For the last few months, the remote that came with my (used) tv has only worked intermittently, which, while annoying, doesn’t bother me *that* much, since I mostly only use the tv in my room for watching the morning shows and the occasional prime-time show that I don’t want to have to watch in tri-color (yes, the tv in the living room still has large arcs of blue, green and red from the lovely antenna degaussing incident of last fall). But there are several shows I’ve taped lately that I’d like to watch in my room, and the tv is just far enough from my seat in my bedroom that getting up every commercial break is annoying. Yes, I’m lazy. But when I’m comfortably seated with my laptop on my lap, it’s a pain to get everything shifted so I don’t have to sit through the commercials.
So. Finally made it to Target last night with the roommate (yay! joint shopping trip) and bought a universal remote, claiming to support my brand of tv. Brought it home, tried all the codes, no go. Of course, I might have difficulty on this one anyway, since it is a tv/vcr. But I tried the vcr codes too, and no luck. I have all the packaging and I cut it open nicely, so maybe they will take it back. But it doesn’t change the fact that I need to get another one, and that just bakes my cookies.
On a funny note:

Sunday morning, the morning of the (freaking early and extremely annoying) time change, I woke up right about 10 am. Hit the bathroom, then went back to sleep. Now, there are two alarm clocks by my bed (I only use one as an actual alarm; the other is the one I can actually see. Usually. Right now, there’s such a pile of TBR books on my nightstand that I can’t see the entirety of the clockface: I can only see the hour digits. So when my phone rang, I looked over and saw it was 11, and thought, man, only an hour of sleep.
Picked up the phone and was utterly confused when I saw my roommate’s number. I mean, this was a sunday morning, I thought she was in the apartment. And indeed she was. She thought I might be up, but apparently I didn’t respond to knocking, so she called 😉 I’d mentioned that we should try to get out more, do some exercise together, because we both need the motivation. So she proposed a trip to the zoo. Then it penetrated my brain that she was in the next room, and I said, “Why are we having this conversation on the phone?”
So we hung up, I moseyed into the bathroom again, and was REALLY confused, because the clocks (yes, we have two clocks in the bathroom, what of it?) said it was 11 am. Now, I hadn’t changed those clocks. One was 10 minutes ahead, and one was 10 minutes behind (that’s just how they get after a while. You get used to it). So seeing them report what I thought was the right time was just mind-boggling. Did they magically change themselves overnight? Had I changed them and forgotten?
I had to head back into my room and check all the clocks there. Only then did I realize that it was much closer to noon than 11 am, and all was well, but it took me an absurdly long time to figure it out. Sigh.