Micrurgy Monday

micrurgy ~ dissection under magnification or under a microscope

Another somewhat uneventful week, although not quite so uneventful that I need to stoop to using one of the blog topic generators to get this post done.

The weather is starting to get me down. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to look out and see all the green this time of year, but it might be nice to actually get out into it once in a while.

Last week pretty much alternated between sun and cloud, mostly cloudy, with a spat of rain thrown in. Actually, come to think of it, there was a lot of rain. Enough so that I didn’t have to water my wild flower seeds and they’ve started to sprout.

But there were two things that remained consistent throughout the week, and that was the wind and the cold. Being right on the edge of Lake Ontario, it’s not unusual for it to be windy, but we’re talking excessive wind here. Can’t keep the plastic adirondack chairs upright kind of wind.

And cold! Saturday was one of the nicer days - the sun was out at least - and when I went out on the deck to sit before supper, I was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and socks and shoes. Not what one would expect from almost mid-June.

One of the things all this excessive wind did last week was take out our cable for five hours one night. It kind of freaked me out at the time - we recently bundled our services so I had no internet, no television, and no phone. No way of contacting the outside world if something had happened. And it was a dark and stormy night.

But the up side to it was that it was incentive to learn how to us the TiVo we have. Apparently, you don’t need your cable to be working to access shows you’ve recorded on your TiVo - too bad I only had two one hour shows and one movie on there during the outage.

However, once our cable was restored I started checking our channel grid and almost immediately found four movies to record, one of which was one we’ve been dying to see for ages now, and I’ll be reviewing it on Wednesday. The TiVo is a nifty little device.

Honestly, I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg as far as the TiVo goes. I can record a single show, or set it to record all of the episodes in a series. AND I discovered that you can record up to five shows/movies at the same time! How cool is that?

Okay. Yes, I know people have been recording off their TVs since the invention of the VCR, and most homes today have at least one PVR or access to Netflix or whatever. But we’d been using the same cable box for the last 10 or 20 years. It was so old we couldn’t even access On Demand. So I might be forgiven for waxing so poetic about my new best friend TiVo.

I have no idea how many hours of “stuff” I can store on the TiVo, but you can bet I’ll be ready for the next cable blackout!