Category: Camp connectivity

I dream of Genies (remastered)

Joy Clough7 Comments

Green light
So bright
First thing I want in sight
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have it glow again tonight.

I wished with all my heart, clicked my heals together, squeezed my eyes tight then opened them again. Over and over. Aaaand…nothing. I didn’t bother bundling up out on the porch to star gaze into the murky, still-winter dusk. Or even peer out the front window where my “forever Christmas” LED light display brightened up the white birches and my mood until it got buried in a four-foot drift three months ago. Nope, I was holed up in my living room, staring at my DirecTV Genie 2 receiver, hoping against hope that the damn status light would go green.

But, alas, my wish was not to be. No way, no how. Genie had gone back in her bottle and taken her two little sisters—downstairs Mini and bedroom Mini—along with her. And with no fairy godmother or Jiminy Cricket coming to restore my once magical whole-home DVR satellite television, I had no choice but to wait for the next available service tech to show up and rescue me.

“Remember when just being up here in this little cabin was the fantasy? When camp TV meant watching the wood stove or the fire pit and you liked it?” I said to myself, sounding eerily like my father. “Turn that damn thing off and go outside!” he’d bellow if he came home and found me binge watching game shows during summer vacation. “But it’s not summer,” I said to my lifeless screen and the surrounding darkness. “Not even close.” It’s final episodes till fall season! Time to wait out the good weather watching The Good Doctor!

But I couldn’t. Not unless I wanted to stream it off the internet and watch my Verizon Home Fusion data overage surge through the roof. And worst of all, I couldn’t record it. That’s what DVR was for until Genie turned into a gremlin.

For a whole year, I hadn’t even cared what my Genie 2 setup looked like. Didn’t know if its lights were twinkling a certain color, or what lights it even had. So enraptured was I with whatever wizardry the DirecTV guy had performed, I never really checked out what was behind my magic wall of endless programs coming out of the northern sky. Oh, I knew there was a free equipment upgrade back there. And, as a retired technical writer, I knew it wasn’t just running on fairy dust. But why poke around with optimal performance, with what was finally letting me be one of the cool kids who could record stuff while watching other stuff—in two different places, fast-forwarding and pausing every riveting moment in sync with my sleep cycles and biological urges?

And then it happened—the fate my mother-in-law warned about when acquiring anything computerized, digitized, or smarter than a toaster oven. It “all went at once.” And being the hapless dummy holding the control “clicker,” I was screwed, stranded up High Tech Creek without a paddle. Had I not given complete control over to them thinking machines, I would have at least been able to tweak my rabbit ear antennae, replace a blown tube, or dial up a working channel. Instead, there I was, numb as a plugged owl, gaping at a troubleshooting screen in place of my prime time lineup. “Error 775—No dish communication,” it said above a bunch of numbered steps with circles and arrows pointing to plugs and parts I never recalled having before.

My first fix-it step was to sound the alarm to Tom: “There’s snow on the dish! Can you please go scoop it off?” It being a Monday (AKA “those hospital shows you watch” night) and not a Wednesday (AKA “I’m really looking forward to Survivor” night), he might have been a bit more enthusiastic about putting on his boots to trudge out and inspect the situation. But he did as asked, verifying there were “no visible obstructions.” (Believe it or not, we hadn’t just experienced a dish obliterating snow storm. That happened when we had the flu. And I think it was a Wednesday, so Tom powered through like one of those “gotta get the job done” DayQuil commercials.)

A few hours and a bunch of unplugging and re-plugging later, I needed re-verification. “Are you sure there’s nothing blocking the dish and the cables?” I asked, until I got “the look” warning me to stop. “Sure, there’s a crap ton of snow over the dirt that’s burying the underground cable coming toward the house,” he seemed to say. “And a whole mountain of snow blocking me from actually seeing what’s going on when the cable comes from there into the house.”

