Moral dilemmas on eBay

Okay, if you've been reading, you know that I've spent too much money on eBay in the past two or three months, and you know I've had some problems with plants being shipping too late in the season, or just being shipped bad plants, or whatever.

Okay, I'm having another problem and would like to hear opinions from others. I bid on Star Trek Voyager seasons 1 and 7. Not seasons 1 thru 7, but just the first one and the last one. I thought that was an odd combination to have in an auction, but I bid on it anyway. I stopped bidding at seventeen dollars, and someone else won.

I guess the someone else didn't really want it, and I got a second chance offer. So I bought two seasons of Voyager for seventeen dollars plus three dollars shipping. And it arrived two or three days later, sooner than I expected.

The package was smaller than I expected. I've seen Voyager seasons before, and they are in plastic things that take up space. These were in cardboard boxes that had the same artwork.

So that was odd. Either I got really nice looking bootlegs, or there's some sort of new "green" packaging that I wasn't aware of.

I asked the seller about it. Seller didn't know.

I did stuff like Google--Star Trek Voyager cardboard box. I found a lot of unhappy people talking about bootleg copies of Voyager. Not bootleg copies in general, bootleg copies of Voyager in particular, mostly on Amazon. Like, most, if not all, Voyager for sale on Amazon turn out to be fake.

I thought at first I had somehow lucked out and either got a really good fake, or maybe the real disks in a fake box? The first disk was just fine.

Only the second disk, not so much.

Third, fourth, and fifth disks also have problems.

But, I have this used divx player, and I can still watch most of them.

So now I have to decide what to do about feedback on eBay.

Now, I don't really think that this particular seller is a crook. I don't think that seller has boxes and boxes of fake dvds to sell. I haven't seen anything else like this in the past month or so, and I didn't find anything like that listed now. Also, seller would refund my money (shipping was not discussed).

I don't really think that I'll take the refund. Someone, probably me or the seller, is going to get stuck with this copy. I don't think that either of us deserves to be out money, much less any more money for return postage. I at least have the divx player so that I can watch most of the disks.

Still, I think that I should report the bootleg dvds, at least in feedback. I think, just in case I'm wrong and seller has more bootleg Voyager to sell later, I should warn buyers. I don't want to leave negative feedback for someone who a.) probably didn't do this on purpose, and b.) would offer a refund. But I'm also thinking that no one reads the positive feedback, except the seller. Buyers just look at the number of positive feedback and then go read the negative and maybe the neutral.

I'm thinking of leaving neutral feedback, saying it is bootleg, but then giving seller high marks and a nice comment about the shipping.

What do you think I should do?

No more Survivor

Last night was the season finale of Survivor, and I did not watch it. I am happy to say that I did not watch any of this season. Not the first episode, not the last episode, not any episodes in between, not one of those "highlights of" video clips, not part of an episode that a friend said I should see, nothing. Zip. Did not watch it at all.

I loved the first season. I loved it so much that if I'd gotten home in time I probably would have made an audition video for the second season. I watched the first season and the season season and the third season and really enjoyed them and I watched and enjoyed many seasons after that.

And then I noticed sort of a sexual harassment situation on one of the shows that resulted in the woman leaving. Not that I'm saying the man really meant to do anything bad, or that he was trying to get the woman to have sex with him, or that he did it on purpose to get the woman to leave, just that there is already a total lack of privacy on the show, and there really isn't anything set up to handle such things if there is a real problem.

And then it happened again, a woman got really upset, and the woman left the show.

Besides the fact that people accidentally see each other naked on the show, if you want to run around naked all day, there's really nothing to be done about that. And if you can use that to your advantage on a challenge, or if you can just annoy other people to death with it, no one will stop you from doing it, and it might even improve the ratings and be encouraged.

And then I started to notice the physical challenges. Some of the stuff used was poorly constructed, and there is no safety equipment. And people get hurt, and again it is good for the ratings.

I was thinking that I shouldn't watch the show anymore, that I shouldn't encourage this sort of thing, but then I still watched the pirate island one and the all-star one. It started to get interesting again, but still nothing was done about safety equipment or people running around naked.

In the all star game, Susan left after getting upset when Richard played a challenge against her naked.

I seriously tried to stop watching the show after that. Not that I stopped watching right then, I watched the rest of that season, but I wanted to stop watching any seasons that followed. But I would see part of show with a friend and start watching again after that.

Okay, so I didn't watch much of the last season, and I couldn't tell you anything about many of the seasons before that. I think that I might finally be over it.

Now if someone comes up with the Stalking the Wild Asparagus show, I would probably watch that. I might even try to be in that. But I'm not interested in Survivor anymore.

Defying Gravity and other random stuff

You may have watched Defying Gravity on ABC, until it was announced that the eighth episode was the season finale. Or maybe it was said to be the series finale. I can't remember. Anyway, it's a bit silly to call the eighth episode the season finale, but sometimes they only make eight episodes of a new show, especially when it is just a summer replacement series. Or sometimes they only make ten episodes, or maybe they only make thirteen episodes.

So, I had thought that they had only made the eight episodes, and that if the ratings were good they would make more for next year, and if the ratings weren't good then the season cliffhanger of them all looking at whatever was in storage bay four would just be the end of it.

Turns out that they filmed thirteen episodes, and episode eight was not meant to be the season cliffhanger. ABC just isn't going to bother with the other five episodes. People in Canada are still watching the show.

So, I have just found out that channel 131 has episodes nine and ten. I have just watched episode nine and seen what is in storage bay four. Tomorrow I will watch episode ten, and hopefully episode eleven will be posted on Saturday.

Anyway, if there is something that you like to watch now that you missed, and you can't find it on Hulu, look on 131.

And there is a lot of cool stuff on Hulu that you might not have noticed.

I've already mentioned finding The Bionic Woman on Hulu. I have yet to look at Return of the Planet of the Apes (animated), but that's cool that they have it. If you missed Daybreak, (think more serious Groundhog Day with the black guy from Private Practice), you can still watch it. You can watch the nineties version of Dark Shadows. They have the short-lived Century City, about a law firm in the future. Maybe you would like to watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos. They have three seasons of Sliders, and seven seasons of Stargate SG1. They have most of the new Outer Limits, and a lot of the old ones.

Anyway, they have a lot of cool stuff if you are ever wanting something to pass the time.

I guess that is all I have to say for now. I have the usual stuff to do. I'd better get started on it.

My VCR crashes, just in time for the new TV season

In the very late seventies, my dad bought us a VCR. It was a Beta. When you put the tape in the machine this thing popped up out the top and sort of looked like part of Mr. Spock's science station. It did not have a remote control, but it had this pause button on a wire that you could use when you were recording or playing a tape. The Beta tapes were smaller than VHS, and were better than the VHS available at the time.

I don't even remember what brand we bought, just that it was something we had actually heard of before we went to the store.

The VCR worked just fine, and with the pause button on a wire I would sometimes edit out commercials. I taped the ABC airings of the first two Star Trek movies with additional footage. We got a card to rent videos at some local independently owned video library.

Life was good.

At some point, it was decided that American public did not need both the VHS and the Beta (though professionals continued to use Beta for a while), and we could no longer buy or rent movies on VHS. We could still buy blank tapes and record stuff off of the TV.

After a time, my dad bought a VHS. It didn't work as well as the older Beta machine, but at least we could rent new movies again.

Around 1989 or 1990, my dad gave me the Beta. It still worked, and I still had some movies that I had bought on Beta. And I could still record stuff off of the TV on blank tapes. We got a VHS player that did not record, so we watched new movies on that.

My house was robbed. They left the Beta and took the cheap VHS player.

And then the local stores stopped selling blank Beta tapes, and we had to buy a VHS that would record stuff of off the TV. I eventually replaced all the movies I had on Beta and gave up the Beta machine. I don't remember what year that was, just that I did not have the Beta machine when I moved in 1999.

If someone out there has my Beta machine, it probably still works.

While the VHS tapes did finally look as good as the old Betas (or at least, if they didn't I just got used to how they looked), the machines themselves were never as good. The last few machines I've had were total pieces of crap. Each new machine works for a shorter period of time than the older one.

Then we got a DVD player. The DVD players worked just fine. Maybe they have fewer moving parts or something.

Well, the DVD player destroyed the TV screen. We had to buy a new TV. But the DVD player and the TV seemed to get along alright as long as we didn't stack them on top of each other.

Then came the VHS recorder/DVD player combo. That seemed to work okay for a while.

A few years back, my mother bought me a VHS recorder/DVD recorder combo. Merry Christmas. Thanks, Mom.

