bunt sign

Saturday, December 18, 2010

As you know, tomorrow (Sunday) is Mom's birthday. She has made it clear that she has no desire to accumulate more things, and she probably would have been content had we just acknowledged her birthday and fed her tacos and made sure her great-grandchildren were close enough to hug.

That would have been fine, too, but Suzanne and John and I wanted to do something to make her life a little better. That's easier said than done, of course, but we came up with the plan to give her a hundred or so extra TV channels, so that she doesn't have to watch Friends reruns just because that's the only thing on. Her previous cable package was pretty lame, and we thought she deserved better.

So, with the help of friends with connections, we managed to score a cable package for her that gives her everything from the Hallmark Channel to History International (also known as the Nazi Channel), plus everything (or nearly everything) in between.

She did not expect to see Suzanne and me sitting in her apartment when she returned from her pot luck this afternoon, and she wasn't expecting the cable guy when he knocked on the door five minutes later. (On time! The cable guy was on time!) In fact, she probably would have turned him away if we hadn't invited him in. That's when we told her what we'd done, and she was kind of stunned. This is pretty much what we were going for.

The cable guy was very friendly and helpful, and he got the connection made in short order. Then Suzanne and I spent the next couple of hours trying to help Mom get comfortable with the new setup. That's an awful lot of channels, way more than any person can watch, but it's miles better than what she had before, which was about 30 channels, at least half of which were shopping, religious, or foreign language channels. And most of the rest showed Friends reruns 24/7, or so it seemed.



The best part of this (for me, if not for her) is that she now has a DVR for the first time. I really wanted to bring her into the era of independence from the networks' capricious scheduling whims. And I promised her I would spend as much time as she needs showing her how to get the best use out of it. Something tells me that won't be much of a burden, though. She'd already figured out most of it by the time we left her this afternoon.




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