So I was left to my own devices. Literally. I hauled the Genie 2 receiver, the downstairs Mini, the power adapters, and the cluster snarl of connection cords out onto the rug for closer inspection. “No fairy dust happening here,” I said, “But would ya look at this house dust!” I did what any self-respecting tech savvy girl would do when crawling around behind her home/office componentry. I grabbed a rag and dusted it off. Then, lest that be my only sense of do-it-myself accomplishment with the current procedure, I unplugged everything, untangled it and laid it out in a pattern I thought I could reverse. Next, I plugged it all back in again, checked that each thingum’s power light was green, and waited.

“Green light…so bright…” I whispered, watching the newly-discovered Genie 2 status light. Green is good. Green is good. So’s flashing green, I reminded myself. It means there’s a ghost of a chance you’ll get solid green. Silent drum roll. Inhale and hold. Aaaand…nada. Solid yellow. Never a mellow color when it comes to operational status. As a documentation specialist for many years and many “black boxes,” I’d written my share of front-panel status light descriptions. And I sure didn’t need a how-to guide for interpretation. Basically, flashing green to flashing yellow means “Go get a cup of coffee, put in a load of wash…and hope for the best.” And when you come back and see solid yellow? That’s better than a red light which, of course, stands for stopped dead. But stuck on yellow means “I thought I could, until I churned and burned and decided I couldn’t.” My cue to get up off my aching knees and call DirecTV support.

I did learn a couple things on the phone with tech support. That a 775 error message is not caused by snow, rain, or other flying debris landing on the dish. “That’s a 771 error,” the rep said, leaving me wondering just how infinitesimal the list of possible problems could be. I then learned that being walked through the disconnecting and re-connecting procedure again via speaker phone and an exotic accent yielded the same grey screen and no-go status light. And that, surprise…surprise…I needed an onsite service technician.

While I was on the phone, though, did I also know I qualified for some even better DirecTV upgrades? Yup, I figured as much, and preceded to “no thank you” my way through the latest up-sell offers. (As a loyal longtime customer, I’ve also learned that amassing every DirecTV programming “deal” onto my bill is kinda like leaving an old shed unattended during a Rangeley winter. You know snow and ice keeps piling up on it, that the roof is sagging under the pressure. And if you don’t shovel a few layers off now and again…boom…it’s just too much and you need to start from the ground up.)

Nope, I just wanted to resume my status quo, hopefully before I spent any more prime time nights in the dark. Doug, my whole-home service technician seemed tentative but upbeat when he arrived. “Oh, jeez, you’ve got one of those!” he said when he spotted my Genie 2 receiver. “That model was installed for free last year for a reason. But, if it hasn’t acted up until now, maybe you’re one of the lucky customers.” He had an unflappable Foghorn Leghorn voice that seemed like it could recharge anything within range.

By the time Doug was outside getting snow in his boots and wind in his face checking my equipment with his, my hopes were growing dim. “No more magic from this Genie,” I thought. Then suddenly…zip-a-dee-do-dah… there was my status light glowing green and my TV lighting up my living space!

The problem, Doug reported, was up on the garage roof about as close to the dish as possible without being in the dish itself and, therefore, a 771 problem versus a 775 problem. The initial cable was hand tight but not wrench tight. “So I gave it a couple good cranks and there ya go!”

“But couldn’t it loosen up in the future and all go at once again?” I wondered. “Nope,” Doug said. And then he used the old tactic I’d come to recognize as the service tech’s version of “paying it forward.” Doug blamed it backward. “The previous installer shoulda wrenched it down, but he just fingered it in place and probably forgot to recheck his work. I’m surprised it held for a year.” You’ll never see it on the grey screen of death as one of the official DirecTV errors. But other than Acts of God, apparently most loss of connectivity is caused by your previous installer being a Mickey Mouse.