The previously bought VHS recorder/DVD player combo was still working, and I had plenty of VHS tapes. We didn't immediately switch to the new machine. In fact, the new machine stayed in it's box until we got around to it about a year later, when the VCR side of of the older machine started doing some annoying thing. I don't even remember what particular annoying thing, cause eventually I had had many different machines do all sorts of annoying things.

So, we hooked up the new machine and decided to try out the DVD recorder. We didn't notice that there are four different kinds of recordable DVDs (in addition to the DVDs looking pretty much like CDs and once buying some of those by mistake), and we bought the 16x DVD+R instead of the 16x DVD-R. So, we got an error message.

Having just bought about a hundred of the wrong DVDs, we decided to wait a while for the right DVDs to come on sale. We just used the VHS recorder instead. We bought a bunch of VHS blank tapes. Life went back to normal.

Last Christmas I found a bunch of 16x DVD-R on sale, and I bought about a hundred of them. And then I got busy with other Christmas stuff and never tried them out. The blank DVDs went in the other room with all the other computer stuff, and I forgot about them.

My VHS started refusing to rewind tapes at fast speed. We fixed that problem by going to a Goodwill and buying another VHS machine. Not that we hooked it up to the TV, we just used it to rewind tapes.

Last week, the VHS/DVD recorder combo ate the tape that I had recorded Fringe on. My first VHS machine used to eat tapes, but it had been a while since I had encountered this particular problem.

Maybe it is time to switch to the DVD recorder. I dug out a blank DVD. I got an error message. Maybe that is the wrong kind of disk. I dug out one of the other kind.

I got the same error message.

After looking at the machine to find out that it is supposed to take DVD-R and not DVD+R, I got out a different 16x DVD-R. I got the same error message.

Crap.

Apparently, the Symphonic SR90VE VHS/DVD recorder combo was a piece of crap new and just out of the box, but it is only now that I am finding out about this particular problem. A bit of surfing found that a lot of people had to do some sort of upgrade to get it to use the 8x DVD-R instead of the 4x DVD-R, though it is supposed to use both of those and the current 16x DVD-R that I tried. I have not yet seen any mention of anything that will get it to work with the 16x DVD-R.

It has been suggested that a 16x DVD-RW would work better even on a machine that seems to prefer slower speeds, but I haven't tried that yet. I would rather not spend money on yet another package of blank DVDs until I know they would actually work. It has also been suggested that I just order some 4x DVD-R or 4x DVD-RW from someone online and try those, but again, I'd rather not go to the expense without having one to try first.

I decided to ask my brother if he had one that I could borrow.

He used the last of his about a week ago, making a copy of some season of The X-files.

And I really have no money for any of this anyway. Due to the thing with the bank fees, not only did we have a not so great paycheck, but we didn't get to spend about four hundred of that after a check of a hundred and something that my husband did not remember writing went through and we were charged another couple hundred in fees due to insufficient funds following the forgotten check being cashed.

So that's it. I'll probably miss The Big Bang Theory tonight. I'll miss either House or Heroes too, but whichever one of those I don't watch I can probably watch on Hulu the next day.

On top of that I am trying to decide whether or not to go to Shreveport. I wasn't going to go, cause I thought it would keep me out of town next Saturday, but as it turns out the trip starts tomorrow and would end Thursday, so that doesn't sound bad at all. Still, I have a lot of work to do before I could leave, and then if I was going to get any knitting done while I was away I need to go and find some specific yarn today. Again, I have very little money, so I'm trying to plot out a shopping trip that will hit all the right stores without spending too much on gas, and I must make a list and not buy anything that isn't on the list.

Or I could just stay here and do some more cleaning.

Me? Cleaning?

That's probably not going to happen, is it?

Free cereal and missing time

I used to do the whole coupon thing, where you cut out a bunch of coupons and wait for things to go on sale, and then you get some stuff for free or almost free. At the checkout you pay twenty bucks for stuff that originally would have cost a hundred dollars, so you saved eighty dollars. Not really, cause I would never pay a hundred dollars for that stuff, but I liked the way it sounds.

At some point I decided to quit doing that and try to eat better. The saving money thing and the eating better thing don't always work together. Like, if you are at the pizza buffet, once you've already paid to get in, you might as well get your money's worth and eat lots of pizza, but eating a lot of pizza isn't good for you. Or, you might be trying to eat lean stuff like turkey, but eating hamburgers is cheaper. Or, you might get a good deal on after-holiday candy, but it would be better for you to eat fruit instead.

So I got out of the habit of clipping coupons, so that the coupons wouldn't influence my decision making at the grocery store. And it worked for a time, and I lost about twenty pounds. I have put them back on now, but I didn't get back into the coupon thing. I still use them once in a while, but I don't spend a lot of time doing it, and I'm not as organized anymore.

Once I found a display of Christmas Crunch. That's like Captain Crunch, except that it is green and red. It was about a week after Christmas, and they had a big end cap display of the stuff, and it was on clearance for $0.99. I had a dollar off coupon and another coupon for $0.75. So I got one box for free, and the other one for $0.25. I bought some other stuff and took my stuff to the car. The Christmas Crunch said it had a surprise inside, so I opened the box right there in the car to see what it was. Inside the box, but not inside the bag, was some gum and some candy and a dollar off coupon.

Great. So I got the dollar coupon out of the other box, and I went back inside the store and got two more free boxes of cereal. And then I took those to the car, opened those boxes, took out the coupons, and went back inside the store for two more free boxes of cereal.

After several trips back inside the store, I had collected one box of cereal that for $0.25 and fifteen boxes that were free. And then I was told that I couldn't have anymore cereal, and if that was all that I wanted could I please just leave the store.

So that was odd, cause it was a week after Christmas, and the stuff was on clearance. Clearance. That's means that they are trying to get rid of the stuff. So I don't know what the problem was, but I left anyway.

I do the remember back when then once in a while and buy kids cereal, but mainly I just eat it when we're at a motel. Until a while back when there was the Kellogg's Star Trek promotion, and I bought a lot of their cereal, and most of it was stuff like Corn Pops.

We ran out of Corn Pops. We're not quite out of cereal, but most of the sugary stuff is gone.

I saw in one of my grocery adds that Captain Crunch and some other cereal was on sale for five boxes for eight dollars. And, there was a three dollar off coupon if you bought five boxes of cereal, making the cereal a dollar each. Cool. I'll go get some.

I wasn't going to buy all kid cereal. There was some stuff that's better for you that I like, and it was on sale too. But I did have to have at least a couple of boxes of Captain Crunch.

Also, I had these rain checks for cheap chicken. A ten pound bag of leg quarters was $3.90, so I got two of them. And then I got eggs, which unfortunately were not on sale, but we still needed some eggs anyway, and they were like a dollar fifty. And then I got five boxes of cereal, some of which is good for you, but two boxes were kid cereal. And I was going to buy this stuff, get forty dollars cash back, and immediately go back home and do some work. I must have gone to the store at about ten in the morning. It took longer than I though because they are doing work in the store, and some of the stuff is moved around at took longer to find than usual. But still, I don't think I was there that long.

At the checkout I'm talking to the cashier and having a pleasant enough time, and the cashier mentions that some of the cereal rang up at forty cents. And then the coupon still worked. So this stuff that I thought I had spent fifteen something on only cost ten something. I was pretty happy about that.

I got so distracted that I forgot to get my forty dollars, and I had been charged for it on the receipt. I was still in the parking lot. I went back in to get my forty dollars. The cashier looked at my receipt and gave me my forty dollars. I thought it was going to be a big hassle and we would have to call a manager and have him count the register and all that, but no, she just apologized and gave me my money.

Since I was still there, I thought I might as well get some more of that cereal, and I had another coupon. So I got one box of the Captain Crunch and four boxes of the other stuff, and it came to $3.20, and then with the coupon I only had to pay twenty cents.

Now I am debating on how greedy I should be, and if I should go back and try to get more cereal. I have a feeling that not all of the cereal will be marked down like that, probably just boxes with a certain date, and they might not have anymore anyway. Still, with the money problems we are having, I think I might as well try. If they have more I could get ten more boxes of cereal for forty cents.

Anyway, I went home and had to deal with twenty pounds of chicken. I hadn't planned on doing it right away, but the chicken is usually frozen and needs a few days to thaw out. This stuff wasn't frozen, and I knew if I didn't deal with right then I would forget and the stuff would spoil. So I cut up the whole thing and separated the legs from the thighs and then cooked half of the chicken and picked the meat off of the bones, and put the other half of the chicken in plastic bags.
And then it was four o'clock.

How is it four o'clock? All I had done since nine that morning was watch Fringe and Bones and maybe one episode of Stargate, go to the grocery store, and deal with this chicken.

