Cuatro de Mayo

Spring is here…at least it keeps trying to be here. We seemed to have developed shade in our yard overnight. Bill Chatman has been busy planting corn and getting his tobacco ground ready. I’ve been mowing and mowing and mowing.

BUSINESS TRIP. I have always counted it a blessing that my job does not require me to travel. I know some enjoy doing that, but its not for me. Now that Vicki has her new job she got the opportunity to go to a children’s ministry conference at Willow Creek Church near Chicago last week. It worked out where she could ride with a group of people from a church in Goodlettsville so I dropped her off a week ago last Tuesday (the 25th) and got her back a week ago Friday night. She had a great time and made several new friends. I know they did a lot of fun things when they weren’t at their conference, like taking in a White Sox game.

The kids and I survived a week without Vicki pretty well, though I am not as patient of a homework coach as Vicki is. It’s a good thing Jenna is self-motivated. I thought Ben and I were going to kill each other over his spelling words.
We all missed Vicki a whole lot, but I think Nate missed him the most. We tried to talk several times but Vicki was so busy it was hard for her to take a call on her cell phone most of the time. Nate got to the point where he would answer the phone with “Mommy?” in stead of “Hello.” And when Vicki got home he hugged her for all he was worth.

HE GOT ME. Ben has this odd habit of hiding whenever he hears someone coming to the room where he is. He even carries this to the extreme of hiding when he sees me pull up at Aunt Mar’s after I get off work (they ride the bus to Aunt Mar’s and stay there until I pick them up). It’s really funny because sometimes I see him diving for a hiding place through the window as I come up the drive.

The other night I was coming into the living room so we could have our family devotion. Seeing this big lump covered by a blanket on the couch I assumed it was him and tapped the lump with the book in my hand. That end of the lump was pretty soft so I tapped the other end which made Vicki and Jenna break out into a fit of giggles. Yes, Ben had put several pillows under a blanket on the couch and fooled his old man. I don’t think I could have done anything else to have made him happier that my falling for that.

A BUGLESS LIFE. The boys now have an insect habitat in their room. Basically it is a bunch of tubing that connects several spherical pods so you can watch the bugs crawl around inside, very similar to those hamster habitats you may have seen with all the tubing that connects different parts the hamster can live and play in.

The irony is that we’re having a hard time finding insects to put in it right now. Ladybugs are the ideal candidate. We used to be overrun with ladybugs here. We didn’t know where they came from or why they picked us but we had them and the only affordable treatment was the run the vacuum cleaner--frequently. Here recently we’ve hardly seen any. Not that we are complaining, but the boys sure are frustrated that they can’t find any ladybugs for their new toy. (They have gone outside to look, but I think they got distracted and moved on to something else pretty quickly.)
DTV. Let me start this out by saying that we are behind the times. We still get our TV over a conventional antenna. Cable TV is not available for us and we’ve never sprung for satellite TV. I am simply not a TV watcher (the only show I watch regularly is Lost) and while Vicki would probably enjoy several of the cable only channels she has never pushed to get anything more. We still wonder what happens to that $50 we supposedly save each month.

Of course, with the big digital TV transition coming up we will be left with static on February 17 if we don’t take some action. Last weekend I got some digital TV converter boxes. I can’t say picture quality is any better, the convert box I got (from Wal-Mart) puts out a standard definition image. What amazed me was that this tripled the number of channels we can now receive. This is because the new technology allows a TV station to broadcast as many as five video streams (at various levels of quality). For example, Channel 2, our ABC affiliate, is now 2.1 for us (a simulcast of their analog signal). Channel 2 has opted to air a second channel, Nashville’s Weather channel (a local spin on The Weather Channel), which you find on 2.2. Most channels have two sub-channels, a couple have four or five.

I mention this to tell you that there are $40 coupons available from the Federal Government to help defray the cost of purchasing a converter box. Each household is eligible for two coupons. You can apply for them at www.dtv2009.gov. It will take about 5-6 weeks for the coupons to arrive. You may be wondering why you should bother if you have cable or satellite. First, the coupon makes a basic converter box cost less than $10 so it isn’t expensive (it’s cheaper than buying a new TV with an ATSC tuner built in). Second, if you have a TV that you don’t plan to add to cable/satellite you will need one of these to keep it running. And third, it makes a good backup to have local TV if your cable/satellite is down.

Joe