Doug was my hero, I had to admit. I was delighted that I could put my Genie 2 back
behind the TV to secretly work wonders without another thought. And I was in the process of doing so when…oh noooo…whatever daytime drama had been playing suddenly switched to a grey screen. “Error 775—No dish communication,” it read. What the….? Lucky, troubleshooting the cause required only an instant of hunching on the floor in repeat status check mode. The cause was me. I’d shoved the receiver just a bit too hard into the corner and unplugged the damn thing! A classic PEBKAC error, as we used to say in the business. You won’t see that on any official self-help screen either, because it stands for Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair. Meaning the equipment is fine but the customer sitting at her computer desk is a complete doofus. Or, in my case, PEBGAC (Problem Exists Between Genie and Couch). But, no need for another support call and promises of even more magic than I could handle upta camp. I plugged it back in all by myself just in time for Survivor. Zip-a-dee-YAY!

For more “Camp Connectivity,” see:

I dream of Genies

Joy Clough6 Comments

When we first starting coming here, any talk of having television “upta camp” would’ve been as far out as waiting for a magic carpet to take me to the end of the rainbow. “And what would you like for your other two wishes?” Aladdin would ask. “Immortal life and money growing on birch trees?”

Back in the very beginning, I dreamt only of electricity coming up our rutted road and into our cabin. Then I longed for a toaster oven, a couple of lamps I could switch on and off from the wall, and maybe even a coffee maker to plug in on top of my plywood counter.

For more than 20 years, watching “camp TV” meant picking one of two channels with very similar programs: the wood stove or the fire pit. Television, and pretty much anything more electronic than a boom box tuned into “The Mountain of Pure Rock,” was the stuff of fairy tales. Only the really, really spoiled women dared to dream of watching Oprah way out here. And when a stray antennae or satellite dish sprouted up among the forest canopy, the rest of us could only stare at it like a unicorn or a leprechaun had landed on some lucky biotch’s roof.

Visitors from away didn’t always understand that the only big screen we had was the one keeping mosquitoes from swarming as we watched our own National Geographic episodes live from the porch—especially after they got water logged and the thrill of going to the Pine Tree Frosty wore off.

“But what else do you do up here?” one of my daughter’s middle school friends, who reportedly had Nintendo and her own TV/ VCR in her bedroom, asked.

“We play Yahtzee and Monopoly and eat s’mores and read,” we said. “We read a lot.”

“Woah. You mean like chapter books?” the girl said. By Sunday morning, her attention span was shot. And that was in the summer.

It took another decade—and talk of an eventual Big Move to Rangeley—before the possibility of television ever crept into our “someday” planning matrix. The year was 2009, and I knew I had forever crossed the “it’s just a camp” line when my mother-in-law almost fainted in my kitchen. We brought her up to see how we’d expanded our tiny log cabin into a year-round residence and added a few twenty-first century conveniences. “You have a dishwasher?!” she gasped.

Yep, built right into my faux marble counter top! I didn’t dare interrupt her “I never even had hot running water in my camp kitchen” story with the news that, after being the only neighbor with a naked roof for miles, I was finally going to join the DirecTV lineup.

“I s’pose this will be kinda nice in the winter,” Tom said just after we made the Big Move. He was kicked back in the new double recliner watching our first ever camp TV, which also happened to be our first ever flat screen, hi-def, bigger than a breadbox TV. It was a huge buying decision, solely mine to make, while Tom had been away working out the last days of his teaching contract before retiring. Did we really need to bring a boob tube into our “dream” log cabin? Was it time to ditch the tiny Discount Warehouse set we bought back in the ’90s, even though it still had some life left to it? “Yes!” I decided in a moment of early spring slump. I closed my second novel of the week and called DirecTV.

A few days, a really tall ladder and some serious roof hook-ups later, our local installation guy clicked through the remote, and presto chango! We could see glaciers calving into the Gulf of Alaska, the real shades of The Color Purple, and every single palm frond and bug bite on Survivor. And even though we didn’t get suckered into the ultimate-supreme-money-grows-on-birch-trees channel lineup, we were enchanted. Who needed the sports/movie super-mega-bundle dish package when, by the end of the first winter, we were like two kids who finally made it to the Magic Kingdom and just couldn’t stop gawking? We didn’t have a bedroom TV and a kitchen TV and a bedroom TV. We had one TV in a small corner formerly known as “the beagle room” that was more than just “kinda nice.” It was a freakin’ fairy tale. And forget DVR! All that fuss over recording and rewinding so you didn’t miss a single plot twist or witty comment? That’s what bladder control, and looking forward to reruns during the “dark months,” were for.

