CountUp

I have a confession to make. In my previous life I was addicted to “Dawson’s Creek” for 5½ long seasons. It started quite innocently enough on a Tuesday night in January of 1998 (with the pilot episode), and I was hooked immediately. I endured some 128 episodes of the teen drama as I followed the continuing life and times of Capeside’s Dawson, Pacey, Joey, Jen, Jack, and Andie. Thankfully in May of 2003 the series came to a fitting close and my Wednesday nights returned to normalcy.

I pledged never again to get hooked on a cheesy teen drama. I obviously didn’t learn my lesson. Now I’m hooked on this show on ABC Family. Fresh new episodes start back up this upcoming Monday night at 8 PM EST !

More than 25 years ago I mastered the fine art of programming a VCR. It changed my life forever. I did it mainly so that I could tape Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and Saturday Night Live ! late at night while I slept.

Since then I’ve been a self-admitted VCR junkie. Nowadays I’ve got 3 of them. They even have names – Arthur, Barney, and Charley – as in ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’.

Arthur, Barney, and Charley are usually hard at work keeping busy every night, although they each get nights off occasionally. TONIGHT Arthur and Charley are working the night shift while Barney has the night off.

I even have an elabourate EXCEL spreadsheet that I utilize to track what recorded shows are on each of my active videocassettes (over 70 of them).

TiVo changed Kelly‘s life. It also changed a lot of lives of people that I know. Me and one of my former co-worker friends used to laugh hysterically early in the morning at some of her too-funny TiVo experiences. She would intentionally set her TiVo to tape a History Channel special on the Persian Gulf War, and then over the next few weeks she would end up getting shows like “Gomer Pyle, USMC”, “Hogan’s Heroes”, and “McHale’s Navy”. She would set her TiVo to record a Travel Channel show on the best cruises to take around the world, and she would eventually end up with a dozen “Love Boat” reruns. Her TiVo also decided that she was a HUGE Patrick Duffy and Suzanne Somers fan, so she ended up with an entire season of “Step By Step” on her TiVo !  Basically TiVo was deciding for her what she was going to watch rather than her deciding for herself.

I am proud to report that I am the ‘decider’. I am in sole control of what gets recorded by each of my VCRs, and Arthur, Barney, and Charley hardly ever let me down (although Arthur is starting to show signs of old age). He occasionally wheezes. He can be replaced. Allison is waiting in the wings.