Watching

Next week is finals week, and tomorrow I need to spend most of the day at school getting caught up on any leftover grading.  One of my colleagues became deathly ill a few weeks ago and I volunteered to finish one of his courses for him.  It's an online class, so all I have to do is grade things submitted by the students, but when I started working on it I had forty-five three-to-five page essays to get through.  I still have a pile left, but I was surprised by the quality of the essays and how quickly the grading went.  Currently, being done with his class as well as all of mine is mostly just a matter of being persistent for most of a day, and that's going to be tomorrow.

Sis sent us a SmartTV for Christmas, which has precipitated a series of adjustments here at Orchard Ranch.  After its arrival, the television sat there in the box for a good week while we thought about where to put it.  Sis sent one that she was sure would fit in our current entertainment center, but as it turns out, the new one is about half an inch too wide.  In the end, I set it on top of the cabinet.  Next, turning it on revealed that the wifi in our living room was too weak to send a signal to the television, so I had to do a little research and then obtain a "signal extender" and install it.  Done!  Then we discovered that if one sits on the couch to watch it, the overhead lamp shines directly on the screen.  Turning off the overhead lamp at the wall means that there is no electricity to the best outlet for the signal extender to be plugged in.  This obstacle had me stopped for a while -- how were we going to fix this?  The Emperor studied the layout, the situation, and the television for a little while, then stood up to pull the chain on the overhead light.  Problem solved!  Finally, I had to figure out what was necessary to turn on programming; I just extended our Netflix subscription and we instantly had plenty of stuff to watch.  Next, I activated PBS and then was able to watch the last episode of Poldark (I had been following along via computer this season, instead of waiting for the DVDs to come out).  I'm glad to note that our watching habits are the same now as they were when we just used DVDs: we watch an episode or two per evening, and only after supper.  On weekends, we might "binge" and watch three episodes of something!  But now we've joined the digital age in yet another way.

Another fun discovery is that Netflix has a "fireplace" stream, which is nothing more than a picture of a roaring fire in a fireplace, backed by pleasant Christmas music simply played on a piano.  We had that on for a while last night.

The only downside to watching this television is that it's too dark to knit.  A few months ago I bought a small Ott Light table lamp that can be focused on your project, so I got that out and was able to work on a sock while we had the lights out.  I'm not sure that the Emperor is going to get either his bed socks or his normal socks in time for December 25; for some reason I just can't make myself pick up a project lately.  I'll get my mojo back, but for now I'm content to just sit on the couch with him and hold hands instead of knitting.  That's not a bad thing, but it doesn't get the socks done.