More Blog Smokin' -- or, A Past Blast from a New Toy

Don gave me more to smoke in my blog over the weekend, after arriving home with yet another large black box from work. Let's see ... we have a VCR, a DVD player, a CD/DVD player, an amp, a pre-amp, a turntable ... so what's left?

A receiver ... or so I've been told.

I have learned to channel my inner monk when these "gifts" make their way into my home, borne lovingly in the arms of my husband sporting a happy grin, recalling my pseudo-vow of silence, remaining devoid of speech while I hear the why's and wherefore's. So, dearest boy, what's a receiver and why do we need it?

Well, first of all -- and Don is a very, very smart guy -- he mentioned that it was FREE. I might not be ethnically Dutch, but "nurture" definitely outweighed "nature" in the frugality department, so strategically -- yet ever so nonchalantly -- placing the word FREE in the beginning of the discussion will most certainly reap rewards. Now moving on ...

Apparently, in 2009, the analog signal will be shut down, and all TV's therefore will be digital. For those of us who have old, fat, clunky, tube TV's, we're going to have a problem. Either we shell out big bucks for new digital TV's, or we purchase some kind of box -- a receiver -- and attach it to our old TV's, thereby instantly converting the analog signal to digital. Sounds way too Big Brother or some other kind of "conform or die" mentality, but such is The Word. Anyway, this new FREE receiver, which Don literally got out of a dumpster at work (brand new, in box) gives us a jump on the rest of the world, with some other extra bells and whistles to boot.

Channeling my inner monk, I nodded silently, my brain rolling the word FREE around like a mantra. All I saw, frankly, was another big black box which needed a home in our already overcrowded TV cabinet. So I just set about doing my thing while he fiddled with cables and wires and the big black FREE box. He got it up and running with minimal effort, and that tricky fiddler even found a spot for it, propped up on its side on the floor, nicely wedged between the TV cabinet and the speaker stand, using that thin already unused space. Not bad -- even this silent monk can give kudos when due.

So now what does this mean? We can now receive the digital signal ... which means it feels like we have cable in our house, with more channels to choose from (ABC, for example, has about 5 different "sub-channels"), and I will concede that the clarity is indeed improved. I don't know if this means that all of my husband's efforts (and my dad's risking of his life) to install the antenna on the roof was all for naught (let's hope not, after all that!), but that's another discussion for another day. In the meantime, in short, we now have digital TV. And I have no idea how to work the thing, so today might be an interesting day with the kids. They might just have to be limited to the one channel for the day until Daddy gets home for our mini-instruction.

Speaking of the one channel, my kids are enjoying something new this morning -- a new-to-them station called "qubo." I'm not sure if it's a purely Christian station, but they certainly do have Christian programming. We've been enjoying a few Veggie Tales shows, as well as some others of a similar bent. But this morning, to my kids' delight and my absolute surprise, a familiar puppeteer came on the screen. I knew exactly what I would be seeing when I turned my eyes to the screen, and there she was: a woman sporting a hair-do oddly resembling a red afro, her face slathered in pancake make-up, with her sidekick -- a talking lamb named Lambchop. Yes, my friends, Shari Lewis and Lambchop are still on TV. My mouth hung open as my kids giggled -- they got a kick out of the fact that "Mommy used to watch this when she was a little girl!" Unbelievable.

So now we have digital TV, which -- instead of making me feel cool and hip -- oddly enough now makes me feel old.
Funny how that works.