Yikes! It's Sweeps Month!

It's November Sweeps Month and I'm waaaay behind in blogging about what I'm watching. Since I DVR just about everything I watch, I'll catch up with my blog notes eventually. Patience, please.

And POOF! it was gone...

Now that I've finally made time to watch the shows I DVR'd last week, I've discovered that a brief power outage occurred Tuesday evening at exactly the same moment as the final scene in "House" and "NCIS". ARGH! I lost less than a minute of air time on the downstairs DVR, but ARGH! I lost the entire ending on the ReplayTV upstairs due to a slower reboot. And ARGH! it was an important minute where Everything Is Revealed and Important Things Are Said. At least I assume important things were said... I guess I'll never know for sure...

Live TV reeks...

Although I like just about everything about staying in a hotel -- endless supplies of hot water, clean sheets, maid service, fluffy towels, etc. -- I loathe the hotel television. No DVR. No ability to rewind to catch a phrase I misheard. No ability to fast forward to skip commercials. No ability to view a channel guide and click to go there, or to click "info" to figure out what channel you're on or what's airing at the moment. It's TV dumbed down. Or TV as an implement of torture. Who knew there were that many channels showing infomercials at 6 a.m.?

Just sayin'...

When the president breaks into regularly scheduled programming to discuss the end of the American economy as we know it, it really messes with regularly scheduled DVR recording. Just sayin'.

An introduction, of sorts...

Why write a blog about watching television? And what do cats have to do with it?

The easy answer is that I watch entirely too much television, and I don't write nearly as often or as much as I think I should. That's not a good thing for a professional writer.

I blame this on the digital video recorder (DVR). Back in the old days, when there was only live TV, my choice was simple: I could only watch one thing at a time. Then came the video cassette recorder (VCR), which enabled me to time shift and watch something live while recording something else to view later.

Now, I have the DVR. In fact, I technically have three DVRs: my old 40-GB ReplayTV unit, and the new dual-recording unit provided by my cable company. (Thanks, SureWest. You're enabling my addiction.)

So here I am, blogging about watching television. With cats. What could be more American than that?