[I really need to learn how to post images and links on this blog because (1) I wrote this post last week but Chip has kind of turned into a SYSADMIN bottleneck - I can't publish posts until he locates images and links to previous posts, and by the time that happens, seasonally motivated posts like this have kind of lost any shard of appeal they may have once had and (2) he has included a full trailer of Skyrim, but refused to include a picture of Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order:  SVU - because we have "run out of space" - because of the trailer, Chip]

Our racist TV, as you may recall, was some time ago taken away for repairs by a man who confidently predicted that it was probably emitting radiation.

We have had no confirmation on the radiation, but approximately an eternity after it being sent in for race re-education and racism eradication, the repair man called and said “no, there is no fixing on that TV.  I bring you a different one, much better quality, yes”.

Given what I knew about the TV, I was quite happy to have it consigned to a broken TV gulag forever.  And also given that the repair man was Indian, I suspected that he may have discovered the TV’s proclivities and planned some sort of punishment for it, on account of its racist ways.

Anyway, the replacement TV looked perfectly good to me, despite Chip immediately declaring it to be inferior and suggesting that we had been the victims of a sophisticated TV swapping scam.

Despite Chip’s negativity, Fred Ex and I were thrilled.

We kept waiting for the TV to try and assert its control over us by refusing to broadcast the full screen or any African American people, or any people of colour really, but to date the only issue has been that, once or twice, it has completely refused to turn itself on.  Whereupon I have secretly agreed with Chip that yes, it was a scam, just not that sophisticated really.

But ever resourceful when it comes to anything involving a screen (and, regrettably, that is the extent of Fred Ex’s resourcefulness), Fred Ex has managed to find a way to coax it back into life.  And yes, Life Is Good.

And has been immeasurably improved by one of Chip’s Christmas presents to me.

For some time, even before the TV’s racist tendencies became impossible to ignore, we had been having problems with the Foxtel IQ/TiVo’s remote.  As in, we would try and fast forward through ad breaks.  Then find ourselves unable to stop the fast forwarding and end up at the end of whatever show we were trying to watch.

This was, naturally, accompanied by much shouting from whichever of us was not holding the remote.  ”Chip, just stop fucking fast forwarding.  FUCKING STOP IT.  We are through the ads and…… ” “Quesera, sweetheart.  SWEETHEART.  STOP IT. NOW”.

Anyway because of the problems with the TV itself, we had characterised this as a much lower severity TV problem and we hadn’t bothered ourselves too much about it.  Frankly, we were happy to even watch whatever ads the TV permitted us to watch, that’s how desperate we had become.

But once we had our swapped-out, working TV, this difficulty now came to the fore.

Now and then, before Christmas, I was dimly aware that Chip just kept prodding about my manifest lack of fast forwarding prowess.   But I was still revelling in the non-radiation emitting swapped-out TV to care.

It was just that you had to really jab at the button repeatedly to make the remote do anything.  By this point, it wasn’t even like we were even daring to fast forward anymore.  We were just trying to select a channel.  Shifting positions on the sofa only seemed to go so far.  And that wasn’t anywhere really at all, on really bad days.

Given that I think I am going deaf or am simply no longer able to interpret what the kids are saying these days, this presented quite a problem.  Because whenever this happens, I insist on rewinding it so that I can hear.  Or so I can make Chip stop playing Skyrim, and then repeatedly rewind the show so that he can render an interpretation that somehow gels with the narrative.

This makes Chip furiously angry.

Aela the Huntress, in full warpaint - this is Chip's ideal wife (in Skyrim and possibly real life as well)

Particularly if he declares that it was something I patently should have been able to hear or understand.  Especially if he and Aela from Skyrim are trying for some alone time or he has taken to his flesh eating ways again and doesn’t want to be interrupted.  And most of all if the whole exercise is not a 30 second diversion but rather a 10 minute one, because we can’t stop the fucking IQ/TiVo and we hurtle to the end of Law & Order:  SVU.  And then I have to try and wrangle the episode back to the point at which the misheard phrase occurred.  Which, to be frank, is a fine balance.

But then, on Christmas Day, for the woman who likes nothing more than to lie on the sofa and watch hour after hour of crap TV, the perfect gift:  a replacement IQ/TiVo remote.

Quesera's best Christmas present ever - FOXTEL HD & iQ2 Remote

I was ecstatic.  And Fred Ex and I have been beside ourselves ever since.  If we want to watch something, we just tap the button.  Fast forward or rewind?  No longer an arduous and frustrating challenge with a degree of difficulty that The Amazing Racewould welcome as befitting a worthy Roadblock.

We both squealed excitedly when Chip fished the batteries out from under the sink to put into the remote.  And then when we first tried it out we each cooed and sighed, as though Chip were the hunter-gather who had managed to fell an enormous bison, which we could feast on the whole winter.  (Yes, I know it is summer in Australia and we don’t have bison.  But you know what I mean.)

Upon viewing my response, which was if course to immediately start watching whatever was on IQ/TiVo, Chip proudly announced that he had been deliberately taunting me about my fast forwarding skills in the lead up to Christmas because he was so happy with his gift selection.  ”What?” I said, as I triumphantly rewound a critical piece of dialogue I had missed in Without A Trace because I hadn’t been able to hear over Chip’s yawing.

I think that Chip was trying to demolish the stereotype of men being the only people obsessed with TV remotes.

In the 6 days after Christmas, I ventured out of the house a grand total of once (and that was only because the cleaner was coming and I hate to be here and feel her silently judging my TV-obsessed slovenliness) because I spent the entire waking period lolling about on the sofa watching the OKC Thunder play or flicking from Gossip Girl to Wife Swap USA (7 hour marathon) to even worse TV, fast forwarding and rewinding at leisure.

Not one book read.  Not one even started. Best Christmas Present EVER.