Last night the local cable company shot out an Amber Alert, most of which ran marquis-style, in red, across the top of a particularly dramatic moment of Desperate Housewives (which I’d never seen before, but, I admit, cracked me right the hell up). But before we could even find out the lost kid’s name, the screen stopped. The marquis disappeared, and the screen froze.

An Amber Alert zapped my freakin’ TV. It took rebooting the cable box, being patient, and a couple of choice naughty words (once the patience wore off) to get the show back on. All in all, about seven minutes or so, I think.

The TV is 11 years old. Or so. It was purchased early one Sunday morning at Fry’s Electronics in, er, Fremont? I moved it from California to Vermont, then down to DC, where it lived in an apartment living room (and developed a curious purple haze in one corner), then a dorm, then a loft bedroom…where it perched on boards above a spiral staircase. It then went to storage, I think, and my last apartment before this one. In the last place, it was one of three and a half TVs, and the least used or appreciated.

It is clearly time to replace it, but that’s a little outside the current budget. I think I can swing it by the end of the year, though. Will Best Buy and the like take your old TV away when they bring the new one? Because I don’t ever want to pick that sucker up again.