One of the joys of home ownership is that you and you alone are responsible for fixing things. This means that when the roof leaks, you either have to get up there and fix it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you. When the leak is the result of hail damage, you get to call your insurance company and get a rather large check in order to pay someone else to come out and fix the roof. When they fix the roof, they take all the old stuff off and put new stuff on. This includes removing and re-installing your satellite dish.

Why am I boring you with all these details? Well, when the roof people re-install your satellite dish, they may or may not get it lined up correctly. If it's not lined up correctly, you spend days watching a blank television screen. While watching a blank screen, you may learn something about yourself. Here's what I have learned. I want my, I want my, I want my HDTV. Apparently, I have become addicted to television. I was blissfully unaware of my addiction until my dish went dead.

My television is almost always on, whether I am watching it or not. It provides the background noise to my life — the soundtrack, if you will. Well, without a dish providing a signal, my television has become a large box in the corner staring blankly outward to mock me. In order to get the television to stop its mocking and provide me with picture and sound, I'm relegated to "rabbit ears." For all you youngsters out there, that's how we old folk used to watch television when we had four channels and our youngest sibling was the remote. … continue reading