Dad drove up yesterday to bring me two digital converter boxes from my aunt and help me get them set up - after buying two antennas or as I call them rabbit ears for the two tvs.
Our first task was to drop off my lawn mower to be gone over for the upcoming mowing season. Mike used to do this but he wasn't able to take care of it last year healthwise so I thought I better have a professional give it a good going over. And I decided we needed to see if it would fit in the trunk of my car so if I had to go get my lawn mower by myself I'd know it would fit in my trunk. The only disagreement was telling Dad to not tie the rope he was using to tie the trunk down to my rear spoiler..............
Then off to look at rabbit ears and we ended up at Best Buy with an "interesting" sales guy. Dad wasn't too thrilled with the guy when he tried to tell Dad that the antenna or something couldn't be programmed for local channels and that the antenna had to be plugged into an electrical outlet. I wondered about the guy when he said the antenna I bought was good up to 25 miles from the repeaters that were located at the airport - I'm thinking the towers for the three local channels are to the north of town close to Ames.
We got home and started on the main tv upstairs and unhooked the DirecTV receiver/recorder and hooked up the antenna and digital converter box and nothing. I'd been told before that I may need to move the antenna around to get the signal so I moved it a little and nothing. I finally called the 800 # on the antenna and talked to a very nice man that said something to make me say my house was a stucco house and he said the metal mesh would stop a signal from coming in the house. I would need to mount the antenna by/in a north window to get the signal since the towers were by Ames. I have one very tiny north window upstairs that I would have to run a lot of cable to mount the antenna to that wall and I have no north window in the living room - what a pain.
So for the time being we needed to hook my DirecTV receiver/recorder back up and that did not go well. First Dad and I only had one LOUD discussion - ok it was probably loud on my end. Then we had something hooked to all the connectors on the back of the tv and one cable left and just a blue screen when the tv would turn on.................. Dad finally decided to head for home and I convinced him to try the south bypass since traffic would be picking up on the freeway.
Later during the evening I decided to call DirecTV technical support and talked to a very nice lady who helped me figure out what was connected wrong to get everything connected correctly and get my DirecTV working again! I'm going to call DirecTV tomorrow to hear what their "cheaper" packages are and may keep DirecTV or get rid of tv period.
I called my folks to let them know that the tv was working and Dad told me that he liked the south bypass and will probably use that from now on to get to my house. For some reason when Mom and Dad tried to get on it one time they missed the entrance ramp (which I'll admit is easy to do) and ended up in Norwalk and somehow worked their way around to SE 14th in Des Moines.
Wednesday when Lynn and I walked around Gray's Lake I had meant to share what Dad used to tell me as a little kid when I needed to spend time outside. He'd tell me to go outside and "blow some stink off". I posted that on Facebook and it was funny to see how many said their dad used to say that to them and one friend said he tells his 5 year old daughter to do that all the time :)
Another friend shared a link to a live web camera in an eagle's nest at the Norfolk Botanical Gardens:
http://www.wvec.com/marketplace/microsite-content/eagle-cam.html
