Growing older, growing up

Well kiddies, it was Big B’s birthday recently and he took a trip with his little lady up to the green mountain state. Since it’s a little bit of a pain to tote around wrapped gifts, we opened them a few days early and went up sans gifts. The gift for the actual day was a round of golf at the #1 rated course in all of Vermont. I think I did fairly well, despite stumbling out of the gate. I’d like a chance to play it again if only because I’d make sure I practiced a little before the actual tee time. The rest of the trip was excellent, with a fly fishing lesson and some hiking mixed in there. M and I were younger than most of the other people we saw (again) and while we lacked a Range Rover, we did have a Subaru, which lent us some serious Vermont street cred. I think we will definitely be back at some point. After we got back, I received a most excellent gift from M’s family – a Blu-Ray DVD player. Now I know I might have boasted earlier here about not having cable or electricity or something along those lines. The TV we own is 10 years old and was the first big thing I bought with a credit card, which coincidentally was also my first brush with monthly payments that I didn’t enjoy paying and other various scary financial landmines I tiptoes around before the millennium. I am admittedly envious of even luddite family members with high-def and surround sound setups. The thing is, we really needed a DVD player. Since the dvd player we moved to the house with broke, we had been using a Playstation2 as a dvd player. That is, until the controller broke and we were unable to use it. We were really in the dark ages. We even bought a puzzle in Vermont so we’d have something to do when we got back home. (The puzzle is a work in progress). So now we have a Blu-Ray player and an old school TV. Someone pointed out to me that in the past, I might have freaked out about a gift like that. There was a stage in my life where any gift that required me to do something was immediately a crapola gift. Even worse, it would provoke an almost angry response. I liked having no stuff, being able to pack up and go in a moment’s notice. Not that I had any reason to, but anything that required assembly or transport was not likely to make it with me on my next move. So here was a gift that would most likely necessitate a new TV purchase. I say most likely because what’s the point of having this super high def player with a low def TV? And if you get the nice TV, why watch bad programming when there’s HD programming out there, which means… a cable package? I’m not sure about that yet. Until they stop broadcasting NFL games on the old fuzzy pixels, I don’t know if we need to switch. The point is, I got older and I got a gift that might at one time riled me up a bit, but this was a nice surprise. We’ve scoped out a few new TV’s but until the old one has an ‘accident’ I don’t know if there’s a need just yet.