Archive for June, 2010

TV or Not TV

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010


How important is TV to us? That is a question behind many of our daily decisions and future preparations. On the one hand, it seems simple to just decide not to watch TV period. We’ve never been comfortable going that far. We have tried to minimize spending on TV technology. I don’t remember that we’ve ever had more than one TV at a time before we had two houses. Now we feel we need a TV at each house. In Raleigh, we had basic cable for many years which gave us the local network channels and a clear picture from our local PBS channel, WUNC.  When TV broadcasts switched to digital, we bought a converter box and small flat digital antenna for each house and gave up cable in Raleigh.  Over the air TV reception has been satisfactory in Raleigh even though we sometimes need to move or turn the antenna to avoid temporary reception problems.

Our question became more focused on  the mountain house as we spend more time there and reception has become more of a problem.  We were dependably getting only two stations, CBS and NBC both from Charlotte.  WUNC signal has been much more “iffy” and had become a good picture or no signal (blank screen) with one minute of signal and five minutes of no signal alternating.  We wanted a dependable signal from WUNC and decided it would be nice to get a station from the triad.  So, we bought and installed an outside antenna.  Now we get about the same number of channels as we get in Raleigh.  Now we only have to decide when to turn on the TV and whether there is anything interesting or important enough to watch. 

I confess that I’m more of a TV watcher than L.  Mostly, I tend to watch news, weather, or a program that looks intersting on WUNC-TV or WUNC-Explorer Channel.  Two programs I like to watch are on WUNC, the News Hour on week nights and Washington Week on Friday night.  However, we turn off the TV during dinner which often happens during the News Hour, and on Friday it’s not unusual to be away from home or to be doing something else that takes priority.  I feel comforted by the fact that I can watch News Hour and Washington week on the computer the next day, but I’ve rarely done that.  I do read a couple of news sources on the computer frequently.  I usually can stay up late enough to watch the 10 o’clock news and weather now that we have that option, but 11 o’clock is too late.

I should mention that I do sometimes watch sports on TV, but mostly basketball and football and mostly Wake Forest or ACC games.

So, after all that rambling, the bottom line is that we invested in the antenna and now we have the option to watch TV or not.

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Riding the Blue Ridge Parkway and “Clearing the Back Forty”

Monday, June 7th, 2010

One of the fun things we like to do is to ride the Blue Ridge Parkway.  This year marks the 75th anniversary of the parkway.  We took a ride from the Northwest Trading Post going North past the Virginia state line to Fancy Gap.  We took our time and enjoyed most of the overlooks and a nice ride.  We stopped at Cumberland Knob and took the short trail up to the Knob.  We stopped at the Blue Ridge Music Center, walked around the grounds including the amphitheater and a short distance down one of the trails that we want to take on a future trip.  Then we sat in rocking chairs on the open breezeway and listened to the local musicians play the banjo and Guitar.  One visitor from New Jersey knew some songs that the musicians did not, so he proceeded to sing three different songs and the musicians were able to pick up and accompany him. 

We exited the parkway at Fancy Gap, ate our picnic lunch and drove a series of mostly back roads over to Independence, Virginia.  From there we followed back roads roughly following the New River enjoying some really marvelous views of pastures, freshly cut hay, and farmsteads with mountains and the New River in the background most of the way.  We could see Mt Rogers in Virginia and other mountains to the South in North Carolina.  This is one of the most scenic drives we have taken.  For most of it, we had not traveled these roads before.

One of our projects is “clearing the back forty”.  One of the comments we often made growing up on the farm was that we had been busy “plowing the back forty” (the figurative huge field that you just settle into and go back and forth all day).  Our back yard is nowhere near forty acres, but it has felt like it as we have cut our way through the saplings (up to 4 or 5 inches and smaller) that have grown much taller.  Our view is improving and expanding and that is one reason we took on this project.  Another reason is that we envision gardening in the back yard, including some blueberry, blackberry, and/or rasberry bushes on the lower part of the lot where the trees were.  At some point the project will shift from cutting trees and piling limbs to chipping the limbs and cleaning up the area.  We have a few more trees to cut, but we’ve made good progress, found lots of muscles that we don’t use often and rediscovered the shear joy of resting.

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