03 | January | 2012

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I have said that I am a bit of a hoarder.

Part of this is anxiety related. The mental answer to “should I throw out this piece of paper with an unidentified phone number scribbled in the corner” tends to be “but what if, at some point in the future, I remember whose number that is and decide that I DESPERATELY NEED IT?”

The other part is from my tendency to anthropomorphize things. The Ikea guy would totally yell at me. I just don’t like to get rid of my old things.

When I moved out here, though, we brought next to nothing with us. Only what we could fit in my Toyota Echo. I left most of my things behind. My papasan chair. My 70s retro mirror cube side tables. My cookware. My glass kitchen table.

It was very hard.

including one stuffed animal

On the other side, PH picked up a sofa and chair at value village, and we shelled out 100 bucks for the cheapest TV we could find.

Cable costs extra. We don't pay extra.

We didn’t even have a bed for the first year. As it is, our bed consists of a dented hand-me-down frame and a headboard which isn’t even attached to the bed, because of the aforementioned dent.

So when someone offered us her 32″ HDTV for $200 bucks, we jumped at the chance to own something that didn’t suck.

Slight problem:

It was enormous.

You see, this TV wasn’t LCD or even Plasma. It was still a tube television.

SCALED UP.

I can’t even tell you how difficult it was to get this thing into the car. It wouldn’t fit in the trunk OR the back seat. It would only go into the passenger seat, with the seat pushed and leaned back as far as it could possibly go, and that was with a LOT of squeezing.

The two of us together couldn’t even lift the damn thing more than a foot off of the ground, but somehow we had to get it up three flights of stairs.

Success smells sweet

We named him for the same reason you name a mountain – it’s so BIG that it demands a title.

By the time we hauled Moby’s heavy ass into our apartment, with new scratches on his casing because we had literally DRAGGED him up step by frigging step, he seemed like an extremely real entity.

(Since then we have lugged him through two moves, and I think our selection of places to live that were NOT up three flights of stairs was largely due to our desire to NEVER TAKE MOBY UP STAIRS EVER EVER AGAIN.)

He was totally worth it, though. The transition to a 32″ HDTV was amazing for us to behold.

THIS IS HIGH TECH, MAN

That was in 2007.

Four years later, we have begun to be aware that Moby is nearing the end of his natural life.

First one of his component video ports crapped out on us.

Then we began to notice a slight change in colour around his edges. Sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn’t, but it appeared more and more.

Also, as time has passed we have become less impressed by Moby’s size. Most of our friends have bigger tvs – or should I say, WIDER tvs that weighed a 75% less.

But while PH’s testosterone levels resulted in some minor drooling in stores when we passed those big, glittering screens, we never seriously entertained buying one. We had Moby. We would make do as long as he lasted, and when he died… we might have to live without a television for a while. Not the end of the world.

But then PH found a really good sale, and pointed out that by combining some Christmas cash with gift cards, we could get ourselves a big new TV without biting into our savings.

A lot of hemming and hawing ensued. I wanted the new TV as well, so I could try out my new Xbox Kinect (a gift from PH, who gets free stuff through his workplace points, of which he has many, because he keeps ranking first in the province for Best Something at Doing Whatever) on a proper screen.

But we’re not overflowing with money right now. Shouldn’t we use our remaining bonus cash on practical, boring things, and split my gift card into batteries or Colin Firth films, and wait for our 10 year old television to flicker and die?

After nearly an hour of waffling in the store, we decided to bite the bullet. We knew that Moby could crap out on us at any time, and right now we had the very rare wherewithall to actually pick up a new TV.

So we did.

It’s a difficult transition for me. I’m not a fan of spending money on things that aren’t food, diet pepsi, baby stuff, or books.

Plus I feel bad for Moby, looming in the corner until we can figure out how to get him out of the house.

But DAMN.