Does it really take all day to do that? Especially since most of that TV watching was done while I was waiting for the chicken to cook or to cool down so I could put it away.

So while I had a good day and got a lot done and saved money and all of that, I didn't get anything done that I had originally planned to do. I washed a few dishes (which I then had to wash again after dealing with the chicken), and sorted through maybe two boxes of books, and that was all. I didn't run any other errands or anything. After four I talked to a friend for a bit, but after that it was time to fix dinner, and then the day was pretty much over. I watched Smallville and Glee, and then fell asleep while attempting to watch some British thing.

Anyway, that means that I will have to get a few more things done today before I go hang out with my friends. I should go to the bookstore and go somewhere to get a phone card. And before I do any of that I'll have to do some laundry.

Not that any of that is a problem, just in my mind I pictured doing most of that yesterday, and I can't quite figure out why I didn't have time to do it. Just one minute it was time for lunch, and then I was doing some more work, and then it was four o'clock.

Now that I think about it, I didn't even have a bath.

That's okay. I'll have a bath now.

A lot happened yesterday

Okay, the first thing that happened yesterday was that I noticed Hulu has the third season of Sliders. I used to really love Sliders, but I didn't get to see it much after it switched to cable. So now they have the third season, which is mostly stuff that I haven't seen since it was originally on like ten years ago, and maybe soon they will have the stuff that I never saw on cable.

So that was nice. I was just hoping that wasn't the end of my good luck for the day.

My husband had a meeting with someone about the planned business thing. It was all very exciting. He printed out a lot of stuff and put on a tie and went off to meet someone who might hire them for their first account.

And then he locked me out of the house, which I have already written about.

My husband's meeting seemed to go okay. We'll just have to wait and see. He was only supposed to do this thing on Sundays and maybe Mondays, so that he and the other guy wouldn't have to take time off from their regular jobs. Only, with the way things have been, there hasn't been any work at their regular jobs. So this woman he spoke to talked him into working for her on two Saturdays instead of two Sundays, which means that he will have to ask for time off. And if you can't work on Saturday then they probably won't schedule any work for the rest of the week either. So he has basically asked off for two weeks, and he's not even sure that they will make any money.

Still, it is a bit exciting that he will finally get this thing going in August.

So after getting a little bit of work done and making lunch and then washing dishes and such, I watched a couple of the Slider episodes. And then my husband comes in with the mail, and there is this odd package for me. He said that it felt like asparagus plants. Did I order any asparagus plants? No, I did not order any asparagus plants. It is too late in the year to order asparagus plants. And I don't remember ordering any plants. In fact the only thing that I remember ordering for a while in the Star Trek t-shirts, but they are supposed to take ninety days.

But it did turn out to be my medical/science shirt. So that was cool. I hadn't checked on the order since last week, so I went to check, and it had been sent on the 30th. So I checked on the other orders, and another one had been sent on the 30th, and one had even been sent on the 26th. So I called to ask if the other t-shirts had arrived, but so far they haven't.

But it is still nice to have the one, and now I'll know better if I want to order a bunch more.

I won't be doing anything of interest over the weekend. We don't have any money. I mean, we seriously do not have any money. All this time off, and no money. Not even money for little things that I should get at Home Depot to work on the backyard.

Back to watching Hulu.

Nothing much going on now

So, I scheduled myself work in the other part of the house from eight to ten. So I got that done. Well, not exactly. But I did get two hours of work done either in the other part of the house or outside, and I got it done before lunch. And that was really the point, to get a little bit done in areas that it is too warm to work before it really is to warm.

And I have been told that part of the reason I feel so bad (physically) is that I don't drink enough water. I hate water. I could drink probably drink gallons of soda, but getting down that recommended two liters of water really seems like a chore to me. If I am not really paying attention, I probably won't do it. And recently, I haven't been paying attention. When I was doing the serious digging holes in the garden type stuff, I was drinking plenty of water without really thinking about it. So I hadn't been paying attention, cause I knew I was drinking lots of water. But then I decided that it was probably too hot to do anymore of that for a while, and I stopped drinking so much water, and I didn't notice. So that was probably some of what made me feel so bad. I made a point of seeing how much water I drank on Sunday, which was about half of what I needed, and then I made of point of drinking two liters Monday, even if I really didn't want it.

Okay, so two hours of work done before lunch, check. Two liters of water drank yesterday (though that last half liter wasn't easy), check. And the last disk of an audio book listened to so that we can take it back to the library, check.

We then watched the conclusion of Impact. Okay, so this was a new twist on the meteor that will destroy us, but I buy this one even less than Armageddon. Could a meteor hitting the moon be really bad news for us? Yes. We aren't even keeping up with what might hit the earth, so we would certainly miss seeing something that might hit the moon, and that could be a problem. Could we fix the problem of having the moon go all crazy on us after being hit with part of a brown dwarf by throwing nuclear missiles at it and then trying somebody's mothballed science project? Hell no. Even with the very convenient mothballed science stuff being available, I think getting any of it to work the way it is supposed to would just be luck, and getting it to work at all in less than a month is just silly. I wonder if we would even be able to do the stuff from Meteor, much less Deep Impact, and this stuff is just way out there.

But it was nice to have something different to watch anyway.

There will be another meteor that will destroy us TV movie in a couple of weeks.

Okay, watched Impact and listened to audio book and watched True Blood. And then it is back to complete boredom. After having kept my husband away from this computer most of the morning, he had it for most of the evening. There was no new TV on (at least no new TV that I watch), and I'm not really up to reading at the moment. I had to take back the last book half read, even after I renewed the thing. I couldn't finish a book in six weeks. I have that much trouble with it.

I really hate being here. I hate being in the house all of the time. I hate the heat. I hate that the only thing around here that made me feel good about myself for a time was the gardening, and I can't work on that at the moment. I hate the mess. I hate not having a job. I hate not having money. I hate not being able to go out and meet people.

I wish I could just lock the place up and go somewhere else for a few months. But even if I had the money, I really wouldn't have any place to go.

That is one of the drawbacks of having had a traveling job. While I quickly got tired of being on the road all of the time, after doing that for a while it feels really abnormal to be here all of the time.

I spent half of a summer in Pittsburgh, and I was really bored with it. After going to Kennywood and a few other places in the area, I had seen all that I cared to see, and I couldn't wait to get away from there. But that was several years ago, and right now I would gladly pack a bag and go there, if I had any reason to go there and the money to do so. Pennsylvania this time of year is cool and green and it seems to rain every night, but not so much during the day. At least, that is how I remember it. But it was a while back, and maybe I am remembering it wrong.

Anyway, I shouldn't leave the house in this state, and the plants have to be watered, etc....

Okay, today I am going to work two hours before lunch and drink two liters of water.

Watching TV

It is starting to bother me that I am not getting anything useful done. Working in the garden is out of the question. Some days I just do not feel well enough to do anything, but the days I feel good I still don't do much.

Yesterday, the bashed finger felt much better. It is hardly noticeable now, and tomorrow I expect it to feel completely normal again. Yesterday was hot and we didn't go anywhere or do anything, except for us watching TV and him doing stuff on the computer. It is very annoying to know that a whole day (or several days) has gone by and nothing has gotten done (unless you are on vacation or something and had planned on getting nothing done). I washed out enough dishes to do breakfast and lunch, made breakfast (cold cereal), made lunch (pasta, with what little veggies I was able to get out of the garden), and watered the plants. That was it. The rest of the day I watched TV. My husband had a similar day, he made pizza for dinner and washed off a screen from one of the air conditioners, and the rest of the day was spent on the computer or watching TV.

It's a rare day that we don't even run errands or visit the library and literally just lie around and watch TV, but I think we have had a few and are going to have more. So I am having a bit of a rant about the TV, mostly about the annoying digital switchover.

So it has been a couple of weeks since the digital switchover nonsense, and I am mostlygetting used to it, but I'm still having some problems with it.

Even before the switchover, there were some problems. Like the VCR doesn't rewind properly. If you hit the play and rewind buttons and the same time, that's fine, but it will take a really long time to rewind the whole tape. If you just want to rewind the tape, and you just hit rewind and not play, it tends to the think about it for a moment, and then the power on the VCR goes off. And then when you turn the power back on the VCR ejects the tape.

I noticed that would happen once in a while, but over the the last few months it went from happening once in a while to happening all the damn time.

The VCR is one of those tape and DVD combo things, so if I get rid of it I won't be able to watch DVDs either. It was a Christmas gift from two or three years ago. I don't think I should need another one so soon.

