I don’t know who said it first, but I remember the first time I said it. It was almost 15 years ago and I was still thinking about the difference between work and retirement. I thought of working as “fast” and retirement as “slow.” I was righter than I knew.

Here I am. I’ve been blogging for more then ten years and more than 12,000 posts later, life is really slow. I thought it was slow ten years ago? I had no idea who slow I would be a decade later. Sad, very sad.

BREAK BREAK!!

As I was watching Colbert, Garry came in to tell me the TV in the bedroom wasn’t working. Nothing was working. He thought it was the batteries in the remote. He actually changed the batteries himself, but he came back and said TV. Still. Not. Working.

I changed the batteries again, just to be sure they were charged (we only use rechargeables and we are always short of AAAs) and he was right. Nothing. I tried the TV remote and it turned the TV on, so that wasn’t dead, but I couldn’t find the streaming channels, which, it turned out, are on the DVD channel. I don’t know why, but it’s probably my fault.

I turned it off. Counted. Turned it on. Nada. Nothing. No pictures in the magic box.

I turned everything off a second time. Rebooting. STILL nothing. Third time, I did something that, for some reason — maybe it’s this particular set up — I moved the plugs around and put everything into a different plug. I then (again) turned everything off, took the batteries out, put the batteries back in. Pressed “ON” and menu, selected DVD (I had tried everything else by then) — and there was Roku.

I picked up the remote, pressed the Roku and everything now worked, just like before. I moved to the incredibly old western channel Roku runs for free and Garry selected a western so old that you can barely see faces in the print. Nonetheless, he still identified every single person in the scene and told me to whom they were married (one was Hal Wallis’s wife, I forget her name). I couldn’t see anything.

I tried a different channel, just to make sure it wasn’t the TV finally dying (we’ve had it for 12 or 13 years) and sure ’nuff, other stations looked normal. I started to laugh hysterically and Garry wanted to know what I’d been eating in the kitchen.

I tried to explain that actually, I hadn’t done anything. I’d just moved the damned plugs around and put them in different holes in that big Belkin doohickey and then suddenly, it worked. I really didn’t do anything. He thought I’d figured out something amazing, but I didn’t. It was magic.

AFTER THE DIGRESSION

I don’t even remember what I was going to write about. I give up. Life is weird and it’s late. I’m going to bed and fall asleep listening to the story of Merlin and King Arthur.

I’m ready for magic.

Categories: Anecdote, Humor, Magic, Media, Television

Tags: anecdote, humor, Marilyn Armstrong, Roku, Streaming services, Television