the end of an era

Good morning!

We're having a good weekend so far. Sunday was a lay low day for me. Craig spend a good deal of time doing bookwork, while I played pc games and surfed the Internet. Still looking to finalize our last 3 trips. Monday was productive. Craig did laundry, vacuuming and dinner, ( which ended up being that wonderful Cabagge roll cassorole he made here!) I spent a good part of the day taking out our Motorola Satellite receiver and adding a digital converter box for our big Toshiba 50 inch projection TV.
Back in 1989 since we didn't have cable where we live, we installed what you'd call, a big dish.

This sucker is 10 ft across! And it sits on the side of the back yard in one of the perennial beds. And we loved it! What was great about the big dish is unlike cable and the small dishes, we could get all our programing a la carte! Just order and pay for just the channels you want. No having to get a basic package and add premium channels. We could also get channels for just a set number of months, Like ESPN. We'd only subscribe for 6 months to watch college football and basketball. No sense paying for an entire year! But that era is coming to an end. As the big dish market shrinks as more people turn to cable and the small dishes, Programmer's are offering fewer and fewer channels due to cost. First we lost Discovery, than History, and ESPN. So we decided to not renew our subscription, and I've finally gotten around to taking the receiver out. I've seen on e-bay that I can probably get $200 for it. So now we have just our roof top antenna. But with the digital converter box, we get like 25 channels! And we don't really watch a lot of TV, so this works for now. We just can't justify getting a small dish for the price they charge for programming. I can't believe people pay so much to watch TV!

bla, bla, bla

It's a sunny morning here today. It's seems like days since we've had any sun. Still cold, currently 20 out. But the sun will make it feel warmer.
I did accomplish a couple of things yesterday. We use to have a big oak entertainment center. But when the 27 in TV died, we decided to upgrade to a 32" LCD TV. Well, it wouldn't fit in the entertainment center, so we got rid of that, and searched for a TV stand. It took a long time, and we never did find anything we liked. So we ended up using this

fake electric fire place that we use in the winter to warm the TV room without having to turn up the thermostat for the whole house. Then we needed to get a cabinet of some sort for all our DVDs and VHS tapes. We found this 2 door unit that fits perfectly.
We put window film on the top door to conceal the tapes. I think it looks pretty good. So yesterday, Craig and I sorted through all our movies deciding what to keep, and what to toss.

Then we made a new chicken dish. Teriaki Chicken.
It was so good, I'm sharing the easy recipe with you.

INGREDIENTS 1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 tablespoon cold water
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
12 skinless chicken thighs

DIRECTIONS
In a small saucepan over low heat, combine the cornstarch, cold water, sugar, soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, ginger and ground black pepper.
Let simmer, stirring frequently, until sauce thickens and bubbles.
Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C).
Place chicken pieces in a lightly greased 9x13 inch baking dish.
Brush chicken with the sauce. Turn pieces over, and brush again.
Bake in the preheated oven for 30 minutes. Turn pieces over, and bake for another 30 minutes, until no longer pink and juices run clear. Brush with sauce every 10 minutes during cooking.

Now we used split chicken breasts instead of thighs and it was Yummy!
That's all I got this morning! Later!