Doing Without

Y'know that thing that sits on your shelf or maybe is attached to the wall?  You can turn it on with a little thingy in your hand and when you do, you see people playing sports or reading the news or saying things to make you laugh. Everything is in color. It's a modern technological wonder called a television.

I, of course, grew up without one.  Nobody had one.  We got our first television the spring of my senior year in high school.  We spent summer evenings watching wrestling from San Antonio with Gorry Guerrero--he was the good guy.  A lot of the time we just saw "snow."  Like other people, I got addicted to television and since then it's been part of my life.  I turn it on when I come home for lunch to see what's going on in the world.  I won't mention what channel I watch because I don't want to offend anyone.

During Hurricane Harvey our power went out here at Brazos Towers but only for a day.  The lights came on and so did the A/C but the phones, internet and television didn't.  Gradually the phone came back, then the internet, then email...but no TV.  Apparently the equipment was in the basement in one of our buildings and it was thoroughly flooded and had to be rebuilt from scratch somewhere in Ohio (a non-flooded state) and shipped here and then installed and programmed, etc.  

Meanwhile, I got used to checking the news on my cell phone, asking Siri for sports score (She said the Astros are predicted to win the World Series by 1.5 runs.  Not sure what .5 runs are, but she gave me hope.)  I spent a lot of time reading, which I do anyway.  Some people were able to get TV by hooking up rabbit ears, but I live on the wrong side of the building, out of the line of sight of the TV tower, so I went without.

Then last Friday our TV came back on, but each set had to be programmed because the channel numbers were 100 lower.  Last Saturday I got upstairs after the baseball game which most people were able to watch in our Event Center, and I decided to watch Saturday Night Live, but I couldn't find it.  NBC had not been included in our service.  So we had to wait some more days and get that programmed in and now we have regular TV.  I will be able to watch my favorite show, Flea Market Flip on Great American Country!

But guess what?  I've gotten so used to not having TV and it's so blissfully quiet here that I usually forget to turn it on.  It's just like being in high school again.