I have died and gone to heaven

I watch television. A LOT of television. Glee, 24, Brothers and Sisters, Parenthood, Grey's Anatomy, Medium, V, to name a few. I wouldn't call myself a couch potato, per say....



You might say that is too much TV. Blah, blah, blah.

Get out an exercise. Yada, yada, yada.

I can't hear you because my fingers are stuck in my ears.

I mean seriously, what else do you want me to do? C'mon I live in a 400 square foot tin BOX candominium. I can sit and and stare at the walls, but they feel like they're moving in on me. Wait. They ARE moving. They are slide-outs.

We have a satellite dish. We had one when we owned a home in Illinois. So we took that one with us. After a month on the road, Jim said it was about time that we notified the satellite company of our new "address" - PMB box in South Dakota.

No problem, right? WRONG.

They couldn't quite grasp the idea that our house was on WHEELS. That we really didn't LIVE in their lovely state. That our name was merely on a FILE FOLDER at some mail service office.

Bottom line? We had to pay for "local" channels. Local being ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX. I looked at this whole thing like we were being punished that we were gypsies. Talk about racial profiling....

Okay, so I accepted that we had to pay this extra charge, PER CHANNEL, mind you. But what I COULDN'T handle was that for some ungodknown reason, we could not get these channels for almost A WEEK! Say what?

We have satellites zipping around in space that can zoom in on a freaking ant hill in the Rain Forest, and I can't get ABC for a week? Does anybody else see the problem here?

That week in question was season finale week for many of the shows. Yep. I was upset. That's putting it mildly. Let's just say that nobody got hurt, but a lamp DID get broken.

I boo-hooed to my twin sister, Pam. Then she, in turn, called our sister, Linda.

Ring, ring.

Pam: "I feel so sorry for Patty! She's crying so hard!"

Linda: "Oh my God! What happened?"

Pam: "She won't have TV for a week and it's the season finale week."

Linda: *crickets* "You're kidding, right? She's crying because she has NO TV?"

Pam: "Yeah, and I can understand that. I love watching TV."

Linda: "I thought she was hurt, or something happened to Jim."

Pam: "No, just no TV."

PRESENT DAY

Five years now of paying for local channels - it has its pluses. We get East Coast and West Coast stations. So we can watch things that are on the same time at different time zones. This makes me happy.

What makes me EXTREMELY happy? A DVR. For those of you who don't know what that is - it is the greatest invention since sliced bread. Forget the old VCR, setting up the timer, sticking in a tape (does anybody really do that anymore?) With the DVR you just press a button and wha-lah! Your program is recorded. Hit that little button twice? The program is recorded the whole season. And commercials? Thing of the past. Just zip through those puppies like nobody's business. An hour show takes about 40-42 minutes to view.

The satellite company told us that they have a new and improved DVR for us and since we were in SD recently, we had the installer come out to the trailer. He delivered the new baby. I am ecstatic. It's an HD receiver, stores 3x the amount of programs, and BEST of all? It can record TWO PROGRAMS AT THE SAME TIME and I can ALSO watch a program that I had recorded AT THE SAME TIME. It's a miracle.

Yep, I have died and gone to heaven. See my wittle wings?