I spent a good chunk of this afternoon in search of a mRCA audio to f3.5 mm adapter. The setup is basically this. The Roku box (That’s Roku 1, for any of you spendthrifts who have upgraded in the last five or ten years) is connected via hdmi to a small computer monitor. The monitor does not have built-in speakers, so the audio comes through the RCA audio outputs into a fine, spit-and-bailing wire assembly of speakers that don’t quite fit. It’s not a bad setup, but the speaker that does work doesn’t happen to be the one that has volume control or power. The adapter will let me plug in, control the volume.

The benefit to the whole mess is that you can watch television, (the way I hear normal people do…)  or you can listen to television while you sleep without the disturbance of flashing lights. (’cause you can turn the monitor, but not the speakers off.)

This is my contraption, of course, but it’s the “television” my mother uses. Apparently, the noise drowns out the neighbor, who likes to split firewood.

I really didn’t think the adapter would be that hard to find, but she called ahead. (Easy as pie, sez the guy on the phone.) And then, we got there. (By the way, the adapter that was going to make this easy? they don’t have it. But, if they did, any of their speakers would have worked with it.) (Well, at least we’re having some quality time together, and there is coffee involved.)

By store number two, my mother suggested calling David.

David, of course, would be a childhood friend who went on to a brilliant computer career.

It’s a little like calling Robert Oppenheimer to kill a few spiders in your basement, but by store number three, I was thinking about it.

Store number three, by the way, would be the kind of place where everybody’s on commission, and your best odds of getting help with an adapter would be to go stand in front of the most expensive television possible. It is also the store that failed to sell me a region-free DVD player a few years back.

Store number four was on the way home, anyway.

And from the moment I got home to when there was an adapter on its way to my door? About ten minutes, including the time it took to read Twitter notifications.

Well, yes. I may be a specialty audience.