Monroe’s desk
Here’s James Monroe’s desk in James Monroe’s house, with James Monroe’s green miniblinds in the background. Hmmm. Something’s not right here.
Well, the house (ours, not Monroe’s) isn’t sold and it isn’t not sold. Limbo is so much fun. It looks like if the deal still goes through, it might be delayed by a week or two. Hopefully, we’ll hear something tomorrow. Since the line of buyers is somewhat short right now, we’re just sitting tight. And paying through the nose.
Where did that saying come from – paying through the nose? Whoever really paid anything through the nose? Wouldn’t it hurt? How would the money get in there? Would you accept money from somebody who wanted to pay through the nose? I wouldn’t touch the stuff. “No thanks. Send me a check.” That’s what I always say. Or would always say if somebody tried to pay me through the nose.
Anyway. Fairly productive day. Let’s take a look here at my Official Franklin Covey Electronic Prioritized Daily Task List . . . okay, got it. Three of my five top-priority work tasks got done. That’s not really bad, all things considered. And tomorrow’s another day, fortunately. If it weren’t another day, I guess I wouldn’t have to worry about undone work, would I?
Anyway. Rode the train today, which was a good thing. I slept most of the way in and am reading and writing most of the way home. Also listening to more podcasts. I think I may be subscribed to too many of those things. I spend a minimum of five hours a day listening to those things and I never catch up. I’m running about a month behind right now. On the other hand, I’m not losing much ground anymore either. If I ever catch up on the tech podcasts, I have a few old general conferences in the queue. Gonna have to just start working them in, I expect.
We got our DVR replaced the other day. The original one they gave us didn’t work very well. It would record or not record, depending on how it was feeling that day, and it would play recorded shows or not play them, depending on ditto. Finally, it just crashed and deleted everything. Most unfortunate. We got on a waiting list (I guess everybody’s DVR was defective) and got another one after a week or two. This one has crashed too, but it hasn’t deleted anything on us. We’re hoping for the best.
The other weird thing about the old one was that it was advertised as holding “up to” 160 hours of low-def programming. Ours would never hold more than 40 hours, which seemed a little skimpy to me. I don’t know how much the new one will hold yet, but I’m hoping for better things.
Everybody I’ve talked to about these things says they change the way you watch TV, and I have to say they’re right. For one thing, we now don’t have to search around for something good to watch when we have a few minutes in front of the box. We just play one of our favorite recorded shows. For another thing, and possibly even more important, the ability to pause and rewind live TV is really cool. This weekend, we got upstairs for general conference a few minutes late for a couple of sessions, and we just rewinded back to the beginning and saw the whole thing. If a program has commercials, we can start watching a little late and then catch back up by fast-forwarding over the commercials. We didn’t expect to use this feature very much, but it turns out we use it constantly. Very useful.
I’ve recorded a few old movies and need to see if they’ve somehow made it difficult to record them to DVD. That’s the last frontier for me on DVRs. Even better would be the ability to copy the entire digital file to a computer and burn it directly to a DVD. That would certainly save a lot of time, and it’s technically possible, but I’m giving pretty generous odds that Comcast has disabled that feature. I guess I should try hooking the machine up to the network (assuming the ethernet connector on the back hasn’t been removed or covered up, that is) and see if it’s visible.
Anyway. I need to finish up here and write my mom a letter. We’ve been emailing her every week for a while, but she’s finding it much harder to get to her email machine, so we’re switching back to snail mail. I’ll still type my letters so I can avoid that awful personal touch, but at least she’ll hear from me.
See you tomorrow.