Bad gadget luck

Not so much luck with electronic thingies lately.

Two nights ago, while trying to recharge the receivers for the baby monitor, we realized that the AC adapter was futzed up. Not sure what happened to this one; it looks like the plastic inside the adapter jack melted or something. The other adapter (we got the dual receiver model) just quit working a few months ago. Luckily, Fisher Price's phone support was beyond helpful, and the CS rep is sending us an adapter and two replacement batteries. I just hope his "7-10 business days" delivery estimate was an overestimate. One receiver is tapped out, and the other one isn't far behind. It makes showering during naptime a little problematic.

Last night the VCR staged another rebellion, and tried to devour a Sesame Street video from the library. Joy. I managed to get the tape out, after removing the top of the VCR, but the tape is slightly torn now. We'll see how the library handles these things. The DVD version is only $9 at Amazon, though. The irritating part is that I got the video so we could watch it and see if we wanted to buy it. Not gonna happen now, I guess.

Irritating Part Number 2 is that we decided to open the combination DVD/VCR that we bought before Christmas. It was intended to be a gift for my Mom, to replace her cantankerous old model, but she beat us to the punch, so we thought we'd just keep it for ourselves to replace our rebellious VCR. Turns out, we can't use this one. At least not without some more cables and such. Sony, in their infinite wisdom, made a VCR/DVD that you can't use without a cable box or satellite convertor. If you've just got an antenna, or cable via coaxial input, you're up a creek. We've got cable, but with a coax input. I swear, I don't know anyone with a cable box these days, and I'm not about to rent one from the cable company just to hook up this insane VCR. Yes, the manual offers that you can run the cable through another VCR and into this one, but that sort of defeats the purpose, now doesn't it.

Besides, that little shelf doesn't have room for a DVD player, a VCR, and another DVD/VCR combo. Twits.

So we'll just have to find the receipt and see what Target's return policy on slightly opened electronics is.

And then today, I may have killed the humidifier while trying to scrape the lime scale off the heating element. Yeah. I don't remember the element wobbling like that before. It's a nice humidifier (a Holmes from Sears), except for the expensive element filter whatsits ($5 each, and they only last a few weeks). And the hassle of chipping the scale off. The manual suggests using a soft toothbrush, but they're obviously from some other planet where the water's actually soft or something. The water deposits here? They laugh at a toothbrush, and aren't that intimidated by the flat-head screwdriver and utility knife method that I've been using.

So I guess I'll be researching humidifiers and VCRs when I get a chance. And VCRs are getting scarce. I hate to spend a lot of money on one, since we'll (theoretically) be getting a Tivo-like device when we move. And doing something with the video archive under the TV.

(And what's up with the spellcheck?)