Thank You Madster For That Interesting And Informative Post

Now back to the boring stuff. Rain yesterday. Rain today. Possible snowflakes tonight. On the plus side, things are really starting to green up.

Yesterday on the way back home from work I stopped in at the hometown-based ginormous electronics retailer to pick up a digital converter box for the teevee. Since we are the only family on the planet to not subscribe to cable or satellite, I really do appreciate the local stations broadcasting in digital just for us. Anyway, a few months ago I applied for my two $40.00 coupons from the govmint to get converter boxes. The coupons came last week, and I actually showed some fiscal restraint and waited until there was some extra money in the bank to buy one. And one is what I bought. I brought it home and spent a while hooking it up to a teevee that has DVD and VCR (yes TOYH and the kids still borrow video tapes from the library) players plugged into it. Voila! It worked. Now I have 19 local channels, including 7 count 'em 7 local PBS channels. All for one easy payment of $23.00. The reception is great compared to what we have with the old analog broadcast. No watching programs through a snowstorm of static. No horizontal lines endlessly running up the screen. No having to get up and fiddle with the antenna to get certain stations. All is not perfect though. The sound on one of the stations sounds like the treble knob is turned up to 11 so the spoken "s" and cymbals can really get annoying after a while. It always amazed me that we lived in the middle of the metro and our analog teevee reception was utterly craptastic. I suppose that was a function of using rabbit ears antennas and not hooking a huge retro-looking aerial to the chimney. Back tonight to gigantic big box retailer to get the second converter.

On the cultural end of things KyKy apparently made it to Chicago ok. Don't know. Haven't heard from her. The rest of us rubes will be at the brand spanking new Guthrie Theater to see The Bard's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." We got the tickets through a program called Project Success. As a life failure I'd like to take the bus to the play, but I think we'll end up taking Crapmobile instead. Actually, driving around in that thing is only about half a step up from riding the bus.