Couldn't sleep past 8:30, even having gone to bed at two. Wretched body parts. You ought to be able to put them to sleep for a fixed amount of time like you do a phone.

So, the Dish guy was coming anywhere from noon to five; this means we had to make tracks to the grocery store. We managed it all in less than an hour, and even remembered the eggs, and good thing, too, because just before we left, Dish called again and said he was due between 11:30 and 12:45, so we were back at eleven—and I was still putting up the groceries when the tech called and said he was outside.

If he had just installed "the Hopper" and that was it, it would have been quick. However, before coming in, he checked the satellite dish itself and found it in bad shape. He ended up, I think, replacing everything including the cables, and aiming the dish to the southeast rather than to the southwest, where it has a clearer line of sight. He said we had 70 percent loss of signal on HD. And perhaps since it's now aimed in the opposite direction of where the storms come from, we won't get dropouts so often. Installing the receiver itself was a lot like installing a new version of Windows, the install and then lots of updates. But finally everything was working, including all the music channels again. It's basically the same except for lots of pictures instead of words, and we get more recording space.

The one thing I forgot to do was check to see that he had reconnected the DVD recorder back to the Hopper. This was a problem because previously the two were connected with co-ax. The Hopper doesn't have a co-ax outlet, so he said it needed to be connected with RCA cables. However, he'd left the RCA cables running from the Hopper to the TV. I spent a fruitless hour trying to figure out why the Hopper and the recorder weren't connecting even when I connected it properly. Turned out, eventually, that the input on the recorder was wrong. It needs to be on Input1.

By then I was too irritated at myself for not figuring this out earlier, and it was really too late to go anywhere. What I wanted to do was decorate the library tree, but it wasn't the happy occasion it always is. I was tired and hurting. On the other hand, I was curious to see how the new tree looked; this is the $15 I got from Michael's. And in the end it's not bad at all. Taller than the previous one, but I still managed to fill it up. It looks quite nice.

Still, everything is a wreck. I'm so far behind!

This morning at Kroger we bought some boneless pork ribs. When we got home, I browned them, and put them in the crock pot with two bottles of tomato-and-basil spaghetti sauce. So now that the library tree was done, all that it took was to cook up the rest of the fusilli and sprinkle a bit of romano cheese on the macaroni and gravy and tender, tender pork, and it was dinner time.

Later it was finally time for The Librarians. Yeah, it's cheese, but it's cute cheese. Noah Wyle is now joined by an ex-terrorism officer, a professional thief, a woman with an idetic memory, and an oil worker who has an IQ of 190 and is an art historian. The fantabulous library has become freed from reality and the only link to it is a satellite location in Oregon with the cranky Jenkins (John Larroquette) in attendance. Wyle is evidently only going to make cameo appearances while his "Scooby Gang" learns the ropes. Oh, and Matt Frewer is a recurring villain, who has absorbed a little of the magic that was released when his operative returned Excalibur to its stone.

Labels: chores, Christmas, food, shopping, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:20:00 PM

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