I miss my cable TV . . .

We got our DSL startup kit on Thursday, but Verizon had forgotten to order a modem/wireless router for us, so we got the whole kit minus that. The modem is supposed to come today sometime, but we won't be able to hook it up until Verizon e-mails me to say that the service is set up and ready to be used.

I returned the cable modem to Comcast on Friday evening. Except for finding a way to get to the place in all the one-way traffic of downtown Frederick, it was a piece of cake. I had disconnected it on Thursday evening when I got home from work, so I didn't get to record Smallville, since the modem was what gave us our cable TV.

I spent practically the whole weekend at Mom & Dad's house. At 1:00pm on Saturday, Kayla and I went to the stake center to watch Jason's basketball game. We saw Anna there, and decided to meet her at her house after the game, since she had to go to the pet store and we had some more of Kayla's stuff in the car to take to the house.

We got to the house and met Anna's new puppy, Mandy, then I watched Psych with Dad. She's a beagle and fox hound mix, and she's so cute! If Bambi were a dog with beagle coloring, he'd look like Mandy. Seriously, her legs are so long, and her neck is too, but she's got a beagle's coloring and soft, floppy ears.

Anyway, Anna got back a little later with Jason, and all of us (minus Jason and Dad) decided to watch Buffy and Angel for a while. Around 10 or 11pm, Anna asks, "You guys want to stay over?" and since I was already thinking about it, we decided we were going to do just that. So Anna dragged out the air mattresses (Jason's twin-sized one and Kimba's full-sized one) and some blankets and pillows. She lent me a pair of pajama pants too.

Sometime during the late night hours, my dad decided that he was going to get rid of some of the books on the shelves in his den--including his entire Star Trek novel collection. He got rid of a few others (most of which I took--not the Star Trek) and rearranged what he had left to his liking.

Once we were all settled, we watched some more Buffy and Angel until about 2:30, when we decided to go to sleep. That's the first time I've slept in that house since I moved a little more than a year ago. The somewhat-strange part is, Anna's new room is my old room.

We woke up between 9 and 11 yesterday morning and had some breakfast all around. After the beds were put away (or at least stood up against a couple walls so they wouldn't get in the way of rambunctious dogs) we watched Smallville, and then some more Buffy and Angel. (Are you seeing a theme here?)

Around 3, I went home to take a shower and pick up Jenn after I set up the phones that Kayla had given us. We now have a phone in the kitchen, one in Jenn and Amit's room, one in the 2nd-floor common room, and one in my room. Turns out, I didn't need a phone jack in my room, because I can use the extension of the one in the common room.

The DirecTV guy came to the house last Friday morning. I wasn't there, but Jenn and Amit were. Apparently, the guy asked if there was a main TV, and Jenn and Amit weren't sure what to tell them, since Kayla is going to be moving soon and the main TV is going with her. So the guy installed the DirecTV receiver in Jenn and Amit's room. The dish is on the roof (back left corner), and it looks like the cable for it goes over the roof and down the front right side (tucked into the corner our building makes with the one next door), into the ground somewhere.

Since the receiver is hooked up to Jenn and Amit's TV, the rest of us still don't have any cable at the moment. I asked Dad if a splitter and amplifier after the receiver would work, but apparently it wouldn't. Everyone would be forced to watch whatever Jenn and Amit were watching, since the receiver only has one tuner. We've been trying to figure out where the cable comes into the house from the dish, so that we can split and amplify it to the rest of our TVs if we need to. If we can just plug into the jacks with satellite-ready TV's and VCR/DVD players, that would be great though (especially if we actually have satellite-ready equipment).

I'll have to look a little closer this evening when I get home from my allergy shots (and before I go across the street for the preliminary voting machine setup). I think there might be some sort of splitter in Stacie's room, or somewhere near where the cable looks like it ends.

Heck, I might even be looking at the wrong cable--it might just go through the roof into the attic crawlspace, and then I'd have to look up there to see anything at all.