Broken TV

We'd been home a few weeks when we went in one day to put on a show for the kids, and.....nothing.  Our beautiful, humongous, flat panel TV won't turn on.

This is bad.  Very, very bad.  He had a bad day.  What a day dad had.  (Oops, sorry, I've clearly been reading too much Hop On Pop.)  No, really, this is very, very bad.  Because we live in Saudi Arabia.  And this is a third world country.  And there's literally no one here who can fix a tv.  Ouch.

After extensive Googling, we figure it's probably nothing more than a popped capacitor.  Which would be a very fast and inexpensive fix for someone who knew how to do it.  In theory, *I* know how to do this.  It's easy to hark back to my undergrad days in the bottom of Vandy's Stevenson Building for physics lab, soldering parts onto a motherboard.  It's not hard.  But this is not physics lab.  This is our very fancy tv.  Even if I had the right replacement capacitor (which I don't), I'm not sure I am brave enough to dust off my soldering skills and risk breaking the fancy tv. 

We moved our bedroom TV to the living room (that's it on the lower left) so the kids could still watch their shows, but it's sad and pathetic compared to what we had before.  And we can't even buy another tv because the voltages are wrong on the tvs they sell in stores here. 

So there she sits.  A very expensive paperweight hanging on the wall indefinitely.  Hooray, Saudi Arabia.