But it still seemed to play and record and all of that just fine. So just the rewind didn't work, and it seems to me that they used to sell something that would rewind tapes. That never quite made sense to me why anyone would need such a thing, unless maybe someone owned a video store. So I never bought one of these gadgets, but I knew that they used to make them. So I thought if I could find one that would solve my problem.

So I didn't find one, but there are just stacks and stacks of old VCRs at Goodwill and such, so we bought one of those for less than ten dollars. We didn't attach it to a TV, we just plugged it in, and now we use that to rewind the tapes.

Right about the time that we figured out to do that, the fast forward feature doesn't work either.

So we can either fast forward and play, which takes a long time, or we can put the tape in the other machine. But while there is often a need to rewind a whole tape, there isn't much need to fast forward a whole tape. And it is hard to tell how much a tape has fast forwarded on a machine that isn't hooked up to the TV, so we usually have to go with the slower play and fast forward feature.

Anyway, I think all new stuff is now deliberately designed to be crap.

Okay, so we'd about dealt with that when the digital switch happened. Which meant that we had to go and get a second box to use the VCR, and then after we got it hooked up we found out that you couldn't program the thing to record on different channels. You just have to always leave the VCR on channel four, and then it will record whatever the box is set for. And there's no programing the box to switch to a different channel.

So that all sucks, but we haven't really needed to do that yet. So it won't really suck until we go on a trip, or until the fall when we get lots of new TV to watch and record. Right now there just isn't enough new TV for it to be a problem yet.

And of course with my husband out of work, we usually don't need to record anything anyway.

But Sunday there was both Impact and Merlin. So we watched Merlin and recorded Impact.

We then noticed something odd that we hadn't noticed before. When we are watching just the TV and using just the box hooked up to the TV instead of the box hooked up to the VCR, channel 21 was on channel 8, and channel 27 was on 11. But channel 11 was not on channel 27, and channel 8 was not on channel 21. Channel 21 and channel 27 both had the "no signal" message.

That wasn't how it was a couple of weeks ago before we got the second box for the VCR. So I don't know what happened. Maybe you have to reset the things after every storm or every time the power goes out or something. Anyway, we don't know what the deal is.

But the box on the VCR seemed to work fine, and we recorded Impact okay, which we were able to watch after we rewound the tape in the other machine.

Most of this week I have been watching Ark II, Space Academy, and Jason of Star Command on DVD. In theory, I am doing this to make sure that the DVDs all work before sending them on to my friend in the great white north. But really, I just haven't seen this stuff in a very long time.

I think that Ark II is the best of them, but I loved everyone in Space Academy. I think by the time they made Jason of Star Command I wouldn't have watched it, except that James Doohan was on some of them.

I didn't like a lot of stuff that they did in TV shows made for kids. I didn't like silly stuff. I didn't like that sometimes characters did stuff just to be funny, when it didn't really make much sense for the character to do that.

Now that I am older, I guess I still don't like that sort of thing that much. But at least I am aware of the tradition of the comic relief character. I have a little more respect for the actors having to do this sort of thing. Or, at least, maybe I have a little more sympathy for them and don't call them names.

During the eighties there was this series called Evening Shade. I did not watch the show, but it seems like it was on. Maybe my parents watched it. Anyway, sometimes it was on, and I wasn't paying much attention to it.

My mom made a point of watching it one day. She said that one of the minor characters looked like someone she went to school with. The boy's name was Charlie. The actor's name was Charles, but he had a different last name. But after a while she was pretty sure that it was the same guy.

I looked on the Internet. The actor was born in Texas, though not in Dallas county. But he did grow up in Texas with a different last name. So this probably was the guy that my mom knew in school.

And this same actor was a character that I did not like in Jason of Star Command. He was supposed to be smart, but he was always doing something dumb or getting his hair caught in something.

So I wonder why my mom told us that she went to school with this guy from Evening Shade, but she didn't tell us that she went to school with the goofball from Jason of Star Command. Does having wild hair and funny eyebrows keep your fellow classmates from recognizing you, even though they recognize an even older version of you later?

My last complaint about the TV is what happened yesterday after a couple of celebrities died. I am sorry that these people died, but this sort of thing happens. People die. But you don't need to hear about it for hours and hours on four networks. These people were not past Presidents of the United States, they were just entertainers. We did not need to see old stuff about them for three hours on prime time television.

I suppose it wouldn't have mattered much, seeing as most of the shows were reruns. But they also managed to show old interviews of Farrah Fawcett in place of the one new show of the evening, Listener. (Okay, Listener isn't really a new show, it's just a Canadian show, but it is new to me, and I wanted to watch it.) So that made me mad. Not as mad as I get when football games prevent Cold Case from being shown on it's regular scheduled time, but very similar to that.

One last thing is that there is going to be something new on FOX tonight called Virtuality. Even when there is something new on TV that I might want to watch, I'm likely to miss it, because I wasn't watching enough TV (other than tapes and DVDs) to see a commercial for it. Anyway, tonight there will be this movie that I haven't seen, and it's probably going to be some really awful thing that was made for the Sci Fi channel, but I'm probably going to watch it anyway.

It's Friday now, right?

My husband has had the last week and a half off, without pay, and we didn't have anything to speak of in savings either. So when you have a week and a half off, and you should be off on a trip or something, we have been at home most of the time, except for maybe seeing a couple of movies.

So we have spent some time together. And then there's been time just sort of being in each other's way, or at least, trying to stay out of each other's way.

Until Tuesday, I had a certain garden project to keep me busy. But it is June in Texas, and it is hot, though it is not as hot as it is going to get. So I go outside in the morning, and my first thought is actually something like it is too cool for my liking, and that I should go back inside. But a bit of actual work cures me of thinking that it isn't warm enough. And of course the rest of the day is plenty warm.

But I can't do very much work all at once, even in the morning when it is somewhat cool. I go outside and dig or something for maybe half an hour, and then I go back inside and watch TV for between ten minutes or an hour. Only there isn't anything to watch on TV. There isn't even anything that I taped on TV the night before. So instead of watching TV on the TV, I'm watching something on Hulu or YouTube or something like that on the computer.

Anyway, about half of the time this works out just fine. My husband bought a new laptop, and he has been in the other room doing photoshop stuff and other such stuff, and sometimes playing a computer game, and he's half watching some new music video channel that we now have because of the digital TV thing. So that is mostly okay. Except the laptop isn't hooked up to the Internet, and sometimes he needs the Internet. And sometimes when I am halfway through watching something I go outside and dig in the dirt, and then I come back in the house to find him on this computer, and I have to wait for him to do whatever it is that he's doing before I can go back to doing what I was doing. And there is nothing for me to do except wait. If there was something else for me to do, I wouldn't be using the computer in the first place.

Sometimes he is actually doing something that needs to be done, like checking the company website to make sure his schedule didn't change. Or sometimes he is downloading something. But usually he is either blogging (which he could mostly do on a different computer and then copy what he wrote on a disk) and sometimes he is doing other stuff like Twitter. Now, he knows how much this sort of thing annoys me, and we have had discussions about it, and as soon as we will have a discussion about it he do it even more and find yet another website to annoy me with, so I have stopped speaking to him on the subject. He knows how I feel about it, he knows he isn't supposed to do it, and he does it anyway.

Anyway, I especially do not see the point of Twitter. Besides the fact that I don't like him talking to a zillion people that I don't know, Twitter itself is pointless. It makes no damned sense. It isn't organized the way that a blog is or the way that other websites are. Twitter is just this endless stream of comments, and you can't tell what the comment is in relation to. It's just a bunch of random comment that aren't filed under anything except for who wrote it and whom it was written to.

Anyway, it was Tuesday, and I was digging a hole in the ground. And Tuesday I was quite serious about digging the hole in the ground, but it was hot. And so I would work on it until just before lunch and then have a bath. And then after lunch it would be hotter than it was in the morning, and after having a bath and getting clean clothes on, I'm not so much in a hurry to go out and get dirty again. So we maybe do something else for a few hours. Like we have been watching the Prisoner. So we maybe run a few errands and then come back and watch a few episodes of the Prisoner. And then maybe I go back to working in the garden and watching stuff on Hulu, and he goes back to his computer game.

So that is how it was for most of a week or so, maybe getting a lot done one day and not so much the next. So Tuesday I did a lot of work, enough that I was starting to see some progress. And Wednesday I got up and planned to do a lot work that day too. And in the morning I did do a lot of work. And after doing some work, my husband comes out and says that we should go for a walk, and I agreed.

But I'm afraid that going for a walk right after I had worked for a bit tired me out, and so I had a bath a couple of hours before lunch, and I didn't really get back to it. It was so nice to be clean, and I wanted to stay clean for a bit. I found other things to do, like washing dishes.

