Decorating

When you move into an old home that was completely rebuilt, the temptation at first is to put everything back the way it was before the disaster. But along the way, and in the course of the rebuilding process certain decisions are made which affect the decorating choices.

The old house started out with the TV on one wall (shorter one) and the couch on the opposite and longer one. Then I succumbed to the lure of a dish system, and that necessitated moving the TV to the opposite wall to be nearer to the only telephone outlet in the living room.

After a few months of dish, I realized it was not a great decision after all and gave it up, but kept the layout the same - the TV and the cabinets it sat on were just too heave and bulky to move. But then the flood came, and now I have a new, and much lighter TV, sitting on a new and much lighter TV stand, and aside from the power cord and the cable outlets there is no reason why I can't move the TV back to where it was originally.

So that is my task for tomorrow, and maybe next week. I also want to rearrange the various electronic boxes (VCR, tuner, CD player, DVD player and Cable DVR/tuner) into a more functional arrangement. I may also eliminate the VCR because --- I no longer own any VHS tapes, nor do I see myself buying or renting any in the foreseeable future.

I wish I could eliminate one or more of the remotes but that doesn't seem to be in the cards. It is almost easier to eliminate one of the boxes.

I am slowly getting used to the DVR, which is sort of like a TiVo. Unlike some who record shows and store them forever, I just record shows when two I want to watch conflict with each other. Well, it is 5:30 on Saturday night and I have a few more minutes left on this shift before I can head on home. Then again I have another shift tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM so it might just be easier to sleep here (yeah, right!!!)

I wonder whether my Internet connection will be working when I get home. It was out when I left and had been out all morning. I think I burnt it out. Last week in a moment of weakness I was fiddling around with my system and managed to build a mail loop into my system. That is one account forwarding to another, and the second one forwarding to itself. By the time I figured out what had happened I had exceeded my mail storage allotment. Thankfully the ISP/web hosting company has lots of storage and is very generous so they increased my space until I had it fixed. But when I finally started to receive mail again, I had 2163 messages in the cue (18.9 MB worth) It took a half hour for it to download and funnel through the spam and junk mail filters. End result, three messages finally got through, and all three were for the new Oprah diet. Talk about junk mail and spam clogging the system. It seems that once someone comes up with a new sure fire way to get rich quick, or lose weight fast, or increase your sexual potency, they farm them out to thousands of folks who spam the world with it, so each one is the identical message but it has a different sender.

Modern ingenuity.