TV's and Time on my Hands....

So, here I sits…

When I took advantage of a post “Black Friday” sale and got a second HDTV to be up in the loft, I of course had to get a DVR instead of the “regular” cable box I had there for the CRT Sony. There is nothing that can’t be made cheaper and chintzier, so the “new” box was made by Pace while the old one (with zero trouble for over three years) was a Motorola. Soon after hooking it up we began to have trouble with the system. You’d switch it to ESPNHD and it would freeze the picture on the current channel, pause a bit, and go to black. Sometimes you could channel up and back and it would work. Sometimes when you turn it on it would just have a frozen picture. This resulted in several phone calls to the Metrocast Tech line, and always with a “reset” of the system, it would come back. Then maybe it would behave for a couple of days or a week, and then black. Call, fix. Call, fix. One of the people on the other end of the phone agreed and said “we get a lot of troubles with the Pace boxes”. So we limped along until last weekend when I could get virtually nothing on the HD end, and accepted the offer of a tech coming out to “check the system”, and replace the box. Okay, how about next Monday (yesterday) no, that didn’t work for me. Well, how about Tuesday (today) then? Yes, that’s fine. “Okay, we’ll have a tech out there between sunup and sundown”. Not really, it was more like “for your convenience we can schedule around you. Would morning or afternoon be best?” How about ten in the morning? “Good, he’ll be there between nine and one”. Knowing I was doomed I said not closer than that? Long string of “don’t know how long jobs take, geographical issues, yadda yadda.” So……here I sits.

Which, allows me to burden you with a few snippets..

Chains: I see that Damon’s has still not reopened from their fire two (three?) weeks ago. In fact, I’ve heard some buzz that “management” is considering NOT reopening. I suppose we won’t be that fortunate.

Service: The other night, after returning from the nice little reception down at Historic St. Mary’s city, we decided to have a pizza to watch a Holmes episode, and maybe just a little bit of the Oscars. Since it’s convenient, cheap, and close, we phoned in an order to CiCi’s. We did our standard order of “large, all pepperoni, half mushroom, and half black olive” Okay sir, that’s a large pepperoni, half mushroom and black olive. “check”. Ready in ten minutes. Fine. So I launch in the car in about five, get to the store (after paying three minute homage to the demons in the light at 235/millstone landing), the pizza is waiting (how do they do that?). Get it home, fire up the pizza stone in the oven (much improves the fast food pizza), open the box, to discover: large pizza – all pepperoni, half mushroom, half olive – on SAME SIDE. Sigh…

Restaurant Ratings: The latest issue of Baltimore Magazine was in my mail box yesterday, with the banner proclaiming “67 Best Restaurants”. We’ll defer the discussion of obsession with “Best” and the apparent American desire to know “who’s number one?”. No need to have taste, all you do is look at somebody’s list and the pressure is off. “It has to be good, it’s number one!”. Whew, sorry. Anyway, their twist is that they decided to rank the restaurants in categories so as not to try to compare restaurants that have markedly different cuisines. Not a bad idea. One of the categories is “Fine Dining”, so with some trepidation, I turned to that list, and guess what? The number one (in somebody’s collective opinion) fine dining restaurant in Baltimore is………Charleston!! Alert readers will remember me waxing eloquent about our meal there recently. And, not only that, here’s a short quote from the review: “The two or three elements in each dish are chosen with such care that you’re inclined to try them separately, then together, and once again to savor each texture and taste”. Hmmm, seems to me the Feeder had much the same comment. They must have been reading the Bottom Feeder….Anyway while certainly not infallible; these kinds of lists provide you with a guide against which you should measure your own tastes. Just so happens they liked mine!!

waiting for that doorbell to ring..

DFT(elevision)