“Just record ’em,” friends would say if I was ever torn between seeing who got Chopped and who was The Biggest Loser on the same night.

“Can’t,” I’d say. “Don’t have DVR.” But I did have a whole-room-length HDMI cable that I could stretch from my laptop to my TV and stream away. And, as long as I wasn’t on the brink of a data overage on my Verizon broadband account, I could see whatever I imagined I’d missed the night before. It was the perfect setup, I thought, way better than I ever dreamed lake front TV viewing could be.

Then came the winter of my discontent, when I convinced myself that hundreds of programs coming out of the North Woods sky or off a tower atop Bald Mountain onto only one TV wasn’t enough. It all started, as most ruminations do out here this time of year, with a bad body image nightmare. How was I ever going to emerge from my cabin come May looking better than the couch potato I’d been the year before? By getting another TV, I decided. A TV in front of an elliptical machine that could just barely fit in the loft bedroom. Then, on days when it was too gloomy to strap on my ice cleats and go outside, I’d watch it to ease the monotony of shuffling in place up under the eaves in February. No need to shell out more for DirecTV which, thanks to the premier channels that used to be free but now cost an arm and a leg, was right up there with paying for car insurance or buying groceries. All I needed was another HDMI hookup and enough Verizon wireless gigabytes left on my data plan and, for the first time ever, I’d have a bedroom TV. Not my bedroom, because that already had the best lake view in the whole house, but in the bedroom where company could watch it off their devices when they got water logged and the thrill of going to the Pine Tree Frosty wore off.

Then DirecTV called and my field of dreams expanded exponentially. “Good afternoon Miss Joy. Did you know that you qualify for a free upgrade to a whole-home DVR package? We’ll replace your old equipment with a Genie 2 receiver and wireless Genie Minis for up to three TVs.”

Say WHAT? Free? I peppered the phone rep with all manner of questions about free actually meaning they weren’t going to start ratcheting up my bill right after I got used to having all this new stuff kind of free, and grabbed the next available installation appointment. Viola! Suddenly the gates of the Magic Kingdom were wide open so Miss Joy could venture to the far corners of DirecTV Land all her friends bragged about!

Installation was set for sometime between noon and 5 p.m. the following Friday. But sometime between noon and 5 p.m. the following Friday, a Stormageddon got here before Josh, the regional DirectTV guy and, somewhere in the snow drifts between here and Waterville, he called to say he’d have to cancel. “No problem,” I said, trying to keep my voice from quivering. “I’ll reschedule online.” Five more days crawled by as I watched The Price Is Right downloads holed up in the attic bedroom until, finally, the DirecTV van pulled down the driveway. I scampered to the door, chirping out a welcome like one of Cinderella’s desperate step-sisters. But Josh was not my prince that day. Cancelling my original date with him had voided the too good to be true free upgrade deal, he declared, and he’d arrived without my Genies. I’d have to wait at least ten business days for the offer to reappear on my account for him to do his magic. Swoosh! Back to the Price Is Right reruns and treading air while I ached for the ability to watch anything I wanted whenever I wanted, simultaneously, in one or two rooms 25 feet apart.

I’d waited more than 20 years for the first TV, I could wait a week or so for the second, right? Barely! By the time Josh finally installed the new Genie in the beagle room and the mini Genie in the loft, I was happy dancing up and down stairs like I was on Space Mountain with a FastPass. I got the whole-home fairy tale at the touch of a button, including a spare Genie and remote in case I fancied cramming a third TV atop Tom’s dresser or, who knows, out in the garage attic. “I’ve got all the bells and whistles now!” I cheered each time I grabbed a remote. Then I got something even more splendiferous: A February thaw—the kind you can’t ignore no way no how out here in the woods in the dark months. I strapped on my slush boots and my all-weather layers and burst out the door for some real deal exercise.

About halfway down the road, striding into the sun with Indian Cove Brook starting to flow and the chickadees twittering, it hit me. Cool as my Genies were, they could stay buried for a bit. The real magic—the best live show in town—would not be available for reruns.

For more “Camp Connectivity,” see:

Codifying my blessings

Joy Clough4 Comments

Codify (verb): To organize or collect together (laws, rules, procedures, etc.) into a system or code.
Used in a sentence: “Sometime after the age of 50, Joy learned to count and codify her blessings.”

When it comes to writing stuff down, not only am I believer, I’m an evangelist. Want something to appear in your life? Write it down! Want to remember what makes your life work? Write it down, make it your mantra! From the time my girls were old enough to share hopes and dreams bigger than toasting their own Pop Tarts, that’s what I kept telling them. At first, they just followed along. I’d find little slips of paper with all manner of colored marker memos and affirmations tucked here and there. Then somewhere along the way, like all things in our family worth repeating, our habit of making lists took a little twist. We didn’t just write things down, we acronymed them. While everybody else was LOLing with their BFFs, we were taking the key letters of our must-know or must-have items, and flipping them into off-the-wall sayings we couldn’t forget if we tried.

“What’s MRC?” Tom asked, pointing to the sticky note we’d stuck by the family computer.

“Modem, Router, Computer,” I replied. “When the Internet goes down, that’s the exact order we have to stop and start our connections if we don’t want to be stuck in login limbo for hours. MRC.”

“Many Red Crustaceans,” Helen said. “That’s how we really remember.” She and Becky made my list into an acronym and then turned the letters back into a hokey string of code words none of us could ever erase from memory. “When all else fails, remember Many Red Crustaceans, and you’re back in business.”

Last time I saw it, the sticky note was affixed to some important business paperwork I was cramming in a Staples box for my Big Move to Rangeley. I chuckled. At the time, the thought of requiring any sort of complex strategy for keeping my 50-foot phone cord connected to dial-up was almost as funny as Many Red Crustaceans. But now that faster-than-a-crawl networking has found its way across the Big Lake, sustaining my wireless tether to the Verizon tower atop Bald Mountain does necessitate power cycling my cabin-office devices. “Ooops, gotta MRC again,” I say as I drop to my knees and reach for the first plug. But I am so grateful, so happy as hell to have my woods-wired version of an M and an R and a C, that I don’t mind reenacting the sequence. It’s my lifeline to the kind of challenging, rewarding work that used to tie me to a cubicle chair at the end of a long commute. It’s my connection to you, my readers, to family, friends, to all that I think I need to know from social media and Google, and think I must have delivered right to my doorstep on those special days when our UPS guy or gal is feeling adventuresome. So, hey, if I gotta get down with the dust bunnies once in awhile to keep my Verizon Home Fusion fused, it’s a winning combination.

While I’ll never take for granted the godsend of connecting to “the cloud” out here, I don’t need the code letters right in front of me anymore to remember how. I’ve internalized them. But I haven’t stopped codifying my blessings and putting them forth on paper.

“JPRB…what’s that stand for?” Becky wanted to know when she saw it scribbled in the corner of my desk calendar. “Juicy Plump Red Berries? Just Purchase Roast Beef? Jolly Puppies Ride Bicycles? And what’s this little symbol you put next to it?”

“Joy. Prosperity. Rediscovery. Balance.” I answered. “My mission statement distilled down to four letters, my basic formula for a life well-lived. And the symbol is Sanskrit for the power of good intentions raining blessings down upon the fertile universe.”

“Kinda looks like a boob shooting out some lightening bolts into a cereal bowl,” she teased. “But, hey, whatever works, Mom.”

I’m pretty sure it does. At the very least, it keeps me reflective—focused on giving the gifts I hope to receive. And sometimes, if I’m really blessed, I get all four letters at once and I have a moment like I did on Thanksgiving.

