MTV makes Beck want to smoke crack

I finally bought a TV. It's not entirely my fault that it took so long (it's all about blame with me). I bought the TV from a friend of a friend, but these friends in question weren't really speaking for a while, leaving my TV in limbo. But I finally got it, and now it sits very prominently in my kitchen/living/dining room, right on top of the microwave. (I'm a little nervous that one day I'll wake up to find the microwave caved in from the weight of the TV, or that I've become some kind of mutant from the combination of micro/radio/UV/whatever waves are emanating from the TV/microwave tower. Probably there are better things to worry about, though.) I don't really even like TV that much, but it should be good for Spanish practice.

I watched a weather report tonight (I'm not gonna go off about the weather again--it's a weekday and it never rains during the week here, so there's not much to complain about). The weather maps here are funny. The map shows the whole Iberian peninsula, but only Spain has texture and color coding and forecasts and stuff; Portugal is just this flat brown blob off to the left. I guess Spanish weather forecasters (who totally suck, by the way) probably don't have weather stations in Portugal. It makes sense, but it looks funny.

It's been a little demoralizing to see how much I don't understand. Even listening to the news, which is delivered by people who are trained to speak clearly, I just don't understand that much. Yesterday it took me about ten minutes of not understanding anything before I realized I was on a Catalan station. Not a good sign.