Not dead yet

Our vacations, as a couple, always involve many, many movies. Many. Movies. Three or four a day, and it used to be more than that, when the kids were little and our brains needed more relaxation. We used to drive about an hour so that we could get through the mountains that are in the way from here, to a condo my parents owned. There was a huge tub, two insanely comfortable armchairs, and a large screen television. We were also not that far from our favorite video store, and so if we had a whole week, we'd get two tall stacks of VHS tapes in the space of those days. Aaaahhhh.... bliss.

For some reason, though, every time we went, the many, many remote controls that lived on the table at the condo were always - always! - all screwy. At every vacation it was necessary to take about an hour to re-set everything so we could embark on our movie-watching marathon that was (still is) our couple's getaway. We're geeks, okay? It's what we do.

Well, our children do not believe that we old people have ever been able to tame the remote controls. In fact, they are sure we're of the Remote Boat generation, and have no clue about technology in general.

And why? Why are they so sure we're a dying breed? Because they (the little pills) can always do things with the remote that we can't do. We can do everything we want to do, but there's always some oddball command. One of the young giants will be home, and one of us (okay, it's usually the dad) will have the remote, and then the uppity youngster will say something like, "just go to the settings," and the dad will not know (nor wish to know, thank you very much) what the kid's talking about.

I've got news for those uppity infants. Yesterday, our ultra-fantasmagorical remote arrived via the UPS delivery guy. One remote for all our stuff - stereo, TiVo, DVD player, TV ... all of it on one remote. We hooked it up to the computer, and programmed it, and now we're USING it. See? We're not dead yet.

And I'm sure I can figure out how to turn off the TV when I go to work today. Just gimme a minute.

(bad word warning - it's Python, after all)