Tag Archives: TV

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No TV? No big deal!

NUREMBERG, Germany — I have been living in a home for the past few days that has no TV.

There isn’t one to be found anywhere. You know what? I don’t miss what my Dad used to call the “boob tube” … and he sold them for a living!

My friends opened their home to me about 10 days ago. We did watch a film on one of their laptops: “The Post,” starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, about the release of the Pentagon Papers.

As for the news as presented by TV journalists, well, it has bored me to sleep for too long as it is. Prime-time programming might not be any good, either. Although to be honest, I don’t know what they show on German TV networks. So, I don’t really know what I am missing.

I am not devoid of news. I sure have plenty of outlets to feed me information I need to know. I have been keeping up with the hush money trial of the former president. And some other stuff, too.

I will say, though, that my friends’ home is a quiet place without the white noise humming from a television set.

Am I going to change my ways when I return home to Texas in just a little bit? Hardly.

The respite, though, is welcome.

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Happy Trails, Part 98

I didn’t used to get annoyed or troubled by the Texas Panhandle wind.

Instead, I would joke that the wind was beneficial in at least one critical way: It kept the bugs away. No self-respecting fly, bee, wasp, hornet or dragonfly or gnat would dare try to fly in this wind.

However, I had the luxury of making that joke while living in a structure that was attached to a concrete slab.

That changed in October when my wife, Toby the Puppy and I moved full time into our fifth wheel. We vacated our southwest Amarillo house to prepare it for sale. We got the prep done and then sold it in early March.

Hot diggedy!

The Spring of 2018 — which followed an extraordinarily dry Winter of 2017-18 — has been windier than the dickens. It’s also annoying me in a way I didn’t anticipate.

Life in the RV has been good. We’re comfortable in our 28-footer. It’s cozy. But the damn wind howls and causes us to sway in a manner that I find bothersome.

Our RV is fastened and secure. I have no concern about the 30-mph wind picking us up and flying us to, oh, Kansas. I just dislike the wind in a way that I had not during our more than 23 years living in the Texas Panhandle.

The good news? We’re close to making a move into another land-tethered structure. We’ll move about 350 miles down the road to the Metroplex. Yes, it gets windy there, too.

Not like this.

Once we’re settled into our new digs, the wind we’ve been enduring seemingly forever will make me turn to our puppy and say, “Toby, we’re not in Amarillo anymore.”