Now I really wish that I had done more work on Wednesday. I also wish that I had gone to Walmart afterwards and got some felt and other craft supplies to make a witch hat. But I did neither of those things Wednesday.

Now, there was a thirty percent chance of rain Wednesday, but it just looked cloudy and didn't really do anything for a long time. But then we started hearing stuff on the news, and I figured that I should at least go outside and smooth out the dirt that I had started to put back in this hole. If the dirt was going to get wet, it should at least get wet level and not be a lumpy mess. So I started to go outside and do that, only it was really windy. So that took some doing. My husband came out to help me for a bit, and then we went back inside. And there was a lot of nonsense, like the power blinking on and off for a bit and us having to reset the clocks a few times. And then it was over, and while everything got a bit wet and it was very windy, there wasn't a lot of actual rain. People north of us had tornadoes and such, but not us. We went to bed.

Apparently the rain was not over. I briefly woke up in the middle of the night (not sure what time) and heard that it was raining. Well, good. If everything has to get wet, it might as well get enough rain to do somebody some good and not just ruin my plans for gardening in the morning. I went back to sleep. In the morning it was still raining.

Well it stopped raining enough for me to go out and look, there was standing water in places, and of course the hole I had dug was completely filled with water. I hadn't staked the tomatoes, so they had all fallen over, as had a lot of my other plants. That's okay. Usually they dry out and recover.

And then it rained some more. And it was on the news most of the day. There were traffic problems. There was even flooding in places, though not for me personally, as the power was on most of the time, except for a minute here and there so that I would have to reset clocks and such. But the power never stayed off, so the pump kept the water out of my house.

So, obviously there was no going out to work in the garden yesterday. So I could have been working on my hat, except that I didn't go to Walmart or anyplace to get supplies. And I didn't think that I should go out any yesterday to get them, because of the traffic problems here and there, and I didn't really need anything. There was food in the house and all of that. The news said to stay in if you didn't have to be out, so we did just that. We stayed here and watched the rest of the Prisoner.

So I have been outside to have a look this morning, and while most of the water has gone down, there is still water in the hole I where I was working in the garden. And of course the ground is going to be too wet to work with for days anyway.

Today is Friday (at least, I think that it is Friday). I think that my husband is going back to work today (and of course he would be going back to work on a day that I can't garden and I don't really appreciate having the house to myself this afternoon).

And today is the day that the TV is supposed to go all digital and be annoying forever afterwards. We have been pretending that we don't have regular TV all week, trying to get used to the annoying bit of having four remotes instead of two. And yes, I know there is this thing called the universal remote, but the thing didn't work very well before so I doubt that it would be any better now. But sometimes you find yourself looking at a blank screen, and you don't know which remote you need to fix the problem. So sometimes you just give up and go back to regular TV. Only, after today, there won't be any regular TV to go back to.

Of course, it will really get ugly in September, when there are new TV shows to watch and record, and I will only be able to program record for one channel, or else I will have to go and manually change the channel. I really don't like to do that. If I do that I usually accidentally see the end of a program that I recorded, or I wait too long and then don't record the beginning of the next show, etc.... It is all very annoying.

Oh, and I'll be seeing my mother tomorrow, but that will be in a group and maybe it will be okay.

A reader needs advice on Star Trek and the Borg

I think this is going to end up being much too long to put in a comment.



Okay, this is the discussion so far:



bulletholes said...
i HAEN'T BEEN TO SEE THE NEW MOVIE YET, BUT i'VE BEEN GEARING UP FOR IT.i WATCHED "fINAL fRONTIER (OPPS)because I like that one, then got "Generations".Generations was cute, but on the whole disappointing to a non-Trekkie.From what I understand, I can watch this new one without needing to see the others.For a non-Trekkie who never saw anything after "5", (except the recent view of Generations) which of these newer films, in 20 words or less, would you recommend?
5/29/2009 11:16 AM
laughingattheslut said...
Now that is a tough one, especially since I am a Trekkie, and it is hard to think from the point of view of someone who is not.Generally speaking, I think that most people like the newest movie (the current movie is number 11), though some of us Trekkies from way back cannot get past some of the mistakes.Of the movies 6-10, my favorite is number 8, First Contact. It has both the borg and the man who first invented warp drive (though this version of the character is very different from the one seen in the original series back in the sixties). Without getting too much into what the borg are, just know that they are the type of alien that you have to stay away from or you will become one of them (like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Puppet Masters, Invaders from Mars, or The Thing, etc...)I would think that the favorite Star Trek movie for basic non-trekkies would be number 4, where they go back to our time to get a couple of humpback whales. It is very funny and you don't have to know anything about the Federation or Klingons or any of that to get what is going on. But you said that you already saw that one.Funny that you like number 5. Most people hate it.Number 6 has been compared to us trying to be friends with the Soviet Union after something really bad happens to them, like Chernobyl.Number 7 you saw. I think that they were trying to make both the original series fans happy and at the same time make the Next Generation fans happy, and just ended up not making anyone happy. Fans of the original series just got up and left in the middle of the movie.Number 9 was okay. Some people accidently found the fountain of youth, and some other people try to take it away from them to cure their own illnesses. But it is their own fault that they got the illnesses in the first place, so you can't really feel too sorry for them. Captain Picard and crew to the rescue.Number 10 doesn't seem to be anybody's favorite either. It had Romulans, and scary sort of almost vampire-like relatives of Romulans, and a dopey younger brother of Data. But somehow, it just wasn't what anybody hoped for.For most trekkies, the second movie is still the best, even if Spock dies in it.So if you are going to the theater this weekend you should be able to watch number 11 without much trouble, and if you want to stay home and rent a Star Trek video that you haven't seen before I would go with number 8, though certainly number 4 is also worth seeing a second time.
5/29/2009 4:02 PM
bulletholes said...
Yeah, they had "first contact", but the cover of Generations said it had Kirk in it so I thought maybe it was #6 in the series. I don't think it was so bad as to walk out on, and when Picard found Kirk in that house in the Nexus it gave me a good feel. Then they blew it.I like #5 maybe just for one reason especially...my son and I watched it when he was about five and when Kirk asks the big God dude why he needs a Starship...well...my son mimics that scene all the time.He will raise his finger up and say "I have a question"...he still does that to this day.
5/29/2009 5:25 PM



bulletholes said...
hi laffin1 I went and got First Contact at your suggestion. it got a little tedious in the middle, but any movie that quotes moby Dick and then plays some Steppenwolf all inside of 5 minutes has got to be OK. I can't wait to watch it again, so my question is...what should i watch for, and do the borgs appear in a previous episode.I'd never herard of a borg before. That one, she was kinda hot.
6/09/2009 12:47 PM


Well, that's a lot of stuff to talk about.

Okay, I think most of us are agreed that the borg queen is kinda hot. Alice Krige played her in First Contact. Later, the same character shows up in Voyager, but that actress wasn't available, so another actress got the part for a while. And then for the show's final episode I think that they got Krige to do it again.

Voyager also had a female borg crew member. Most of us are generally agreed that she was also hot.

Some of us Trekkies, including some of us female Trekkies, have been known to dress up as Borg. Some of us are hot, some of us, not so much. Some of us get mixed reviews. I had a Borg parody costume myself, but my last time to wear it was about twenty-five pounds ago.

Okay, that was the only Borg appearance in the movies. Before that they were in several episodes of The Next Generation. I think that the second or third was Best of Both Worlds, which was the end of the season cliffhanger one year, and it is usually voted favorite episode. At least, part one is great. Part two was good, but a bit of a disappointment after all of us spent the summer trying to figure out what would happen.

There were more Borg episodes after that. Some of them involved Data's evil twin brother Lore.

There most have been Borg episodes on Deep Space Nine, but I can't remember any of them at the moment.

Then came Voyager, and after spending all that money on new Borg stuff for the eighth movie, they seemed to run into the Borg all the time so that they could use the expensive costumes and props.

There was even an episode of Enterprise where they find a couple of frozen Borg on the north pole or something.

Anyway, there are a lot of Borg out there in the Star Trek universe.

As for what are the best parts of First Contact and what you should watch for if you see it again, I'm not sure. It was all good. I personally don't care too much about the holodeck scene, but the producers of Star Trek do love their holodecks and use them often.

I think that my favorite lines belonged to Lily. "Sorry, it's my first ray-gun." and "Borg? Sounds Swedish."

Also, as a non-Trekkie you might not know that the Emergency Medical Hologram (Robert Picardo) is the chief medical officer on Voyager. In fact, after the first episode, he is Voyager's only medical officer. This computer program that is only supposed to help the real doctor in an emergency ends up being online all the time in that series. So that part was really funny to fans of Voyager, even though there's really nothing that funny about the scene itself.