Like I told Becky, my little Sanskrit scribble is just a reminder to “put it out there” to the universe, a signal that sparks my side of a two-way conversation with Spirit. When I attract and cherish moments of joy, prosperity, rediscovery and balance, then I am blessed in kind. And my blessings are often synchronized with what I’ve come to recognize as special “here ‘ya go” hellos from heaven. A perfect rose. The number 42 over and over again. A song on the car radio during the few hours a year I bother to turn it on.

“When I put it out there the right way, I get all kinds of signs,” I told Becky. “It’s like Spirit telling me I’m on the right track—through personal, intuitive soul symbols. Do you have a personal, intuitive soul symbol, something really special and memorable?  I bet you’d be surprised at what shows up if you know how to ask, and what to look for as blessings in-the-making.”

“Hmmm…Personal Intuitive Soul Symbol,” she repeated. “You do know if I made that into a code, it would be PISS for short. Doesn’t sound very enlightened, but at least I can remember it.”

“Whatever works, honey,” I said.

For more “Camp Connectivity,” see:

Directionless TV

Joy Clough4 Comments

New Year’s Day 2014: “To read more in my free time.”
New Year’s Day 2015: “To watch less TV, giving myself infinitely more free time.” (See last year).

Watching New Year’s Rockin’ Eve two years in a row, while what my body really wanted was bed, must have been the final straw. I stopped being a resolution recluse and boldly proclaimed my change of direction: “Start picking up a book more often than the blasted TV remote, you lazy, half-witted slouch!”

So far, it’s working for me. Not perfectly well, but I’d say distinctly better. I’m doing more page turning than channel surfing. I’ve gone Wild and vicariously hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, and become engulfed in an Inferno of mystery and intrigue. I’ve left the Sister Wives and the Little Couple in favor of some quality time with Mike Bowditch, my favorite fictional game warden. And if I stay strong in my resolve, I fully intend to be Daring Greatly by March.

It’s still a hard-fought battle, a nightly dilemma. Will I open a book and forge new mental pathways or once more kid myself that The Learning Channel somehow deserves its name? Will great authors spark my imagination, or hoarders, bridezillas and gypsies totally snuff it into the couch cushions?

Not too long ago, there was no such choice to make, when TV and “camp” were not mutually possible, when the only big screen I had was the one keeping mosquitoes from swarming as I watched my own National Geographic episodes live from the porch. I could get a few different channels if I stared at the fire in the wood stove long enough. But aside from that—and being entertained by the pantry mice—paperbacks, cards, board games, and a retro radio tuned into “The Mountain of Pure Rock” atop Sugarloaf was as exciting as things got inside the cabin after sundown. Company from away didn’t always understand, especially after they got water logged and the thrill of going to the Pine Tree Frosty had worn off.

“But what else do you do up here?” one of Helen’s middle school friends, who reportedly had Nintendo and her own TV/ VCR in her bedroom, asked.

“We play Yahtzee and Monopoly and eat s’mores and read,” she said. “We read a lot.”

“Like chapter books?” the girl said. By Sunday morning, her attention span was shot. And that was in the summer.

“I s’pose this will be kinda nice in the winter,” Tom said just after we made the Big Move to Rangeley full time. He was kicked back in his new double recliner watching our first ever upta camp TV, which also happened to be our first ever flat screen, hi-def, bigger than a breadbox TV. It was a huge buying decision, solely mine to make, while Tom had been away working out his teaching contract till the weekend. Did we really need to bring a boob tube into our “dream” log cabin? Was it time to ditch the tiny Discount Warehouse set we bought back in the ’90s, even though it still had some life left to it? “Yes!” I decided in a moment of early spring slump. I closed my second novel of the week and called DirecTV.

But I still couldn’t imagine how in the heck we could pick up satellite reception out here amid the towering trees. “Don’t worry,” friends told me. “Norm will set you up. I’ve seen him put a DirecTV dish out on an island. He even put one on an outhouse once.”

They were right. A few days, a really tall ladder and some serious roof hook-ups later, Norm clicked through the remote, and presto chango. I could see glaciers calving into the Gulf of Alaska, the real shades of The Color Purple, and every single palm frond and bug bite on Survivor. I had more than a hundred channels and, soon, a renewed addiction.

