Another Small Triumph

Thursday, so we went to Jerry Story's afternoon dance and as usual enjoyed the dancing and the company. Jim and Jane, Dick and Mary Ann, and Bob and Pat joined us for the open tip at the end.

This morning I spent some time on the web again looking for solutions to our need for a new amplifier/DVD/CD/Tuner unit to replace the Curtis that was no longer playing DVDs or CDs. Then it occurred to me that it might be possible to fix the Curtis, so I Googled "DVD player quit working" and found lots of tales of woe-and a couple of good suggestions. One was to unplug the unit to try to "reset" the electronic brain. I tried that, and it seemed to help, since the DVD loaded and the title sequence played, but still no sound and the program would not play.

Another suggestion was to use a CD lens cleaner. That didn't seem very likely to fix the problem, but it couldn't hurt and would be lots cheaper and easier than buying a new unit, so we decided to try it. On the way home from the dance we stopped and picked up a cleaner kit up for $7.97. It worked like magic! Another small triumph.

The DVD of Paint Your Wagon played perfectly, with great sound. Then I tried playing the exercise video, and we were right back to the same problem. I ran the cleaner DVD again, and again Paint Your Wagon played fine. Finally I decided to try the exercise video on my laptop--and for some reason it plays fine there. One of life's little mysteries...

We are still interested in replacing the Curtis. It's not a great unit, and we get very poor FM reception. We've tried antenna boosters, but the unit only has a 75 ohm connection, and so far nothing has helped, so we mainly listen to radio on the laptop.