Tip the Wink

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, and here’s hoping you all have much to be thankful for. We certainly do: family, friends, health, our home and garden, books, cats, quilting, being retired, and so much more.

Through the woods and over the bridge to Grandmother’s house they go.

Wednesday evening, our turkey will go into the brining solution to soak for 12 hours, then back into the ‘fridge until late tomorrow (Thursday) morning when it will be stuffed with the aromatics (apples, cinnamon, onions, sage and rosemary which will be discarded when it’s done) and eventually put into the oven.

Yesterday, as you will remember, I told of moving into the current age of streaming with a DVR, Prime Video, Netflix Streaming and so forth. So, yippie and all that, yes? Well, no.

This morning I went into Netflix to print my queue before it goes away, as I moved from the DVD to the streaming plan, and then looked up some of the movies on streaming. None of the first 25 movies on the queue are available for streaming! Nor were the next fifty! All are DVD plan only! What the…?

I figured I’d flip on the TV and see what the full line of streaming shows was. When I fired up Netflix, I got a message from Xfinity (Comcast) saying Netflix streaming is included in my account, and all I had to do was set up a new – not my DVD – account. Wait, I already have streaming on my Netflix account. I don’t want two accounts! We called both Netflix, and after they couldn’t fix it because Comcast had put Netflix into a “package” which they do not support, we called Comcast who basically told us that’s just the way it is.

There wasn’t a lot on the streaming plan we wanted to see, but we DID want to see those movies. So this morning I went into Netflix (using the computer, of course) and cancelled the streaming account and reinstated the DVD account. Back to physical disks, no streaming. We do still get Amazon Prime and On Demand from Comcast, but of the three sources we’re already one down.

Nothing is ever easy, is it?

Yes, I have been accused of being a luddite (current usage), and the accusation may be justified. After all, I don’t do any “social media” except email and this blog, which these days hardly counts. Just ask anyone under 40.

Let’s consider that forty-two inch thing in the living room. On it, we watch sports, PBS Newshour, other programs on PBS such as Nova and Nature, occasionally Masterpiece and Father Brown.

These days, it impossible to avoid all the streaming discussion. This is streaming, that is streaming. Good grief. But I kept seeing things I’d be interested in watching, but…they were being streamed. So I called Comcast, since they’d told us our equipment was of need of an update, and we did it. We got a DVR. We set up streaming for Netflix and Amazon Prime. We subscribed to TCM, which used to be free, but is now part of one of those damned extra-cost packages. So I guess we’ve joined the twenty-first century. Sort of.

I’m not interested in signing up for a bunch of costly providers such a HULU, or Acorn, or any of the other many, many choices. But if the good stuff is there… What this mostly means just now is things that will be on late, or that we would have missed, we can now record and watch later. So, anything we should keep an eye out for?

Reading? What reading? Too busy setting up and playing with the new box. Looks like screen time will go up (probably accompanied by headaches), but in addition to all the money, that’s the price we have to pay. ** sigh **

How about you? What are you reading?