Not sure what else to suggest at this point. Maybe other readers have some thoughts on the subject.

Digital TV and other crap

Yesterday I got up early and decided to make a serious effort to get out and finish my garden project of the twelve by four garden bed that will mostly have decorative sweet potatoes growing in it. I really need to finish that up, because I've already started another project of moving some flower bulbs. So I have a big mess to deal with, and I need to finish with something.

And of course on the one day that I get up early and decide to deal with some stuff, it started raining about an hour and a half later. So it will just have that last little bit of it not done for however long it takes for the soil to dry again, and the new project will just be half-done for a long time after that.

Sometime after it stopped raining I went and voted in our little community elections. I meant to do that the day before, but I forgot what time the clubhouse was open for voting. And I really don't know these people, so I vote based on who sends me the most interesting flyer. So there were nine people wanting to be elected, but only four wanted to be elected enough to send me a flyer. So that narrows it down a lot. Two of them were easy. Only two of the four were running against each other, so that was a tough one. In the end, I just guessed. On the way out someone thanked me for walking all that way to vote. It wasn't anyone I recognized, so it was probably someone I voted against. Tomorrow I should walk over and find out who won.

My mother and I are somewhat at it again. I have asked her again and again not to bring up certain subjects, that I will just have to stop talking to her if she continues to keep talking about certain subjects, etc.... And she still doesn't get it. Right after I tell her that something is off limits, she talks about it more, saying that she doesn't want to talk about anything personal. I didn't say that I didn't want to discuss personal aspects of a subject, I said that I did not want to discuss the subject at all. I remind her of that, and she keeps talking.

Also, she has said that she doesn't want me to be mad at her, so she's thinking that she should do something that goes against her better judgement if it will make me not be mad at her anymore. It won't. It will make me be less mad at her if she tries to undo what she did wrong, but it won't erase what she did in the first place. If you do something to make someone mad, you just have to live with it. If you said that you were going to do something, and you don't do it, even if you think you have a good reason, people get mad at you. You have to live with people being mad at you if you don't do what you say you will. Will people be less mad at you if you end up doing what you said you were going to do like a year later, probably. Will that totally fix things, probably not.

My husband continues to work on his business idea, and towards that end we have bought a new computer. We would have bought two new computers, but right when things were starting to be okay, his real job isn't going so good. In the last three weeks he has only worked five days. And he can't use the time off as he would like because a.) we have less money than he needs, and b.) the other person in this business venture had to go out of town for three weeks.

The TV switch over is in a couple of weeks, and I am really starting to hate it. First of all, this upgrade is a lot of nonsense. People who want to pay for a better TV picture already did that. I have never understood why it was necessary to force this on the rest of us. The TV worked just fine before, and for the past year or so it was just fine to have the TV work both ways. But in a couple of weeks I am going to have all kinds of problems when the regular signal is gone for good.

First off, I sent for those coupons that were supposed to get us free converter boxes. I never did see anyone selling the things for forty bucks, so they still ended up costing ten or twenty dollars, even with the coupons. So we got one last year, and it worked okay, and then we kind of forgot about the whole thing. Later, we realized that the VCR wasn't going to work without a second box, but the coupons expired before I realized this.

So then we thought about buying a new VCR.

Apparently, there just aren't any VCRs that work with the new signal. All the VCRs need converter boxes. That sucks. I mean, all the TVs made after a certain date have to work with the new signal, and we bought our TV about a year too early for that. But why didn't they do the same with the VCRs?

Anyway, after looking on the Internet, we see that there is a way to use the one box for both the TV and the VCR, if you go and buy some more cables and such. So we were going to do that, except on the day that we were going to go and buy the cables, we notice that method does not allow you to watch one program on the TV while recording something else on the VCR. You can only use the VCR to record what you are already watching on the TV.

So that sucks.

Okay, so I look around on the Internet, and they will send you a replacement coupon if you didn't realize that you needed two boxes and you let one of them expire. I'm not sure how they would know such a thing, but I filled out the forms to get another coupon. Unlike the first coupons, the new one came in about a week. So off we went to Walmart to spend ten dollars on another box, and then we also had to spend another twenty-five or so on additional cables and such.

Later we saw that some of the cables were at the dollar store.

Anyway, both boxes are now hooked up and there are cables and splitters and whatnot and we now have to have four remotes to watch TV instead of the two we were using last week.

And we've found out that the VCR still isn't going to work properly.

Well, most evenings when he is at work, I am using the VCR. Usually I watch what I want to watch on one channel, and then I record something that he wants to watch (or hopefully something that we both want to watch) on other channels. Or I record something that we both want to watch on various channels while I am out doing something else. And there is usually something on one channel at seven, and something on another channel at eight, and maybe something else on a third channel at nine.

Well, you can't do that anymore. The VCR is only going to work on one channel, until such time as you change the channel. You can't just program the thing to record on one channel at seven and another channel at eight and so on. The VCR has to be set for the same channel for the entire time you want to record things. So if you go out of town for a bit and try to record stuff while you're away, you can record eight hours of tape on the one channel, or maybe ten hours of disk on the one channel, but not on different channels.

With these damned boxes, you'd have to buy a different box and VCR for each channel if you want to program the VCR the way that you used to.

In addition to that, one of the boxes really sucks on FOX. I guess I'm glad that it sucks on FOX instead of some other channel, as I can watch most FOX stuff I like on Hulu.

I guess it was all meant to force us into getting cable and Tivo. That's what I thought in the beginning, before they said they were going to send everyone these coupons. Even with the coupons, we have spent about fifty dollars. And it still isn't going to work right.

A reminder

If you didn't see The Big Bang Theory episode of Penny and Sheldon exchanging Christmas gifts (or if you would just like to see it again), you can watch it tonight at 7pm on CBS.

A reminder

I probably should have told everyone this morning to watch or record tonight's episode of CSI. It will be set at a sci fi convention.

And Supernatural seems to be a rerun tonight, so that shouldn't be a problem for anyone.

Live long, and be happy.

"There is another" brief question about last week's Terminator

I totally forgot to post this earlier.

Okay, so last week we were watching Terminator: the Sarah Conner Chronicles, and there was a quote from an old movie. And I laughed, and he laughed, and on with the rest of the episode. And I kind of wonder how many of us got the joke. It has been a while.

And then I'm talking to my husband later, and apparently we were laughing at different jokes.

John Henry says "There is another." And that's a quote, or part of a quote, from an old movie. And then it's a quote, or part of a quote, from a different movie. And I was thinking of one movie, and he was thinking of another movie.

Okay, so who got the one joke, and who thought it was a different joke, and who has no idea what I'm talking about?

Growing your own food and the dollar a day thing

There used to be this British comedy called The Good Life (or The Good Neighbors, depending on when and where you watched it). On his fortieth birthday, Mr. Good tells his wife that he is tired of his job and wants "it", and he quits his job, they turn their nice home into a small farm and do all sorts of things which upsets their very prim and proper neighbors.

Seeing as this was a British comedy and not a documentary or a how-to video, they did a lot of silly stuff, and most of it was all wrong.

Even if on your fortieth birthday you decide that you want to do this sort of thing, you'd probably give it a lot more thought than just the one day, and you probably wouldn't immediately quit the job and start tilling the backyard. You would probably keep the job for another year or so and save up some money (maybe longer depending on the time of year and how much money you want to save up), try your hand at some weekend gardening projects, do some research, visit a farm and see if you actually like being around livestock, etc....

But since this was a comedy, Mr. Good has to both get the idea and start working on it the first day. Doing something sensible like waiting a year and doing research just wouldn't be funny.

So on the second or third episode, they have decided to decline a dinner invitation because they supposedly have their own dinner waiting at home. And they have bragged that it is a completely homegrown dinner, with nothing store bought. But, it is only the second or third episode, so they have been at this for less than a month. They really can't have much of anything growing at that point, much less anything ready to eat. It takes about a month just to grow radishes.

But, after having bragged about going home to eat this dinner that has nothing store bought, they decide that they are going to kill one of the chickens and eat it. That's a very bad idea. Luckily, the chicken is so startled by almost being shot that she lays an egg, and Mr. and Mrs. Good eat their first homegrown dinner by splitting one fried egg.

I don't have any chickens, and I'm unlikely to get any. We had at one time discussed getting chickens or maybe ducks, but we never did that. And I wanted a goat. The husband wanted to keep bees, but I was having none of that. We talked about making a pond to raise some sort of fish. We never did any of it, but we talked about it a lot ten years ago. Now I don't think that I would ever do anything like that. If something happens and you need someone to watch your dog or your cat, that is hard enough. It would be much more difficult to get someone to take in your chickens and ducks and a goat, much less a bunch of bees. So I don't think that I'll ever be doing that.

