I Want My MTV

So today we FINALLY had an antenna and even a satellite dish installed on the house!!! This was something that was sorta mentioned back when we moved into this house as something the contractor would take care of. This was a good, um, 9 months ago (see what I mean about things just taking longer to get done here?). One guy first came out about 2 months ago to take a look at the house and the connections, and then today we finally had the follow-up where the guy came WITH THE STUFF TO INSTALL! The appointment was for 9:30am so I figured I'd wake up for that, it'd maybe take a couple hours, and then I'd be able to nap in the afternoon, knowing I was still a bit tired out from a busy day yesterday.

Um, yeah, see my above statement about things taking a long time here.

The morning was taken up with the electrician needing to come out to show the antenna guy where the connections were, and then he was up there working for a while, but the roof was iced up still at 11:30am so he couldn't do any of that work yet. He broke for lunch, then came back in the afternoon where from about 1pm to nearly 5pm he was drilling and working and setting things up.

That's right, this took till nearly 5pm.

BUT! Now we can watch tv!! Before we got no reception at all, so all we could watch were DVDs. Now we have CHANNELS! And quite a few of them, too. I think there's a basic 10 or so channels that are the public Swiss ones, and then there's a whole crapload of random stuff that seems to just be free satellite channels. I watched parts of Amelie and one of the Harry Potter movies, in French, found Home Improvement dubbed into German (I think), and watched an episode of The Nanny dubbed into French. We also get CNN, BBC news, and a couple other news channels in English. Then I discovered that we get the German, Austrian, and French versions of MTV-- I watched one episode of the Brittish Pimp My Ride dubber (badly) in French. lol!

The only teensy problem-- everything's in black and white.

Before this, when I'd noticed that European DVDs played in color but US (region 1) DVDs played in black and white, I'd blamed it on our cheapola "all region" DVD player. Now I'm thinking it might actually be the TV (which Zach got for free from one of his coworkers) that's quirky.

Also, the satellite box kinda froze on me twice as I was watching tv, completely randomly, and I had to unplug and re-plug it in to get it working again. I'm choosing not to worry about that quite yet. I don't want to think about what I'd need to do and how long it would take to get fixed if it is a real problem, so for now we'll just pretend that it didn't happen.