Today started on Thursday.

James had noticed for the past week or so that he was unusually tired. He doesn't sleep well anyway because he has restless leg syndrome and twitches in his sleep. But he's also had some trouble breathing as well. Since he had the day off Thursday from working Sunday, he made a doctor's appointment for the morning to make sure it wasn't something serious.

He didn't come home until after six, having determined that his heart was okay—but he has walking pneumonia! And if he's not feeling better by Tuesday he's supposed to go back for more x-rays and may have to go into the hospital!

So Friday I teleworked so I could take care of Tucker and take care of James if he needed it. He was supposed to be on complete bedrest, but he spent four aggravating hours trying to get ahold of the advice nurse at Kaiser because he was rather weirded out by the instructions on the paperwork that went with the antibiotic he was taking: it said if you took OTC pain meds you might suffer from nerve damage (and he needs the pain meds for his arthritis and was unable to sleep from the pain) and if you took oral diabetes medication you might have a reaction. They finally told him it was okay to take all the meds he was curious about, but it took a lot of time away from when he should have been sleeping. I wasn't having much luck with the work I was doing; I had one order that wouldn't complete because a totally new error message came up. And I had stomach cramps after lunch.

Once the day ended, and James went to lie back down, I went downstairs to fetch a package that was on the porch. It was the little Proscan digital converter box I had found on Amazon.com; I thought I could run the antenna in the spare bedroom through the box and into the VHS/DVD recorder and possibly record Doctor Simon Locke. And, astonishingly, it worked. Now, to watch the television you have to turn the recorder on, but it seems a small price to pay if I want to record something else, including Lassie on CoziTV or Rin-Tin-Tin on Antenna TV. Unlike the old converter box from my mom's TV, this did tune in Channel 32-1 and all its subchannels, including RetroTV, but this is seven years newer.

The neat thing about this tuner is that if you put a USB drive into it, it records to the USB drive. I tried it on one episode of Police Surgeon and got a very nice copy of the show in a format that plays on Windows Media Player. Now I need to figure out how to program the silly thing. Anyway, we had leftovers, watched Doctor Who and Police Surgeon, went to bed.

Today I was determined James get more sleep. I got up at nine and walked the dog, then grabbed up my wallet and went to Sam's Club by way of Publix (I wanted a baguette and they had nice hot beef vegetable soup that I picked up for James for lunch). At Sam's I finally gave in and bought a third Leaf antenna. The poor rabbit ears balanced on the big television are just giving up the ghost. I also bought a USB drive packet that has a tiny 16GB drive that I was going to use for the Proscan (except the Proscan doesn't recognize it even though it's formatted as FAT32 just like it's supposed to) and also a 16GB drive you can plug into your cell phone and transfer files to and from it (this works okay). And then milk, Jamaican meat patties, some grapes, Tyson teriyaki chicken for supper, and some mandarin oranges in juice. Got out of there in a trice because the Sam's Club self-checkout has one of the laser guns instead of you having to pick stuff up and use a scanner. It makes it so much easier. Topped off my gas tank, too.

James was just getting up to eat when I got home, so he had his soup and I had a sandwich, and then I plugged the Leaf antenna into the big television—it was getting great reception just sitting on the stepladder! Once determining I was getting the same channels as the old rabbit ears, I rescanned the channels. Still didn't get GPTV. Sigh. And to my surprise, the Atlanta Channel didn't come in, either, although it came in on scans for the other two antennas. But everything else tuned in quite well. Decades was showing a Dark Shadows marathon. Sam Groom showed up on Gunsmoke on ME-TV. Then someone had a Twilight Zone marathon going.

About four James went back to bed and I shut off most of the lights and sat writing in the cool dimness. Tucker was asleep with Snowy occasionally protesting behind me because I'd shut off the noise. When James got back up after six, we had some of the teriyaki thighs from Sam's Club and I bounced around on the broadcast channels for a while, then put the satellite back on. Except for the Britcoms, there was nothing good on. Later we watched a British special about the Golden Age of mystery stories—featuring lots of Dorothy Sayers!—and this week's episode of Star Talk.

Just as As Time Goes By began, James thought he heard something being dropped on the porch and Tucker sprang up and began to bark frantically. When I went to look out the window, our mailbox post had fallen down! We went out to look at it; it seems to be of natural causes and the bottom of the post is all crumbly. I supposed someone could have knocked it down, and if it had fallen northwards I would be more suspicious, but it fell to the southeast. Someone would have had to be driving on the wrong side of the road to make it go over. Possibly the post even had termites.

So now there's something else I have to do tomorrow. I never will get all the Easter decorations taken down and put away.

Labels: birds, chores, dogs, electronics, food, health, pets, shopping, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:58:00 PM

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