Saturday, November 14, 2009

At least I got it to work.

Jon came over in late September and helped get the TV with the digital box set up properly. I've never had an outside antenna so watching some stations has always been on the whims of the analog gods. We finally got a set of rabbit ears and taped them in the north window when the signal was strong. That brought in all the stations we needed.

Along comes the digital revolution and, as with any revolution, some of us get left behind.

My co-worker, Luke, gave everyone a Best Buy gift card at Christmas. I needed that digital tuner box thingee so I trotted down to Best Buy with my gov'mint rebate check and my gift card and spent exactly $3.87 for a digital box. I brought it home, set it next to the TV and it stayed there.

Enter football season and the miraculous win over Penn State. Methinks my Hawkeyes are going to be on TV more this year. It would be nice to see them. But I knew that in late October of last year, the TV signal disappeared and almost every channel was snow. I also knew that the cats had knocked connections off the back of the TV in the past. I looked and the signal booster for the TV was lying on the ground. I have no idea where this goes.

Jon came over and set everything up. But I couldn't get channels 2 and 7; CBS and ABC respectively. He felt, if I could move the antenna into the northeast window, that would pull the signal in from those two stations. I simply needed a coax cable.

Off to Radio Shack I went and got a 12' coax cable. I screwed it into the port on the back of the digital box, stretched it behind the plants, grabbed the signal booster and went to plug it into the cable. It wouldn't go. I was trying to plug a male end into a male end. I unscrewed the other plug and looked at it. Same thing. I had a coax cable with two male ends. Jon said to just go to Radio Shack and get another cable.

Looking online, I found that there are adaptors that will change the ends of cables. As Iowa was playing Ohio State on ABC today, I decided this was the game I would watch. I trotted off to Radio Shack and purchased the connector you see above. I have beautiful digital quality on my TV and I get every station I could want and a few more. Worked like a charm.

Now if only the Hawkeyes had worked that well.

Iowa 24 Ohio State 27

But it took overtime to get the win. Still, there were so many missed opportunities; 5 dropped passes, 3 interceptions and one missed field goal. Ohio State is going to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on New Year's Day. For sure Iowa will be in a bowl game, but the Rose Bowl would have been extremely nice. We did have one bright spot, a 99-yard kick off return for a touchdown that brought us back into the game. That hadn't happened since 2003.

Now we just wait. We were ranked #15 in the country. I would imagine, with this loss, we will drop into the top 25. Still, it's been the best season ever, in terms of wins, for Iowa football. One more game versus Minnesota for "Floyd of Rosedale".

Beverage: Huckleberry tea

Deb

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