MacGyver lives!

He is now a chubby middle-aged redheaded woman and blogs under the pseudonym Fiona Picklebottom. A couple of years ago, I bought a two-screen DVD player from Best Buy. It was not. My best buy, that is. It lasted about 4 hours before Beth snapped off the screen of the player side (there's a player side that takes the DVD and a monitor side). When I got to our destination, I found a Best Buy and returned it for a replacement. By not allowing Beth to touch the replacement, it lasted about a year before she forgot the 'no touching' thing and broke it again. In her defense, the player had a VERY BAD DESIGN in that the screen opened downward in a clamshell-like manner in order to insert the DVD. In the DVD player's defense, apparently that is a common industry STUPID design. These things are for kids, industry people. Adults are not (or shouldn't be) driving around watching movies. Use a little common sense when designing your products.

Anyway, we are taking another long car trip this summer (about 3 weeks), and since it's just going to be me and FOUR kids (Mr. Picklebottom can't take that much consecutive time off, so he's flying to meet us at one of our destinations for a few days), my sanity felt the need to do something about the DVD player situation. The screens for car DVD players are pretty small, so to avoid the kids possibly TOUCHING one another in order to all see, because the resulting whining for miles in a car would be hell on earth, the ideal situation is one screen per kid. I set out to accomplish this goal, keeping in mind that I had one extra screen from the broken set already.

I couldn't find where a 3 or 4 screen car DVD player existed at all, let alone for a reasonable price, so I had to purchase another 2 screen. This time, with prices having come down, I was able to purchase a better-quality player. I also purchased a cheap portable laptop-style DVD player for my oldest, figuring as a teenager she probably wouldn't appreciate having to watch the little kids' movies the whole time, so she could watch her own.

After getting home and unboxing everything, I discovered that the connections on the new player and screen were different from the ones on the old leftover screen. I looked online to see if I could find any adapter and splitter cables that would do what I wanted, but didn't have any luck since I didn't know exactly what the names of the cables were. So I hit the local Radio Shack (how does this place stay in business, no one I know will ever ADMIT to going there, like it's embarrassing or something), so I could peruse the cables and adapters and see if I could find anything that would work. Ultimately, because the salesman wouldn't just let me look, he HAD to help, I drew a picture for him, explaining what I was trying to do, and we found the cables. Actually, it took me a little while to convince him that yes, this would work, because he was scratching his head and trying to convince me otherwise. Then as I was leaving, he actually said, "I'm impressed that you knew how to explain all that." I answered (in my HEAD of course, I NEVER say these things out loud), "Why? Because I'm a GIRL?"

I put it all together, and IT WORKS!!! Even though I'm a girl!