The *other* weather disaster

Now you might think that having my car crushed by an avalanche would be enough weather-related disasters for one vacation. Alas, there was more to come after we returned home on December 30th.




This is a picture of me watching the NFL playoffs this weekend. What do you notice about it? Let's go through a list of items.

• Christmas tree? Check!
• Rocking chair? Check!
• Bookshelves? Check!
• Rabbit-ear antenna atop the bookshelves? Check?!
• Football game on the 12-inch black-and-white TV? Che ...

Hey, wait a second! Why are fifty inches of plasma love sitting behind the little TV like a useless, shiny, black mirror?

That would be because a windstorm shoved our DirecTV satellite dish off its alignment while I was on vacation. This was a first for me in almost ten years as a DirecTV subscriber. Worse yet, the dish is up in a precarious position far up on the side of the house, a position that is most certainly not easily reached by a ground-bound fellow like myself.

So I called up DirecTV and explained the situation and they very happily agreed to schedule the next available technician in the first available slot ... January 12th! It turns out that if you're going to need a service call, it's a really bad idea to try to schedule it after Christmas, when all sorts of people have gotten new HDTVs that need new HDTV dishes.

Two weeks without TV might be no big deal any other time of the year. But for a certified football addict, this means the loss of New Years' Bowl Games, the college football quasi-championship game, and the first two rounds of the NFL playoffs.

Inconceivable! Unbearable!! Unendurable!!!

So, on New Years' Eve there I was, balanced atop the long, long ladder trying to align the dish. The situation, alas, resembled an elephant dancing on 25-foot stilts more than an actual repair operation. Defeated at Rooftop's Edge, I went to Plan B and hooked up the rabbit ears, only to discover that the Fox and CBS stations -- which came in pretty well over their old analog channels -- don't really come in all that well at all on their new digital broadcast signals.

Thus, Plan C, the little old black-and-white portable TV that now sits in front of my mammoth big-screen HDTV. Oh, the ignominy.