Eight Thirty Eyes

I personally try to avoid them when they involve the plot. I don’t mind casting spoilers or finding out that someone is leaving a show because you still don’t know how they are going to do it. I do try to avoid finding out what’s going to happen in the show. I like not knowing, so I generally keep my Internet reading to post show reviews instead of pre show spoilers, but I just couldn’t resist this morning.

If you watch Vampire Diaries and don’t want to know anything about the future of the show, then stop reading now.

I followed a link to TV Guide and read a scoop on Vampire Diaries. I know I shouldn’t have, but I did, and now I’m disappointed. Essentially it said that there are going to be werewolves. No big revelation or anything so as far as spoilers go it’s pretty tame, but I don’t like this. Vampire Diaries is the first vampire thing I’ve gotten into. My friend is really pushing me to read Twilight, but I have held out. Now I’m seeing all these previews for New Moon (right?) and it has to do with werewolves and in my head I’m like, “Really werewolves, I thought this was about vampires, werewolves stink. This is stupid.”

And now Vampire Diaries is going to have werewolves. Is this a requirement for vampire stories; do they always come in pairs; is it an epic struggle? I have no idea, but this news disappointed me. I don’t want a werewolf in my vampire story. And besides I’m pretty sure it’s hard to make a werewolf sexy.

Don’t worry though, I’ll probably continue to skew the CW’s average viewer age by watching Vampire Diaries. But now maybe you see why I don’t like spoilers.

I missed a lot while I was in Hawaii, so I’ve spent the last week catching up on everything – my DVR was at 98% – barely made it.

Best One-Liner: Community

“Oh my God, my life is Degrassi High” – Jeff

Best Thing I Watched: The Office 10/8/09

I’m a sucker for The Office and Weddings so it was a perfect fit for me. I loved every bit of it from the opening vomit sequence to the very end.

Worst Thing I Watched: The Office 10/1/09

This episode was pretty dumb. It seemed forced and I didn’t like it. I did enjoy Pam’s face at the end when she realized Ryan scammed her, but that was about it.

That’s it. Hopefully I’ll have a little more insight for you this week

Best One-Liners: Modern Family and How I Met Your Mother

“Haley had her first boy over today. Phil shot him.” – Claire (MF)

“No, they don’t realize that they weren’t lying.”  – Lily (HIMYM)

Best Thing I Watched: Grey’s Anatomy

I was a little nervous how they would handle the death of George. We knew he died, we knew he wasn’t coming back so it got off to kind of a rocky start with Lexi claiming it wasn’t him, but overall I was very impressed with the two hour season premiere. I thought they handled the transition from last year to the lead in to this year very well. I also especially liked how they had each of the characters show how they were grieving. It was good also to see Meredith crying in the locker room at the end because her character hasn’t always been good at dealing with things and it seemed like a breakthrough to have her deal with this almost normally. I’m interested to see what they do with this whole Seattle Grace/Mercy West merger. I might have to do some online searching to see if there are people leaving the show.

Worst Thing I Watched: SNL Weekend Update Thursday

Wow, I just don’t think the whole SNL on Thursday idea works as well without a major election going on. I was pretty disappointed with it this week. I really don’t like the bits with the NY Governor – I feel like it’s old and overdone. Let’s stick to Saturday guys.

Worst Thing I Didn’t Watch: Beautiful Life

I saw the pilot a few months ago and declared that it was the worst thing I had ever watched on TV ever. I wasn’t exaggerating. Luckily most of America agrees. In week two of the new season, it becomes the first casualty of the 09/10 season. Well played CW, well played.

Most Interesting thing I got sucked in to: That’s Impossible “Weather Warfare” on The History Channel

Very fascinating facts and some conspiracy theories about the governments using technology to harness weather and use it as a weapon.

My week in TV may become a weekly thing, but we’ll have to wait and see if I can live up to that…

Best One-liner: Parks & Recreation

“He told me that he was going to Kansas to climb mountains, so I don’t really know where he is” – Ann Perkins

Best thing I watched: Vampire Diaries

I haven’t been into the whole vampire craze – True Blood/Twilight, etc, but I am loving Vampire Diaries on the CW. I saw the first episode a couple months ago and watched it again last week. I was looking forward to this week to see if the second episode lived up to the pilot. It definitely did – the series recording will stay on my DVR. I don’t know if it’s the journal keeping aspect of the show or the smoldering good looks of Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley, but this week it even beat The Office. I am a little confused about how the whole vampire thing works though – is Vicki supposed to be a vampire now that she was bitten and lived? Also, what about Caroline?

