Oh, TiVo

Gainesville

Good to have your catch-up blogs, Mom. It sounds like you're making great progress toward regaining independent living. It seems eating right could be a problem, though. You should consider stocking up on complete frozen meals -- NOT store-bought TV dinners (very unhealthy) but some of the gourmet health-conscious kinds. Don't even think about cooking for yourself for a few days. You know how to use the net, so you can shop around for what would work for you.

How nice to have Kay's help in the kitchen, not only with cooking and clean-up, but also doing some organizing. Wish someone would do that (organizing) for me! I'm counting on next week being the Kitchen Zone to spur me back to dealing with pantry mess. Although I must admit that I didn't do much in the way of tackling the catastrophe in the Great Room last week.

I did do all my daily and weekly routines, though, plus added the master bathroom to the daily swish/swipe routine, something I've been wanting to do. I also Got everything on my to-do list checked off. Not bad for Week One of the new life.

Yesterday was a Gainesville-wide holiday: Homecoming. Always before, the Library has had to remain open, even though there were no classes and all the schools are closed. Last year they gave us the afternoon; most people took the morning as annual leave, because the parade made it impossible to leave at noon. This year they FINALLY gave us the whole day off, so Bill got a well deserved holiday.

We went shopping at the mall in the afternoon, and had a late lunch at the Macaroni Grill. My quest was for NYDJ jeans-- the ones FL's Ms. SmartyPants has been raving about. I'd discovered Dillard's carried them, and managed to find a pair that fit. By far the most expensive pair of jeans I've ever bought, but my god, they're right: they look fabulous, AND they are incredibly comfortable. Usually any pair of jeans that looks good on me requires choosing between breathing and sitting-- only one or the other at any one time. (And don't even think about bending over...) If these hold up for more than a few months of wear and washing, they will be well worth the $$.

And the rest of yesterday was consumed by Battlestar Galactica-- the season 3 premier was at 9:00, and I ALMOST finished watching the DVD of season 2.5 in time-- missed it by 15 minutes. Ordinarily this would be no big deal, but with TiVo out of commission, it was difficult. Fortunately, the SciFi channel reran it again immediately, at 11:00, but I had to watch it the old fashioned way-- wretched picture, no pause or rewind, glued to the tube until commercials. This last interferred with the barmaid service Bill has come to expect, so...

Today he tackled installing the "new" TiVo box we bought in February 2003. That is an eternity in electronics time-- the box is now obsolete, and Bill had a hard time finding anyone at TiVo that knew anything about it, so nearly an hour on the phone getting the info needed to make the transfer. (We'd bought it to take advantage of an offer to move our "lifetime" subscription over to newer software, but then never seemed to find a good time to make the change, and as long as the old box worked okay, kept putting it off-- way too late to do that now.) Then the fun of downloading the software and programming info over the phone line. It took an hour or so for the former, over 6 hours for the latter, and dozens of manual re-starts/re-dials. It finally finished about 15 minutes ago, at midnight. You do not want to know the gruesome details. Still another 4-8 hours for the programming info to be unpacked and loaded (and in TiVo time, that could be days) so recording can be done, but at least that part is local and doesn't have to go through a creaky modem. Moral of the story: if you buy new electronics hardware, do not wait 3.5 years to install it. Well, duh...

Oh and by the way, the BG season opener was awesome, but terribly depressing. This is NOT escapist fare. And five hours of it yesterday was too much of it in one day. I woke exhausted after terrible dreams. Scary stuff, and all too close to present day reality.

Tonight's dinner was a fairly dishonorable defeat. The Gator football game didn't start until 3:30, so had to wait to shop til then. Bought things that would go quick-- salmon fillets preseasoned with cajun spices, a spring greens salad with apples, raisins and nuts, and sushi. Instructions for the salmon said to broil it, but the top blackened, one piece was overdone, the other underdone in spots. The salad was so far past it I couldn't rescue it, though I wasted a lot of time picking out the yucky stuff, and even put dressing on it before deciding, after tasting, it was inedible. The sushi, at least, was fine. Note to self: dial back on the pre-fab stuff. Not worth it.

And, let the record show, yesterday's online 4-star Sudoku has thus-far defeated me, despite spending way too much time on it. Today's 5-star, though, I did easily in one pass. Go figure. They keep them online for about 6 weeks, so I'll get it eventually.

Hey! It's after midnight, so let me be among the first to wish you a

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM!