Electronic Work Out

Argh. Such a day. It started out brilliantly enough with a morning outing to 24-Hour Fitness for an 80 minute session on the Tread Climber. With only four machines that are sought and fought over by ardent fellow gym rats, I was thrilled to see that Santa had delivered six or seven of the premier Precor EFX576i Elliptical machines. Next to the Nautilus Tread Climber, these bad boys get my heart rate pumping and sweat glands flowing like nobody's business, so with more machines as an option to my cardio sessions, I won't have to trip old ladies and knock down old men to get to be one of the fortunate four.

Now, that was all fine and good but that is precisely when paradise ended and purgatory began because the rest of the day was spent attempting to get our home entertainment hooked up...television, cable, tivo, slingbox, universal remote and dvd recorder. Beginning after a naively calm and carefree lunch there's been a one hour in-house installation appointment with Circuit City's FireDog tech support, a return trip to Circuit City to return the tivo and the universal remote, a stop at Comcast to trade in my old cable box for a new DVR box, and five hours spent re-configuring the connections I'd just paid to have done by a trained tech from FireDog. As it turned out when he left the phone line was dead, the dvd recorder didn't record, and the slingbox had no sound; none of these being minor points in my little parcel of terra firma.

Given my limited take-no-prisoners approach to electronics I now have everything up and running, which is to say until the cat dashes behind the television, gets dangled in the mountain of cords, and pulls everything loose. Yes, all is running smoothly on all 457 channels but I wish I could say the same for myself. I haven't even one nerve left in my body let alone 457 of them, I'm as grouchy as a rain-soaked cat and I'm fairly convinced that at one point in the evening while I was lying on my back wedged behind the television with eight cords and only six jacks remaining to put them in, I invented a entirely new language. In reflection it had a rather harsh gutteral quality reminiscent of an ancient Nordic dialect calling forth visions of marauding and pillaging Vikings. No offense intended to the Nordic community.

A noteworthy detail is that Dana wasn't seen all night except when spotted silently slipping downstairs to grab her dinner plate only to dart back seconds later to the relative safety and serenity a closed (and bolted?) door. A wise decision given my temporary emotional and mental state.

Despite all that, it's great to be home from the holidays, preparing my own food, working out at my own gym, and being annoyed by my own cats. All this and 457 channels. Sweet.

[Phatgirl Note: The events of today are what are commonly known as "cadillac problems." In other words, when you have food on the table, a bed to sleep in, a roof over your head, a steady howbeit modest income, your health, and loved ones, the ordinary trials and tribs that pop up in a day are little more than annoyances at worse and opportunities to grow and learn at best. Perspective kids, it's all about perspective.]