There are no pics this week.

I’m Famous. I was on TV. I went to vote midday Tuesday. A cameraman from one of the local TV stations had just set up, and asked if he could record me. Mine was one of the clips that made it onto the news. I never saw the clip, but several people told me I was on.

We went to an awful event this week. The UMBC humanities department had their keynote presentation Wednesday afternoon. The subject was “Pottery and Ancient Dance”, about the ancient Greeks. It should be an interesting topic, and the speaker was quite informative when she answered questions from the audience at the end. But the actual talk was terrible. Her presentation was rapid and dry. She would mention somebody’s name and assume that the audience had read their work and know what their view of Greek pottery was. I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about. I ended up sleeping through much of it.

Other than that, it was a pretty standard week. We went out for dinner Thursday and Friday, and breakfast this morning. We’re going to a neighborhood potluck dinner tonight.

My big news is that we got a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) for our TV. We time shift shows by watching them online. Lately, it hasn’t worked very well. The shows would freeze, often in the middle of a commercial. Shows on CBS would be OK. We could shut down our web browser and restart it. The show would remember where it was and start where it left off. But one show we watch, “The Flash”, isn’t on CBS and wouldn’t remember where it was. We could skip segments of the show, but we had to re-watch each of the commercials. We don’t use a cable box. We have just the local channels. The FIOS cable plugs directly into our TV. So I ordered this DVR. When it arrived, I learned its tuner isn’t “cable ready”. It really needs a TV antenna signal. So I ordered a “leaf” antenna. This looks like a piece of plastic, a little larger than a sheet of paper, white on one side and black on the other, with a wire sprouting out of the bottom. Our TV is in the basement, so I used painter’s blue tape to tape the antenna to the top of the basement window. Amazingly, it worked pretty well. Of course, I wanted to make it work better.

We have a Radon pipe in the basement that seems to run to the roof. The Radon pipe doesn’t really do anything but provide a 4″ conduit from the basement to the attic. My first thought was to run a coax cable through the Radon pipe and hang the antenna in the attic. I got the stuff I needed, then I tried to climb into the attic. I knew there wasn’t a lot of room in the attic, but I thought there was enough room to let me crawl to where the radon pipe was located. It didn’t take long to convince myself that I will never be working in this attic. Even when I was young, it would have been an amazing adventure. There’s no way this old man is going to do more than gaze longingly in the general direction I thought I needed to go. By this time I had quite an investment in my little project. I needed a “plan B”.

We have a FIOS box on the outside of the house which is connected to a coax cable in the garage. Most of the rooms in the house have a plate with one or two coax connectors and one or two phone connectors. I started climbing around the utility rooms (we have 3) and trying to figure out how all these cables are routed. I found out that we have a video and a phone distribution panel in one of the utility closets. We’ve been living in this house for 4/12 years. One might think I would have figured this out before now. I guess I just never cared before. After studying the distribution panel, I figured out that I could hook the antenna to one of the jacks in the upstairs bedroom, and wire that to an unused coax connector that’s right behind the TV. Lucky me.

All I needed was some simple tools. I needed a stripper to prepare the coax cable, a crimper to mount a connector to the end of one of the unused cables, and some coax connectors. I also noticed my drill battery isn’t holding a charge, so I needed one of those. And the new drill battery is different than the old battery and needs a new battery charger. All that was supposed to arrive Monday, but it actually arrived today. On a Sunday! They must be gearing up for Christmas. Lucky me.  I spent the afternoon today running up and down stairs, figuring out for sure which cable is routed to which outlet, moving the antenna to various positions to see how many channels we can get, etc. It’s all done now. The antenna is cleverly hidden behind a curtain. We get a bunch of channels, and the DVR is merrily recording the shows we want to watch. More accurately, the DVR *says* it is recording our shows. We’ll figure out how well all this is actually working in a week or so when we get around to watching some of these shows. Oh, and about the drill battery — I never actually needed to use the drill. But I have a spiffy new battery for “next time”, all charged up and ready to go.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.