One of the few things I miss about our house is the satellite TV. It was always frustrating when we would lose our TV signal whenever a storm came through - or when the satellite was covered with snow - but at least we had TV except in extreme weather.
One of Hubby's first times of being truly frustrated with me when he came back home full time after working in northern Iowa for over five years (we had a weekend-commuter marriage) was because of that satellite. It had snowed quite a bit and he was out in the cold shoveling and cleaning off the vehicles. I mentioned to him that if he wasn't totally frozen when he finished, he might want to see if he could sweep the snow off the satellite so we could check the weather for the region on TV.
Hubby is 6'3". I'm not - by over a foot. So working from his knee-jerk reaction of what "normal" is, he wondered why I didn't just go out the back door and sweep off the satellite myself if I wanted the TV to work. After all, he was doing the shoveling. Did I mention that the satellite was on our roof? Hubby mushed around in the snow to the satellite, looked up, and immediately realized the reason I didn't do it myself. He was laughing when he came inside and told me about the incident.
It was nice when the first few storms of the spring came through and we were just fine with our TV - because the apartment has cable. The sad reality is that the cable isn't quite top-notch in our town, and we randomly don't have TV. Like now. It's the time of day when we enjoy watching the local and national news, to catch up on what's going on in the big wide wonderful world. But today, just about 4:55, Judge Judy was in the middle of some grand proclamation on our TV when she froze, pointer finger in the air. And then, poof!, she was gone. Over an hour later, we still have no cable.
So we're sitting here far from anyone who cares if we have cable service or not, in the calm and quiet of our apartment. Okay, so we're not really reliving the "olden days".......we're both on our computers, the lights are on, and the air conditioner is keeping us quite comfortable. But it just could get to be a long evening if we have no other entertainment......I'm somewhat addicted to that TV.
I've talked about it before, but it was somewhat tough on me as a kid to not have television. We had one until I was 3 or 4, then it quit. And it didn't get replaced until about halfway through my 5th grade year. I looked forward to that week Mom and I spent every summer with my grandparents in Jefferson City - it was fun to get to see Captain Kangaroo for that brief period of time.
By 5th grade, though, TV wasn't just entertainment, it was part of the social makeup of my age group. That happened to be the year The Beverly Hillbillies started. And it would be the topic of conversation on the bus the morning after, everyone rehashing the episode and laughing about it. All except me. I couldn't share in the experience because we had no TV.
I'm not quite sure what prompted Mom and Dad to get another one, but I was so glad they did! With an antenna on the roof we were able to pick up channels 4, 5, and 9 - NBC, CBS, and ABC out of Kansas City. So I was once again a part of the school bus discussions.
During the summer, the TV didn't like to work in hot weather. So we would watch the evening Kansas City news, then turn it off. If we were lucky, it might cool down enough to catch the nine o'clock show. But with the summer's heat and humidity, that wasn't always the case.
Since we've moved into the apartment, we're gradually becoming used to the foibles of cable TV again, after 14 years of satellite. The cable company, in all its infinite wisdom, has switched the channels around at least twice since we moved in mid-March. So instead of a nicely printed list of channels, we have one that I did after painstakingly flipping through all the existing channels and logging down what they are. And that's been marked through and corrected two or three times. The worst day was when without notice and with a flip of a switch they changed up the channels and everyone's favorite stations were MIA. It took some time to find the Weather Channel for the fellow across the hall. Some digital channels that everyone had been watching disappeared for those with older TV's.
That happened a couple of months ago, and we still have to refer to our "cheat sheet" to find a lot of the channels. There's no sense in trying to remember them when they'll most likely just change again in the near future!
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