"I want you to hold the power button down. This will reboot your cable box," Leon told me.
"Ok," I said, and we waited for a few minutes for the cycle to complete itself.
"Is it working now?" Leon asked.
"No," I replied.
"Ok, we're going to try something different. Can you physically unplug the box from the wall?"
"Yes, do you want me to do that?"
"Yeah, unplug it, but wait three minutes before you plug it back in."
"What does the three minutes do?" I asked.
"The hardware has an internal clock, and the three minutes lets it reset itself," he responded. I thought about pressing him on this statement, asking for specifics but then realized he's probably reading from a script, and questions just make his job harder. We waited the three minutes, and I plugged the unit back in. Still, no dice.
"Sir, I've done all I can do. I'm going to have to schedule a service call. How's Sunday between 8 and 11?"
"That will be fine. Thank you for all your help."
We've been without cable TV for 48+ hours now. It's 10 am Sunday morning, and the cable guy still hasn't shown up. I suppose I was being naive to think he would show up at the beginning of the scheduled window. I've heard rumors of people being told the cable guy would show up between 12 and 4, and the guy shows up at 12:05. I've also heard rumors of the Loch Ness monster and of alien spaceships being stored at Wright Patterson AFB; until I actually see it for myself, I won't believe it. But there has to be people out there that have been on the happy side of the dreaded cable service window; I'm just not one of them. I'm sure at 10:55, our doorbell will ring...
So how have we gotten by without cable TV? Surely man and woman would die if they couldn't watch The Soup Friday night at 10 pm on E!, or This Old House, or The Food Network where any number of chefs make an awesome looking meal in under 30 minutes. How can we go on not having watched Bridezillas, Bringing Home Baby, or The Shawshank Redemption for the fortieth time? Can you imagine the horror if this were a college football weekend, and we had to resort to (gasp) the radio to follow an Auburn football game?
Amazingly enough, we are getting along fine. At first, Ashley was quite bored when she fed Bode, as she typically would park herself in front of the TV and zone out while the little guy ate. She quickly developed a way to read and feed him at the same time. Thanks to the absence of TV, she's already 150 pages into The Kite Runner and hasn't really complained (although if this were a Tuesday, she'd most definitely be in Idol withdrawal). I've done fine without TV, but it does pain me to think I've probably missed a couple HBO showings of Revenge of the Sith. I've read a lot ( Forever Odd by Dean Koontz and some magazines), the house is clean, and the laundry is all done. I'd say this no-TV thing isn't half bad.
I took a lot of pictures of Bode the past couple days. Here are the best. We were actually able to get a couple shots with the kiddo smiling. This isn't to say he doesn't smile a lot. It's just whenever we bring out the camera, he stares at it trying to figure out what it is, which is not conducive to smiles. Thus, we had to be sneaky about getting these pictures. First, Bode and Mama.
She quickly handed Bode to me, hoping to get a shot of the two of us smiling. Here's the result. No smiles for one that doesn't bear milk...
Here's a shot of Bode when I have the camera where he can see it. I kept trying to get him to smile, but, as I said, he just stares at the camera. In this shot, he looks pissed...
I then hid the camera, got him to smile, and quickly snapped the following shot. The lighting is bad, but you can see a big grin.
Finally, per most posts, we end with a picture of Bode with Auburn. The two are becoming best of friends.
Pleasant day to you all (FYI: It's now 10:38 and still no cable guy.)
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