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hosting
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| For
six glorious months, I had free cable. I guess that AT&T just
didn’t get around to pulling the plug, even though the previous
owners of my house had left the property vacant for over a year. I
moved in to my house in March, full of home improvement fire, ready
to decorate and paint and sand and scour. Even a solid week of cleaning
hadn’t reduced my fire to the ashes of defeat, despite the lingering
aroma of Pledge (did I mention how much wood paneling I have?) and
my strong doubts about the cleanliness of the carpet (brand new, mottled
brown, and sculptured; I didn’t know they still made that stuff).
After a long day of moving, I was ready to settle in with a new episode
of the X-Files, so I set up the TV in a corner of the living room,
perched precariously atop one of my fifty pound 1970 vintage speakers.
But, which video cable was the antenna? One cable came from a wall
jack, seemingly professionally installed. The other cable sprouted
curiously from under the carpet, near a heating vent. I figured this
for the antenna, based on some of the other half-assed work the previous
owners had done around the house.
Praise Jesus, it was cable, every channel but the movie ones! I had nerd channels again! I could waste whole weekends rotting my brain, watching Behind the Music and Mysteries of the Bible and Curse of the Pharaohs. I had been using a VHS antenna for two years, after deciding that $30 a month was too high a price to pay for my sedentary lifestyle. Flipping through the channels, I made an amazing discovery: HGTV. Ultimate Kitchens. Trading Spaces. Designer’s Challenge. Extreme Homes. Did I mention Trading Spaces? What a wonder of a show! What happens when friends trade houses for 48 hours and fix up a room? Amazing things. It’s like the Real World, only with less drama and more work. I didn’t know that so much could be accomplished in two days! New furniture, fresh paint, fancy flooring, Medusa lamps, beanbag couches; it makes my head spin. O! Sing, Heavenly Muse, of the glory of laminate flooring! What more could a new homeowner want than a show all about do-it-yourself home decoration? I became engrossed in the show, making sure to catch both its HGTV and TLC airings. Why fix my own home when I can watch others work on theirs? I was just like Bob Vila, never lifting a finger, just watching ugly rooms become suddenly beautiful (or ugly in a new way). And when other stations had nothing on, HGTV rescued me from actually painting my office! I had so very much to learn about plaster texturing squares on to my walls, making bolster pillows, installing parquet flooring, and creating that fabulous beanbag couch for my retro TV room (I’m still serious about doing that). HGTV was there for me when I stopped having a job and started having time to do all that work on my house that I had been meaning to do. But you know what? Actually doing the work is SO much harder than watching someone else do it on TV. I built a tiki bar for my housewarming party, and I spent days slaving away, staining this, hammering that, drilling holes in the wrong places. It took me a week, a WEEK, to paint my office, not two days, not one evening. Oh, the paint bled underneath the masking tape, the tape removed some of the plaster from the walls, the wall texture required two coats and not one, it was a nightmare! How did they do it with such ease on Trading Spaces? Did they break the rules and paint the second coat before it had dried for six hours? Did they cheat by using the ProTrim instead of masking everything off? Then it hit me: all the hard stuff, everything that was a real pain, they just didn’t show it on TV! They want you to think it is easy! My love affair with HGTV ended on September 13, when AT&T finally decided to take my cable away. Back to plain old local stations for me, I now had a new goal in life: to make Fox 49 come in clearly so I can watch the X-Files when the new episodes begin. But, truth be known, the X-Files just might lose out to Alias this year. Damn she makes being a spy look easy! And TV never lies... |
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Stacy is looking forward to the day when she wins the lottery and never has to lift a finger around the house again. |
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