I was going to do the dollar a day thing again for a bit. Monday I skipped breakfast, not so much to keep things under a dollar, but more because I was too lazy to get up and fix anything. Tuesday I did a bit better and got up to fry an egg. At some point I hope to do this dollar a day thing with stuff from the garden. And then it occurred to me that I already have a few things.

If you've been reading my blog you know that I dug this new garden bed about a month ago, but I have not yet planted it. Not even the radishes. So I don't have anything from that yet.

But I do have asparagus from a couple of years ago that has actually grown enough to eat now. And several weeks ago I bought some kale transplants, which I planted in pots. Some of the kale didn't do well, but two of them are growing just fine.

In this part of Texas, I could be eating all kinds of things from the garden right now if I had just thought to do the work earlier. In fact, if I really worked at it, I could probably have some sort of produce all year. Stuff like broccoli doesn't do that well here in the summer, but it grows in the fall, and even somewhat in the winter as it takes several days of hard freeze to actually kill the plant. So with proper planning, I could have broccoli most of the year, except in the summer, when I would have squash and tomatoes and wouldn't miss not having broccoli.

But I never seem to get around to that.

So how does adding homegrown asparagus and kale to the dollar a day thing work out?

If you read the dollar a day stuff that I did before, you'd see that I spent about fifteen cents a day on some sort of veggie, maybe broccoli or tomatoes, and then ate the veggies with pasta. So really, having the homegrown veggies just saved me about fifteen cents, and the rest of it is about the same.

Having your own asparagus saves you more than fifteen cents, if you were planning to go to the store and buy asparagus if you couldn't just get it for free from the backyard, but you probably wouldn't be buying asparagus if you only had a dollar a day. Sometimes asparagus is three or four dollars a pound, so for what I like to eat with dinner would cost seventy-five cents or a dollar. So that's out. But right now you can get asparagus on sale, sometimes as little as a dollar a pound. So if you look at it that way, I'm saving twenty-five cents a day (or at least every other day, as I don't yet have enough to eat it everyday).

The kale was a disappointment. I don't know if I'm not cooking it right or if I didn't buy the right type of kale or if it is too late in the season for kale. I ate some of it yesterday anyway.

Today, if it doesn't rain and such, I will got out and plant some radish seeds.

Thank my gods it's over

I was a big fan of the original Battlestar Galactica. I even watched Galactica 1980, which wasn't near as good. As for the resent remake of Battlestar Galactica, well....

And I'm not one of those people who just hates remakes. The second Invasion of the Body Snatchers was my favorite of the four movies based on Jack Finney's book. I liked Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. I have enjoyed all versions of Star Trek, including the animated series.

I've even decided that Enterprise wasn't that bad.

I liked The War of the Worlds that Tom Cruise was in. I will even say that pollution is just as valid a reason for making The Day the Earth Stood Still now as was the threat of nuclear war in the original.

So I'm not one of those people who is just so in love with the original that they'll always see remakes as a bad thing. Sometimes we just like to update things a little bit. Every twenty or thirty years we remake Miracle on 34th Street for a new audience, and so far they've all been good.

I saw the Marlo Thomas version of It's a Wonderful Life before I new who Jimmy Stewart was.

So I'm okay with remakes, if they are good remakes. And maybe sci fi stuff gets remade a lot because of the new special effects. Sometimes you look at an old sci fi movie or tv show, and you think that people would still like this, if not for the rubber monsters and bad special effects. Now that we sometimes have pretty good cgi, maybe some of it is worth doing over again.

So there were a lot of people looking forward to the new Battlestar Galactica. A lot of us were disappointed that it wasn't a continuation of the original series, but I for one didn't totally dismiss it just because they decided to go with a remake instead.

Until I actually saw the thing.

The first episode was good, it was just too different for me to like it as part of the Battlestar Galactica universe. And right there at the end, it looked more like it should have been called The Second Variety (Screamers). But, to be fair, I like Philip K. Dick stuff as much as the next person, so that wasn't what I didn't like.

I didn't like that they took the names of characters that I cared about and gave them to totally new characters, some of whom were real a**holes. I didn't like the new special effects with the shaking camera. And I didn't like that everything looked so old.

Yes, I know it was an important part of the plot that Galactica was older than most of the fleet. But I still didn't like the way it looked. The sixties are over. Rotary phones shouldn't be on spaceships.

But, still, I was trying to give it a chance.

I think, for the most part, that the first season wasn't that bad. I would have liked it better if they had done a real Battlestar Galactica, and I just wanted to shoot the camera guy, but I was watching the show and liking parts of it.

Among my friends, I was in the minority of people who were disappointed with the new show. There were a few others, and I even know one person who refused to watch after the first episode, but most of them liked the new show. The really odd thing was that some of my friends would go on and on about the things that I didn't like as if they were really good. Like shaking cameras add realism to the show.

Felgercarb.

But when I really started to lose interest was in the second or third season when the new a**hole characters really started to behave like a**holes and play musical beds. The show became more about the soap opera of the a**holes than about the war or the quest. There was an episode where most of the main characters were in a boxing ring. I think that I really would have stopped watching the show then except for two things. A.) I was already going to my brother's house to watch Stargate stuff he recorded for me, so I might as well watch Battlestar Galactica with him too, and B.) half the time Battlestar Galactica was all my friends wanted to talk about, so I had to watch the show just to have something to say about it, even if it was negative.

While everyone else was cursing that Galactica was getting canceled, all I could think was it would finally be over. All I have to do is watch one more season to keep up with what everyone is talking about, and then I'll be off the hook.

And I'm still crossing my fingers that it will get interesting again.

And for awhile, it does get interesting. There's this bit about a Cylon named Daniel, who must be Kara's father. So that explains Kara. Kara must be the first child born to a human/Cylon couple instead of Hera. So then what is the big deal about Hera?

Turns out that Daniel was not Kara's father, and Kara is not part Cylon, and we weren't supposed to be thinking that at all. What we were supposed to infer from the Cabel kills Daniel story is that they are Cain and Able.

????

So, on Friday, when everyone else is all excited about seeing the two hour finale of Battlestar Galactica and even planning little viewing parties around it, I'm just sort of relieved that it is about to be over. I don't know if I'll watch Caprica. It might be interesting. I'll certainly watch the first episode and at least give it a chance. But Battlestar Galactica, at least this version of it, is finally over and I'm not really sorry to see it go.

I look on the website just to make sure I have the time right. I had heard that it would be two hours. According to the website, it will be two hours and eleven minutes.

My brother records all of the shows. I call my brother to tell him to change the recording time.

I usually end up watching the recording the following Sunday, but due to our schedule that week I got to see it on Friday with everyone else.

And there were all of these flashbacks. And I'm thinking, who cares about this stuff now?

About an hour into the program, it looks like they've pretty much wrapped everything up. My brother looks at me and says "Are you sure it's two hours and eleven minutes. Maybe it's one hour and eleven minutes."

He wasn't making a joke. He just really thought that I had read it wrong.

More flashbacks.

A bit later, my brother looks up and says "There's still half an hour left."

Again, he's not making a joke. It sounds funny now, but he wasn't trying to be funny.

This is like the longest two hours and eleven minutes that have ever been on the small screen.

Okay, I mostly like that they got back to the original idea of these people being our ancestors. If you are a serious fan of the show, you've probably heard that the idea was originally to be a show called Adam's Ark. (I first heard the title Adam's Ark on a Sci Fi Channel show called Sciography, which is damned funny, and if you haven't seen it you could watch it on Youtube.) So I'm kind of glad that they finally got back to Earth.

I don't think that they needed to send the fleet flying into the sun. I think that most of the people watching the show are fans of science fiction in general, and they are already familiar with the idea of colonists losing their technology. It is just something that happens over time, or something that happens after some catastrophe. You don't need to deliberately get rid of the technology. It just sort of gets lost anyway.

I think that I might have sent the Galactica into the sun, because it was too damaged to land. Maybe some of the ships weren't designed to land, and I would have sent them into the sun rather than leave them in orbit where they might later fall and kill someone. But I would have kept everything else, and there probably would have been scenes of people dismantling ships and making homes from them.

But this people don't even keep the agroships. And they are on a new planet where they don't even know what to eat. I guess they'll eventually learn from watching the natives, but this still seems like a really stupid thing to do.

Never mind, it's over. We can all look forward to the next Stargate series now.

Is Friday night still the kiss of death?