I fell deep and hard into “reality” TV—my obsession of choice, convincing myself I could turn it off any time I wanted. After all, I said, I didn’t get sucked into the sports/movie super-mega-bundle dish package. I didn’t have a bedroom TV and a kitchen TV and a loft TV. I had one TV in a small corner formerly known as “the beagle room.” And thanks to steadfastly refusing a DVR hook-up, I had to be strong. Who knew when I’d have to go to the bathroom and miss some vital twist, some witty comment or, heaven forbid, seeing who got Chopped or wasn’t The Biggest Loser? I had high standards for when and how I indulged.  Amazing Race, Undercover Boss and, if no one was around, an occasional Say Yes to the Dress, were my allowable choices. And North Woods Law—a vital local broadcast—was a non-decision, my civic duty. I deliberately black balled Amish kids binge drinking, and couples wanting to “embrace” life in Alaska while not wanting to haul wood, poop outside, or butt up against bears.

And then it hit me. I was sad. Not the kind  of sad that kept me from walking the dogs, showing up at the dinner table, or opening the curtains. Too much mindless TV had given me a case of what Psychology Today calls “infinite sadness,” a seeping, low grade feeling that I was turning into a total waste of skin. While it hadn’t suffocated me yet, a door was closing, slowly crushing my psyche, show by stupid show.

I began to wonder: If my mind was a bookshelf, what would it be lined with after hours and hours of reality TV? Wilting roses from the Bachelor? The Travelocity gnome sitting atop a stack of Amazing Race clues? Would it have any of the rich permanence of a grand old library, or the vacant stillness of an empty warehouse? Or worse, maybe the regions of my brain had become a row of closed cubby-holes—and the only thoughts waiting to pop out were silly, vacuous, Laugh In-like one-liners!

I took a hard look at how I defined “surviving” the long winter evenings out here. Was it letting the dim glow of an idiot box keep me going till ice out, or spending long evenings becoming truly enlightened by the books that were piling up like cord wood? I sure did miss Mike Bowditch and whatever new adventure Paul Doiron had for me to read! And I kept promising myself I’d finish The Promise of Energy Psychology, a second-hand paperback all the more inspiring because it was earmarked, highlighted and annotated by its previous owner. “This book is a New Age textbook,” I decided when I read the first half. “It’s helped someone be the best she could be!” The only thing the Learning Channel and Discovery Channel were teaching me was how much back-to-back crap I could gaze at, slack jawed and inert in my recliner, till I shuffled off to bed. I did learn to be glad I wasn’t a third sister wife, or compulsively eating dryer sheets, or cheap enough to dumpster dive out back of Parkside and Main. “At least I’m not dating my car!” I’d mutter to myself when I finally clicked the off button. “Plus, lucky me, I’m way past the threat of suddenly squeezing out a baby in the Coos Canyon rest area because whoops….I was more than just fat.”

So I backed away from the TV and got back to my books. Real books. I don’t do Kindle ’cause yup, you guessed it, I don’t own one. Tracking words across a tiny screen is what I do for a living. So when it comes to reading for pleasure, I prefer the tactile enjoyment of holding a real book, the thrill of unearthing a good Rangeley “dump” book, or the social amity of visiting my friends who own the bookstore in town.

It’s over a month into the New Year and I’m happy to say I’ve gone whole days immersed in Paul Doiron, Dan Brown and Colleen McCollough. No more gypsy wedding brawls or folks long-jumping through hoards of junk to get to their front door. I’ve limited my consumption to select comedies, North Woods Law, and a few upbeat reality shows. I’ve only slid off the book wagon once but, hey, that was a special occasion. It was free HBO, Cinemax, Starz and Showtime weekend. And now that I fork over almost as much for satellite TV as I used to for a car payment, free trumps everything. “My books will be there next weekend,” I decided, “Fifty new channels won’t!” Except for when I have to run to the bathroom and chance missing something really cool, home entertainment doesn’t get much better than that in my cabin in the woods in February.

For more “Camp Connectivity,” see: