Today was not the day I thought it would be. I had planned to look into some computer parts and get an antenna for our roof so I can hook up our TV and see just how many channels we could get over the air. Easy peasy. So I go to a place to check on parts and as I am talking with a sales/tech guy we start putting some stuff together (on the computer making a list of needed parts) , before you know it I am building a complete new computer. Not a bad thing but the cost was the same as buying a computer from Bestbuy. It just would not make sense for me to spend hours assembling a computer, hours loading software and drivers only to have a system cost as much or more than buying a complete system from a store. Maybe the parts are higher quality? I don’t know. Maybe the processor would be slightly faster? I don’t know. What I do know is I did not but a computer today. I did go to another place and buy an outdoor antenna. I figure i can install it in under an hour and go about my day. Yep, did not happen. I had to drill through the block wall to get into the basement, and use an extension ladder to get up to the roof. We have an extension ladder. It is a nice light aluminum one that for some reason was in 2 parts and missing the rope to pull it into the extended position. I spent an hour putting the ladder together, adding some rope once I found it and struggled getting it in place, but not in that order. I put the ladder together wrong. It fit together wrong. I did not have the rungs/steps facing the same way. I also did not add the rope right away once I got the rungs corrected. I tried to extend it fully while balancing it only to find I needed a rope to pull it fully into the extended place. I was like a one man 3 stooges team. I get it all worked out and climb the ladder to get to the chimney top so I can pull the antenna up to me then secure it up there. Problem is the ladder is swaying a lot and I freeze 3/4 of the way up. I just could not go up further. At this point a neighbor comes over and we talk a while, all with me frozen on the ladder unable to go up higher. I get down knowing there is no way I am climbing up to where I need to be. As we talk my neighbor suggests I go to the front of the house and climb up to the low point of the roof then “just walk up to where I need to be”. So that is what I did. But it was not easy either. The pitch on the roof is steep enough that I was sliding as I was stepping and did not feel safe. So I had to climb all the way to the top of the roof so I could hang onto the ridge and scoot over the the side where I needed to be. I then let go and slid down to the chimney to mount the antenna. That went pretty easy. Now I needed to climb back up to the ridge, scoot over to the center of the house and slide crawl back down to the porch roof and get on the ladder and climb down. This simple task that I thought would take an hour ended up taking 3 hours. But it was worth it. we get 40 channels over the air. Granted many are never going to be watched by us, there are some Spanish ones, some french ones, even an Arabic one, so I guess I should not really say we get 40 channels. With this in place I can now focus on connecting our laptop to the TV and testing out Hulu and other online sites for streaming TV shows. If it works fairly well we will ditch our $100 a month cable service and pay the 8 dollar a month “premium” service through Hulu. That will save us over 90 dollars a month. We are willing to give up some of the features like On-demand shows and being able to record 2 shows at the same time. I am messing with a TV tuner for the laptop so we may even be able to do some TV recording with my planned setup. Now back to my regularly scheduled post…
AM:
60 minutes on the elliptical stepper
PM:
30 minutes on the elliptical stepper
Dinner tonight was a good one. I cooked some chicken thighs, tortellini and asparagus. I added Alfredo sauce and dinner was delicious.
