The Last Good Year...

 The year 2019 certainly had some ups and downs. All years do. Then 2020 came along, which kind of like 2019 had ups and downs also. One feature of 2020 was the stay at home efforts to contain Covid 19. Notice I did not say it was a down because worse things can happen. Now I have tested positive for Covid and am quarantined at home with a mild case. A friend, also positive described it as "stuck inside this Covid jail cell." All this stay at home time has led to excess TV watching which I have had enough of and I think that is the worst thing about all this. The kids gave us the TV we own for Christmas in 2016. I think that was the last good year and I am trying to feature what I was doing with my time before I had TV and these on demand channels. 

We tried to prevent TV from becoming the center of things when the family was young and I always liked musician Frank Zappa's take on the subject. When the kids were little we had no cable, no rabbit ears and only DVD movies that had been mostly taped by Cathy's mom, Linda to watch. It was classic material and they watched it a million times but if I came in to find them on the TV I let them finish their show and hustled them on to more active endeavors. It usually meant endeavors I would be involved in but most people would call that old school good parenting but don't get too excited. There was certainly some old school bad parenting that went along with this but you try your best. Like I said, there are ups and downs to each year. 

I did not realize how different thigs were in our household till Morgan became old enough he started spending the night out with friends. One day he said, "You are not like other dads." I said, "How so? What do they do?" He replied "Sit in a chair watching sports." 

After the kids all left home me and Cathy kind of struggled along with one of those little TV sets with a VCR built in. It was the kind of thing found in your work place that they make you watch a sensitivity training instructional video on after you have said mean things to another human. We cobbled a DVD to it and were happy as clams watching the occasional movie mailed to our house from Netflix. 

All this changed in 2016 when the kids gave us a modest sized unit and fitted with the stuff to get Amazon, Netflix, PBS, YouTube and a little news all on demand. Since then we have watched a goodly portion of TV which has increased with stay at home and now a real quarantine situation. 

What was I doing before this? Maybe aging and the slowing of a busy life has lead to falling into the TV trap. I have at least 11 more days of quarantine to go. Can somebody tell me how many shows to go before I'm well?