Yes, my hubby has his pretty new television.  Of course it’s flat, and HDTV and all.  Pretty when it’s on, pretty when it’s off (because I can close up the cabinet, which I find to be very appealing), but God Forbid we have to watch something in regular D now rather than HD.  I have created a monster.  We cannot stand the idea of giving Comcast even one more dollar for an HD converter box to change ALL of our channels to HD, so instead we rig it up with multiple inputs, so that he can watch everything possible on the free HD channels on AV-1 via the cable hookup directly into the tele, and I can switch to the regular cable box on AV-2 to watch things “ugly” and “squished.”  He actually sits and insults the picture when I’m trying to watch a show.  It’s ridiculous.  A monster, I say.

Well, the TV came with a freebie.  It’s a Sony blueray DVD player with a surround sound system.  We wouldn’t have ever bought one, but it came with the TV, and we will take anything so long as it’s free.  On the way home, we stopped to get a blueray dvd so that we could test it out and see the whole HD experience in all it’s glory.  To get the full effect, we as a family selected Disney’s Earth.  It’s a story about animal families and their journey through a year’s time.  It promised sweeping majestic landscape shots and unparalleled majestic beauty… sounded like a home run that would fit the bill to perfection.  I don’t know about you, but I used to watch those Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom shows back in the day.  Every single time it was on, the night would end with me cringing, watching through my fingers and crying when the lion killed the gazelle.  Not much has changed.  I was up nearly half the night having nightmares over the fate of the baby caribou caught by the white wolf, the baby elephant that walked the wrong way after it’s mother, the gazelle captured by the cheetah in the slowest.slow.motion.ever., and OMG the full sized elephant taken down by an entire pride of lions.  It seriously creeped me out, they were like spiders all over him!  That was the final straw, I had to turn it off.  

I KNOW what happens.  I realize that there’s a food chain.   It’s a fact of life (or death, depending) out in the cold, hard world, and the wolves and the lions and the cheetahs need to eat, too.  I totally get it.  That doesn’t mean that I have to watch it.  That I WANT to watch it.  It doesn’t mean my kids want to see it, either.  I still get tears in my eyes seeing it in my mind’s eye, and it bugs me.  So I’m guessing I won’t be watching the end of the big bad blueray DVD and now I’m ticked that it cost us $20.  I bet that’s the difference in regular D or HD cable for a whole month!!!  Damned carnivores!!