February 17, 2013: We Have a Theater

It’s Sunday and last Sunday’s brunch at Brookhaven with dad was so successful that we decided to do that again as this is his last weekend day in Texas.  We knew to go a bit earlier today than we did last week. So first thing after everyone was awake and dad got over to the house and the girls were ready we headed out to Brookhaven and had our breakfast.  It was very good, as always.  We had a nice time.

Dad worked on the screen more today and managed to get everything set up so that we were actually able to use the theater today.  The screen is powered and brings itself down from the ceiling, the project is mounted, the receiver is sitting on the bar and this evening, while heading to pick up dinner at Eat St., dad and I swung into Target and I picked up a third generation Apple TV for $99 that we are going to use to primarily power the new theater.  The tiny little Apple TV is very different than the one that Dominica and I got so many years ago back when we lived in Newark.  Now rather than relying on iTunes and requiring that movies be transferred to the device before using them, the new system has no internal hard drive and instead is designed around streaming all content.  So our Netflix, Hulu and YouTube will work on it making it unnecessary for us to have a more powerful (and ergo cumbersome) device hooked up for watching shows.

We had dinner at the house and then dad was off to his hotel on the early side because he wanted to be sure to be able to make it in time to watch the season finale of Downton Abbey.  He watched the penultimate episode last weekend in his hotel too.  During the week Dominica and I had purchased the season on Amazon Prime and had watched nearly the first half but were very far behind.

So tonight we decided to forego any real sleep, Dominica rarely can sleep on Sunday nights anyway, and we started watching Downton Abbey from mid season and stayed up most of the night so that we could make it through the entire second half and complete the season!  So it was nearly four in the morning when we turned in for the night which only gave Dominica about two hours of sleep.  She is going to have a long day tomorrow.

The theater is really awesome. The 1080p Optoma projector looks great and is plenty bright on the 103″ screen and the screen really works well in the living room.  The next steps, which are pretty major, are to have the electrical in the house modified to accommodate everything.  We need to add power up front, run speak cables to the front, run cabling from the server closet to the bar, etc.  Tomorrow dad is going to work on putting up a shelf in the bar to hold the receiver and Apple TV (and maybe the XBOX 360) up in the ceiling area to make it as unobtrusive as possible.

Tomorrow is a holiday for me so I am home with dad and the girls while Dominica goes into the office and I don’t have to spend the day working.

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