April 6, 2015
4:21 p.m.

Well, it's a day late, but Happy Easter!

I'm feeling especially lucky to have been invited to spend the day with good friends/family and eat a great meal. At the end of the day, having special people in your life is the most important thing.

I've been lazy about this blog, but this time I have a good excuse! I started digging around in the family genealogy, and I have to say, once you start, it can be quite fascinating. I never expected to get so far into the past.

Now I want to go to England and Scotland and see if I can find more information, but that is certainly not in the cards. Too bad I am not famous. Then I could go on the show "Who Do You Think You Are?" and they could send me on a hunting trip down the family tree highway. Ha ha!

I don't know what sent me down this road. Other members of the family have done some considerable work on this. My father's sister did an incredible job with that side of the family. I know my cousin and my aunt on my mother's side of the family have done quite a lot, too. But I have been trying to find things from both sides, because in the end, I would like to give the information to my kids.

What I would love to be able to do is to track down the history of my ex-husband's family so that the kids would have a more complete family tree. I think when we visit my mother and father this summer I will speak to my brother-in-law about their family.
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5:29 p.m.

Remember back in the day when television had thirteen channels and you actually had to get up and cross the room to change the channel?

Okay, I guess not everyone remembers those days, but we never had a remote control until I was in my teens. Ditto color t.v.

I'm feel nostalgic about the old days, though. Growing up, my hometown had only one choice for television if you wanted to get all the channels, and that was cable. Our programming came out of Salt Lake City, so we got no local news on cable. Ariel t.v. was broadcast out of the neighboring town, but provided only one channel, and since we were in a valley of sorts, reception was terrible. But you could catch a local news report on that station. Otherwise, they ran two movies repeatedly: "The King and I" with Yul Brenner and "Bedazzled" with Dudley Moore and Peter Cook.

More recently, both those movies have been re-made, but I can't get on board with either of them. I guess I watched the originals too many times on what passed for late night back in the day.

Fast forward to today, and here I am, with a sixty-inch screen, three remote controls, Comcast Cable, Netflix and Hulu, access to over two hundred channels, and what am I watching?

Re-runs.

When I was a kid, we used to wait for a whole year to watch a re-run of a favorite movie, like "The Wizard of Oz" or Rogers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella". I used to wish I had a projector and a copy of the films so I could watch whenever I wanted.

I remember once taking my Lloyds cassette tape recorder and taping a movie so I could listen to it later. I was sure I was onto something good. I wanted to find a way to actually tape the audio and visual parts of the movie and watch what I wanted whenever I wanted.

Well, I was onto something good, but someone older and smarter than I developed it first. Movies on a disc the size of a record album! Beta, I believe it was called. My brother-in-law and sister got a player and some movies in the early 1980's. It was so cool!

But it don't really catch on. It was replaced by the VHS tapes, and that format stuck around for a long time.

In the 1990's I did the unthinkable and cancelled cable. People occasionally taped television shows for us. We already had lots of tapes before I cancelled cable, so we were never really without something to watch. But the 90's were tough, and I couldn't afford a cable bill, so no one complained. And that crazy ariel t.v. station was still broadcasting, so we could watch that. Not only did they have local news, they had added some shows to their repertoire, so it wasn't a two movie rotation anymore. The kids got pretty good at adjusting the rabbit ears.

I don't know what really got me thinking about all the television stuff. These days we have stacks of DVDs available to us, and yet, here I am, still with cable plus other digital options. I sometimes think I should cancel it all and read more.

Four books a week isn't enough, right?

The saddest part? I'm still more likely--as in back in my cassette player days--to listen to a show rather than watch it, because I am always doing something else at the same time.

I'm a mess.

And...I'm outta here.

Peace!