I don’t know how old our TV is, but I have the receipt with a delivery address in Kingsville. We decided to update our TV. We got a good price on a Samsung at Amazon. Plus they threw in free setup in the room of our choice. The TV picture looked great. Until one of the installers said I have a dead pixel. I would have been perfectly happy in my ignorance, if they had just kept their fat mouths shut. I didn’t want to send the TV back. Partly it was on the theory that the next one might have two dead pixels, but mostly it seemed to be a colossal waste. I called Amazon, and they gave me a 20% discount. I wonder what you get for two dead pixels. The new remote control is designed to help you get content from your streaming services (Netflix and such). That makes sense, because that’s the only way to get 4K video to display on your brand new 4K TV. But the remote doesn’t have any numbers. This is a serious inconvenience for us. We still watch TV on our TV. Without a number pad, we would spend a lot of time scrolling up and down to get the channel we want. I bought an old style Samsung remote with numbers for $10. The next thing was that our DVD player doesn’t have an HDMI output. It was strictly RCA cables. Our lofty TV is way too advanced to accept RCA cables, so I got a new DVD player. Now we’re down to one problem. The old TV is still in the basement, and we want it on the second floor. Are you feeling strong, Mark? (Hint.)

We also had several smoke detectors go offline. This isn’t an urgent problem. If there’s smoke, they will beep. But it would be nice if they would alert me while we are traveling. I traced the problem down to a many-years old WiFi access point. A new one is on the way.

We had a lot of activities at the clubhouse this last week. We only attended half of them. The best was a band called “Sons of Pirates”. They play Jimmy Buffet and similar music. They did a nice job. They kept the volume down to a comfortable level. It was a well attended event.

But wait … there’s more. The BMA had a members evening for an exhibition of John Waters’ collection of contemporary American art. There was free food, followed by a slide show tour of the exhibit, and then an interview with the man himself. Like many artists, Waters lives in a different universe than do I. But it’s a very funny, upbeat universe. Everybody had a great time. After the interview, we were invited upstairs to see the exhibit, along with a very large crowd of others. We decided we might come back another time when it’s not so crowded.

That’s a lot of activity for one week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.