That Blinking VCR

No Little Troopers today and Guitarman was on shift. When Wee Laddie kept choosing movies to watch that are in German, I decided I’d see if I could get both DVD players hooked up correctly.

We’ve been watching our movies on the cheaper/not-as-nice DVD player ‘cause when we got the nicer one we remembered to get dual-voltage and muti-format but forgot about region-free. And we’ve bought mostly German movies for practice, so we can’t play them on the nicer one unless/until we decide to hack it. We got an inexpensive one at Media Markt or something and strangely, that one is region-free even though it doesn’t claim to be.

Anyway, Guitarman somehow got some moisture inside it (something about cleaning a DVD and putting it back in wet or something, which is so unlike my husband!) and it started acting funky. It was quirky to begin with, but this was a temporary full-on work stoppage. So Guitarman unplugged it and hooked up the other DVD player, which is not region-free… so that’s limited us to about 5 childrens’ DVDs that we have in English and that Wee Laddie likes to watch.

It took a while, but I sorta got everything working, although not like it really should. Everything is called by a different name on each different machine, and the TV just has symbols on the back (nothing like “video out” or something that someone with a Technical Communications degree might be able to actually understand. I was really wishing for a patch bay for this project… could have solved the whole issue in minutes). All that money on college and I can’t even hook up my home entertainment stuff correctly. Sheesh.

We rushed off to have lunch at the mess hall, even though we wouldn’t be able to eat with Guitarman. I needed to get some stuff at the commissary (where, as usual, “just a few things” turns into an entire cart full of groceries) and didn’t want to have to try to go after naptime, since that’s always such a gamble. Ended up getting to see Guitarman for a bit, which always makes Wee Laddie very happy.