When I was young, maybe six years old, I got to stay up late on Friday nights. I can't really define what "late" meant back then. I can't really remember what time I was normally supposed to go to bed. I keep thinking that my parents normally sent me to bed at eight, but until recently it just seemed unreasonable that anyone went to bed much before ten.

Now that I'm older and have a different schedule, I find myself drifting off to sleep at nine or sometimes earlier, so maybe they did send me to bed that early, just so that they had a hour or two for themselves before they fell asleep too.

Anyway, when I was very young I got to stay up late on Friday nights and watch stuff on TV. And that was the only night that I was allowed to stay up late, because Saturday morning was the only day that I was allowed to sleep late. When I was six or so, I watched a scary show, which I think was probably Ghost Story/Circle of Fear. (I'm not entirely certain that this was the show, but I've now found some of them on YouTube, so I'll watch some later to be sure.)

So I grew up thinking that Friday night was the best night to watch anything on TV, though after Ghost Story went off the air I don't really recall watching anything in particular most of that time. I think eventually The Powers of Matthew Star came on Friday nights. But in between that and Ghost Story I don't really remember anything. I just remember thinking that was the best time to watch TV, and I remember wondering why there wasn't good stuff to watch on Friday nights.

"Good stuff" being defined by pre-teen me as either horror or sci-fi. I remember seeing a lot of stuff, but I don't remember when most of it was on, and except for Ghost Story and Matthew Star they weren't regular series. Most of what I liked turned out to be pilots of shows that didn't sell, which were turned into Movie of the Week stuff, which may or may not have been shown on Friday nights. I don't remember.

When I got older I learned that the Friday night schedule was the kiss of death for TV shows. This I learned from reading behind the scenes stuff about Star Trek. It seems that for other people Friday Night was date night, not TV night. On the one night of the week that it is okay to stay up late, you're supposed to actually go out and do something with the evening, not stay home and watch TV. So if you're an actor or director or producer, you don't want your TV show to end up on the Friday night schedule, because in theory most of your desired audience is out doing something cool and cannot possibly watch your TV show.

So, even after you found something you liked to watch on Friday nights, this was bad, because the show was probably going to get cancelled.

As for Friday night being date night or anything like that, I didn't get to do much of that until 1985.

A bit before that, we got a VCR. I think that a lot of other people also got VCRs. My family got a BETA, which was a better machine than what most of the other people bought, but that's another story and we won't get into that.

I got married, and then Friday nights stopped being date night. Between our work schedules and not having much money, we didn't go out much, and certainly not on Friday nights.

In the early nineties I joined a Star Trek club, so then I again had something to do on Friday nights. A bit after that there was a show called The X-files. By then most of us had VCRs, so we were able to go to the club meetings and then watch The X-files afterwards. Of course, since it was both a good show and it was on Friday nights, we all expected that it would soon be cancelled.

It wasn't.

Later came the Sci Fi Channel. I didn't have cable at the time, and I still don't. But I was aware of it and sometimes watched it at a friends house or in a motel room when we went out of town. There were a few interviews with actors and directors and producers, some behind the scenes stuff, but mostly lots and lots of reruns. So people could spend time watching stuff that had been made years and decades before, like Lost in Space.

And then the Sci Fi Channel started making new programs. The first one I remember was Farscape. Stargate moved to the Sci Fi Channel from Showtime. Farscape and Stargate were on Friday nights.

I don't know if the Sci Fi Channel assumed that we all had VCRs and it didn't really matter what night they picked, or if they figured that none of us were dating.

Stargate was on for ten years, and it's first spin-off lasted five years. There is supposed to be third series coming soon.

So is Friday night no longer the kiss of death because we all have VCRs?

Now Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Joss Whedon's new Dollhouse are on FOX Friday nights. FOX has had a lot of good sci fi on Friday nights, but except for The X-files they usually cancel the show before it's had a chance. But I think now there's another problem.

Why move all the sci fi to Friday nights, when they must realize that most of the sci fi fans are already watching something on the Sci Fi channel? What was wrong with leaving Terminator on Monday where it was?

Of course, that caused us to miss The Big Bang Theory....

The Internet was broke

At least, that is the way it seemed to me this morning.

I try to stay in bed until at least five thirty or so, even if I've already been awake for two hours or so. And then when I do get up at five thirty or six or so, I still try to be quiet for two or three hours. So I come in here and do stuff on the computer. And I try to do stuff that doesn't require sound, so I'm probably not using YouTube or Hulu that early in the morning.

I'm just trying to be considerate and not wake up my husband.

Not that my husband appreciates this. Often he does something to the computer during the night, and he doesn't set it up so that all will be well by six in the morning. So that is annoying to say the least. I'm trying to be quiet, and he screws up the thing that I do in the morning to try to be quiet.

So this morning I come in here to turn on the computer and find that not only has it been left on but Explorer is already up and on Google. Great. Not that it takes a long time to turn on the computer and get to Explorer and Google, but today I didn't have to wait even those first few minutes.

Or so I thought. Nothing seemed to work right. I kept getting messages that the address was invalid or the page could not be displayed. I knew I had the right address. Same address as yesterday.

So I finally get a few things to work, but I can't seem to really do anything. I can't use any links that require a password. So I can't log on to Blogger and I can't check my email and so on.

Well, sometimes Explorer just seems a little bit weird, and I switch to FireFox, which is usually slower but sometimes has less problems.

Nope. Same thing. Can't log on to anything. Can't check email. I get weird messages. Pictures are missing. YouTube says that all of the videos are no longer available.

The Internet must be broken.

Okay, it seems very unlikely that the Internet is broken. It must be something with the computer itself. And it must be my husband's fault.

But usually it is very clear when he has done something to the computer, and there's usually an indication of what has been done and how much longer it is going to be a problem and so forth. But there was nothing like that.

I was about ready to wake up my husband by pretending to strangle him.

Anyway, I shut down the computer for a minute or two and started it back up, and now it seems to be fine. I'm sure I've ruined something my husband wanted done, but by now he knows to have whatever it is finished before six, unless it is something really important, and then he at least needs to leave me a note.


I'm hungry. I rarely eat this early, and I've already had the leftover's from yesterday's free Denny's breakfast. I could just go and eat all kinds of other stuff, like maybe blueberry pop tarts. But I probably won't do that. I'll probably just have my yogurt and wait for lunch.


I haven't done anything useful since Saturday. Okay, maybe that isn't entirely correct. I've done a few errands and such, but that is about it. I can't seem to get anything done except when I have the place to myself, and sometimes not even then. I can't seem to focus on work when he is here, even if he is not in the same room and is either on the computer or reading or watching TV. It shouldn't be a problem, but somehow I just don't get anything done.

I've become my mother.

When he isn't here, I think about what I want to get done that day, which just seems like something I'll never get done. But I break it up into stuff that I just do for a little while here and there, and in between doing that I blog for a bit or I watch TV or I watch stuff on YouTube and Hulu. So it is like watch something for ten minutes and then get up and wash some dishes, go back to the computer for ten minutes and then get up and wash some more dishes and then ten minutes at the computer followed by washing some clothes and then watch something on TV while I eat lunch and then take the clothes to the dryer, etc....

But I don't do that when he is here, cause he's probably on the computer all day, except when we eat lunch or have to go to the library and run errands. So maybe try to do something similar by watching a DVD and stopping it every ten or fifteen minutes to go and wash dishes or sort the laundry or take out the trash or whatever.

So he's here, and I'm getting nothing done. And we go to the library, and I check out some DVDs of Enterprise. Not my favorite show, but I don't have the episodes all memorized like I have done with other shows, so maybe it's time to watch the show again.

And it isn't my husband's favorite show either. But after I get the DVDs, he decides to watch some of them with me. Well, that wasn't the idea for getting the DVDs, but I'm not going to be rude and send him to the other room if he's trying to be nice and wants to watch TV with me. But now I'm not stopping every ten minutes to do some work, I'm just watching TV all day.


Yesterday we went to get the free Grand Slam at Denny's. We got done with that at about ten or so, then picked up a few things and went home. And then we watched stuff we had taped the night before like The Big Bang Theory and House. And then we watched some DVDs. And then he didn't want to watch anymore, but by that time I had already wasted most of the day and didn't bother trying to do much work.

Then I suddenly didn't feel so good. It was around four. Then I realized that we hadn't eaten anything since we left Denny's, and I had only eaten the pancakes. So then we had chili cheese dogs. A bit after that I had yogurt, some peanut butter and some leftover Christmas candy. Then I didn't feel like eating anything else. At least, I wasn't hungry enough to get up and do anything about it.

So I spent four fifty on my free Denny's Grand Slam, and I spent less than seventy cents for the rest of the day.

Okay, so I'm weird.

He's awake now, so I think I'll go watch Enterprise.