Thursday Thoughts

Nothing much was up on Wednesday, so no blog post. Today is Thursday, closer to Friday, and I'm looking forward to the weekend. The husband will be home so he can help look after the puppy, however it's NFL Playoffs time, so he'll be pretty much worthless in that regard.

We almost lost our FOX station in Bend. Honest. FOX was negotiating its contract with our one and only cable company here, Bend Broadband (can you say monopoly?), and they were going to charge BB a fee for transmission rights. It's free over the airways if you have an antenna, but BB would have to pay for it because they're the only game in town here. When I thought I'd no longer get to see some of my favorite shows (Bones, House, Fringe, etc.), I started checking into satellite companies, thinking that would be the way to go. Only problem is the satellite companies don't offer local network stations here in Bend. WTF? Central Oregon is NOT that small. We have Costco!

So while negotiations between BB and FOX went on, with BB refusing to pay, FOX withdrew their signal and the channel went away. Blue screen. Gone. Ack! I couldn't believe they'd do that. My husband was chewing his nails because he was going to miss one of the playoff games on Sunday. So we got out our older, little tv out of my office and set it on top of the big one in the living room. My husband hooked up its antenna, added a foil accent (what's an antenna without foil), and voila! We got FOX. We could hardly see the picture, but we had reception, such as it was. Lots and lots of snow. But the sound was good.

So we we're both thinking that this will be the state of tv watching in our home. The hub watches more than I do, but I wasn't at all pleased with the foil decorating accent or the tvs stacked like a snowman. Picture a scene from a 70's sitcom: "Okay, just a little more to the left... wait, that's it!... No, go back. There. No, no, no, you had it a second ago, just push it a little more forward..." Heaven help me. One of the cats did enjoy the foil, though. She kept trying to bat it off the antenna.

So there we were, watching tv on Monday night -- I had the laptop on my lap and my husband was watching-- when he says: "Hey, look! FOX is back!" There was much rejoicing. BB and FOX had worked out a deal. Subscribers will pay more I'm sure, but it won't be that much. From what I read in the paper, the squabble was over an extra penny a day per subscriber. Hey, I'll forego my annual latté for a year's worth of FOX shows. They're only the best network station ever!

So that's my excitement for the week. There could be more later, who knows? It is only Thursday, after all...