The TV! THE TV!!!

Quote is from the famed Simpsons episode with MIT students. They unplug the TV to plug in some tech toy during an Itchy and Scratchy exclusive. Geek boy asks which to plug in, and with horror in their eyes, Bart and Lisa act in unison for one of the few times in the history of the show and scream "The TV!, THE TV!!!" Classic.

Happiness things:
1. HGTV:
I'm obsessed with HGTV's Designed to Sell. Maybe it's because I need to see how a space looks without stuff. If you see my last post, that picture is busy busy busy with all my stuff. Mostly books, but lots of stuff too. And I learn a lot of things about how to stage an area for pleasing space when I watch but have to keep in mind that it's not necessarily "Designed to Live". Design on a Dime gives me hope and some ideas, like using $4 placemats instead of a $175 custom frame to get the perfect look for a unique art piece. I also love ReDesign. For those with bigger budgets, Kenneth Brown has some wacky but cool, funky ideas and pulls it off in the end. Candace Olson of Divine Design does some lush looking things as well, but lots faster than Ken, who works on a more normal design timetable, I suspect. She also sounds like she had speech therapy for an /s/ lisp which makes her name unfortunate for her. Nonetheless, she looks and sounds like a Minnesotan with the "Olson", height, blond hair, and accent and has turned out quite well as an adult. Small Space, Big Style has great ideas for places of the size I live in, although is usually high budget. Some of my other very favorites are the shows where they take stuff you already own and remix, move, and repurpose it to make it work for you: Design ReMix, Decorating Cents, and FreeStyle rock my world. With their motivation, I turned a dresser I didn't like into a media center I love with a quick drill hole in the back and an attached power strip. And I had a bookshelf that vacationed as a great windowseat and is back to being a shelf in the new place.

Shows that make me Cranky:
Buy Me, on right after Designed to Sell, is where the people consistently dis their realtors' advice and come to a bad middle while being rude about it. Haven't managed to finish a show yet to see if they come to a bad end, also. I'm not psyched about What You Get for the Money either because it's kind of false advertising. They always show oddball places, and not the "average" area house. They once profiled a condo in the town I used to live in, and it was lovely and unique and expensive, and absolutely one of a kind. Despite 90% of the living spaces being 3-5 bedroom family friendly triple deckers with parlors and built in butler's pantries, they went with a loft converted by a top architect to have an open plan which precluded having kids or stuff. That condo was not in any way representative of what you could expect to get in my town. All jealousy issues aside (80% of shows profile a price range I can't afford), the houses they show are lovely, but are not representative, which makes the show useless for the education the title implies and makes it a purely voyeuristic experience. Nothing wrong with voyeurism (you're reading my blog after all, doesn't do to insult the guests) but they should change the title. Finally, House Hunters. It's not a bad show, but it's HGTV's most popular so it's on all the damn time. And while it's useful to see people look at 3 houses, none of which meet all their initial criteria, and still manage to get a place they like, ultimately, they are deciding things based on their personal criteria which aren't mine, or relevant to me. It's more the learning experience I would expect from "what you get for the money" on a neighborhood scale. But I don't learn much beyond that basic "get what best works for you". They don't teach me how to improve focal points, find cheap lamps, or anything else I want. They do show people saying things like "I don't like all that clutter" - duh! you're not buying the clutter! Look at the room size and mounted fixtures already! So I don't want to watch it as often as they show it.

2. Strangely, I've been enjoying watching "Girls Next Door" starring Hugh Hefner's three live in blonde girlfriends. It actually makes me feel better about my life. The girlfriends seem nicer than I'd expect (when on camera at least), but their lives are very controlled: 9pm curfew if not with Hef; Thursday night is club night; Sunday is pool party day. Is Tuesday foursome night? And their little amusements aren't my little amusements. Maybe because I was never The Hot Chick, but still, not for me. And wow, Hugh can be a grumpy old man who likes to have his dinner on time and not go anywhere while ogling sweet young things and getting his way. I expect Holly, the head GF, is hoping for a long, long residency. She seems to like curmudgeon boy well enough, but she's there at his pleasure and is constantly aware of it, so I think it adds a lot of stress to her life which you wouldn't expect as someone thinking of the glamorous, near mythical, "Playboy Mansion" lifestyle. Ok. It disturbs me that "Hefner" is in the yahoo and blogger spell check. God forbid I spell it "Heffner". Won't get my pool party invitation now.

3. Spent the afternoon at work doing solid process engineering work. Managed to get out of a meeting that keeps happening over and over with little to no forward progress because we need to have time to go do our action items before we can give an update, and not have a meeting once in a while! Gah! So I took it on myself to do that and I enjoyed my job today because of it. Yay!

I think that's quite enough, don't you? I fell asleep on the couch for 4 hours again, which is why I'm posting at an "unreasonable hour". If I didn't do something at least kinda constructive in this time between nap and bed, I'd just feel worse for wasting it all. So I exercised and blogged. Didn't get to my other two website updates though. Tomorrow. Well, technically, later today.