We have been without a TV since we got married.

By choice.

Yeah yeah, we’re weird and we like it that way.

Well, in late January, Joey and I went to Best Buy to buy a fancy-pants digital antenna for our tv-computer setup.  We have this thing called Eye-TV; it’s a little do-hickey type thing that plugs into both the monitor and the antenna and it turns my regular old lappy into a TELEVISION.

This was all for the ‘Lympics.

I sort of wanted to keep the antenna…because I sort of wanted a TV.  But Joey thought it was more wiser to return it since, quite frankly, it didn’t work totally perfectly.

Like, for example, if Henry gets anywhere near it the picture goes on the fritz.  And if we want to get NBC, we have to lean the antenna against the window.  For ABC?  It needs to be on top of the bookshelf.  For CBS?  Well…sometimes Joey’s desk works, but only if he’s touching it.

Yeah, it’s a little temperamental.

That’s whycomes Joey wanted to take it back.

We were going to return it today (Tuesday), but I wasn’t feeling too chipper yesterday and spent the afternoon on the couch convalescing and I was suuuuper glad we hadn’t taken it back yet.

When Joey got home from work, the signal was acting funny, so he moved the antenna from the window position, but this time he set it on top of the floor lamp.  I lay there like some kind of loser until our pizza and our friends Matt and Molly arrived almost simulataneously.  And it was then that I began to smell the smell.

The weird, creepy smell.

But since we had just had both a pizza delivered and friends show up, I was hesitant to be all, um, does anyone else SMELL THAT?  I didn’t want our friends to feel, you know, self-conscious.  Not only are our friends zero-smelly type people (it’s true, guys, you are), but I started realizing it was NOT a people-type smell.

So ten minutes later I asked if anyone else smelled something funny.

Sure enough, Molly agreed with me.

She thought it smelled like burning plastic.

I sent Joey on a mission throughout the entire house to track down the origin of the burning scent, and a few minutes later I heard him in the study.  And I heard him say, “Uh……..ohhhhhhh……”

I was all WHAT IS GOING ON OVER THERE?

And he came over looking really, really sheepish.  Because the digital TV antenna we had been planning to return?  The one we had spent a little bit too much money on?  The one he set on top of the lamp?  Well, the lamp done burned a hole in that there digital TV antenna.

Like, the top of the lightbulb had turned black from the melty-plastic transfer.

Our entire house smelled dispicable.

I begged Joey to unplug everything over there before we spontaneously combusted due to electrical fire.  (He told me it wouldn’t matter, but he did oblige me and unplug things.)

So now we have a TV.  Because we can’t return a digital TV antenna with a hole melted in the bottom of it.  (SECRETLY I AM SO EXCITED!  BECAUSE IT STILL WORKS JUST FINE!!!)

I still can’t figure out why he put it on top of the lamp in the first place.

Neither can he.