Worst thing I watched: Glee

I’m a fan of music and I’m a fan of TV, but not a big fan of the combination. I decided to give Glee another shot this week, and that’s it. I cannot think of one thing I liked about the show. The characters have no depth, the men aren’t good looking, and it still appears to be lip syncing. I admit I watch some pretty cheesy stuff (usually on the Disney Channel) and this probably has a better shot at survival than say Viva Laughlin did a few years ago, but come one, I just don’t get this show. Why is everyone raving about it? The best part of the show was the preview for Monday’s episode of House, and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.

I’m not sure if I’m going to survive this plan or not, but here goes… For the entire month of August I am giving up TV during the week and limiting myself to 4 hours total on the weekends.

I’m going to give you a second to absorb what I just wrote. For some people this probably sounds like an easy task, but for me it is going to be really really hard. I’m not doing this for any purpose other than I have stuff I want to get done and I’d like to maybe try some new things.

August is a good month because all my favorite shows won’t start up until September and I have no plans to actually miss anything I want to watch. I like TV too much to go that far. In fact I’m allowing myself 4 hours on the weekends because that will give me some leeway to watch some of the movies on my DVR, Royal Pains, Mad Men (which starts up again on 8/16), and Secret Life of the American Teenager.

I’m not going to go into much about what I want to get done/work on, because the stuff on the list so far is all pretty boring and lame. However, this weekend I’m going to start trying to come up with some new things to try out around town – restaurants, exhibits, events, hobbies, etc. If anyone has any ideas feel free to share them with me. I feel like my life is just kind of sitting in neutral right now, so I’m going to try and shake it up a bit, try some new stuff, see if any of it sticks.

Here are a few of the things that I want to do:

*Finish reading Catch 22 – I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far and I’m getting really tired of having to log onto the library web site to renew it.
*Go through some boxes in my attic and get rid of stuff – also go through all my clothes and donate some of them. I’m running out of closet space.
*Take a good look at my budget and try to figure out how to pay for the girls trip to the beach, my trip to Kansas for my 10 year reunion, and the trip to Hawaii that will all take place in September.

Anyways, wish me luck.

So tonight I just set up my living room TV to actually receive the digital channels over the air. I did this for two reasons, but found a third along the way -

1. I can now use my picture in picture function since now the “TV” option will actually have a signal. Now I can watch two lame shows at once if I so choose. Since my cable box goes through the HDMI cables I couldn’t figure out how to do the P&P function without it using the “TV” option and since I didn’t not have anything connected to that – well it has never worked.

2. This has been a topic at work for years and I never gave it to much personal thought because I have cable so I didn’t have to do anything. It’s pretty much just been a lot of hoopla about which markets are prepared and which ones aren’t, and how it’s going to affect the ratings, and oh we’re not going to have a February Nielsen book, but oh wait never mind, now we’re switching to June, so scratch that we’ll have February ratings, but not ratings for June, etc. etc. (sorry, I completely realize that is the ugliest sentence on the planet) Well anyways, earlier this week one of my stations told me that the actual over the air signals in HD are way better HD than going through the cable box, so I had to test this out…

OMG, he was totally right. I cannot believe the difference. I could tell just by watching but then I also did a very scientific test by watching the same channel through both signals using the P&P function. Granted some of my favorite HD channels – discovery, Nat Geo, etc are only available through cable so it’s a moot point for me. However, I am currently watching swimming from last years Olympics on WXIA’s 2nd or 3rd digital channel and it is pretty amazing.

I think I owe it to anyone who actually uses their TV to watch sports on the local stations to tell you that you should definitely consider switching over ot the digital signal instead of the cable box for game time. I mean if your TV is digital ready and your cable is all set up through HDMI like mine, all you have to do is switch to the “TV” option and run the “autoprogram” and it just puts them all there for you.

3. Finally,  I also just realized that this will help solve my issues with having too much to watch on TV at one time. I can now have my DVR record two things and then switch to the TV signal and watch a third option. I have not tested this out, but based on my limited knowledge of technology I think it should work.  I know a simpler solution would be to watch less TV, but sometimes you just have to sacrifice for your work…

There you have it, my input on the digital tv transition that occured last month. It’s all about timing really – I didn’t want to be the first to post something because I didn’t want to deal with millions of people clogging up my blog comments looking for real answers (ha) Anyways, if you have any real questions about it, there are about a million other web sites you can go to for info.