...especially since I got a DVR.

You know, I’m one of those junkies that loves to watch television. Usually good television – I don’t sit around for a lot of situation comedys anymore as they seem to rehash the same storylines over and over again, no matter if it’s a family, roommates, friends, coworkers. It’s all the same – one does something, someone else misinterprets it, and hijinks ensue.

I stray towards dramas and reality. CSI, ER (although that’s getting old), Grey’s Anatomy, 24… and reality comes in the form of Mythbusters and Good Eats. Yes, I like real reality, not this semi-scripted stuff that CBS keeps churning out (except for Amazing Race)

But what makes television even better is when it’s out on DVD. I don’t have to deal with commercials, and I can watch as much as I want in a block of time. The problem with that is that I have to wait until well after a season is over to catch up with something like that.

Enter the DVR. Live television with a delay. Who would have thought that this would have turned into the stellar way to watch television? Who could have possibly guessed? I’m glad the people at TiVo thought up this little idea, and that many others strove to copy it. Most especially I’m glad that DishNetwork decided to go this route and create their own DVR.

And I’m especially glad that DH decided that getting me a DVR for Christmas would be a good present. Of course, it’s more of a present to the whole family, even if my name was on the box, because it was also our new satellite receiver for the Dish. Yes, we had one of those almost 10 year old Legacy models from when the whole service was just getting off the ground.

So here I am with this new DVR. And I didn’t think that I’d get used to it that quickly. Wrong. I live for the DVR. Best thing? I can go to bed at 10pm and not miss a darn thing, because its sitting there on a hard drive waiting for me to speed through the commercials. And I’ve got things queued up that I don’t have to worry about missing. For example, I’ve got an entire marathon of Firefly that showed up on SciFi. It might not be the whole season and they aired it out of order, but I can always watch them in the right order and keep them for awhile. I Tivo’d (that’s got to be a new verb in the lexicon, like ‘Googled’ has become) ER so that I could get 7 hours of sleep one night instead of 6. I’ve got CSI from last night in the DVR, but I’ll probably erase that since I watched it while it was on. Well, after pausing it for about 15 minutes so that I would have a buffer for speeding through the commercials and while I was working on a Sudoku. Heee. I don’t have to worry about falling asleep through something anymore, because I can just speed back through it to find where I left off.

It’s fantastic! It’s renewed my love of television, not that it was waning or anything.

Now, before you write me off as some boob tube junkie without a brain, you have to understand that I also read voraciously, and long time readers know me to be slightly intelligent. But the DVR has added a whole new element to watching television – putting it on hold for later and doing other things!

Including telling the kids to pause the TV and go do a few chores. They’re still getting used to the fact that they won’t miss anything because they can pause the television, and getting through commercials is still one of those “oh I forgot about it” sorts of things. Even I get a little dazed at the fact that I can jump through the commercials. And I’ve forgotten a couple of times too.

But there is bummer that comes with it. It's limited in it's space - only 60 hours (which is probably enough), but the big letdown, as every DVR owner knows, is when you end your buffer and catch up with live television again. And when you hit that button and it says you’re live you kind of sit there and stare, in surprise that you’ve managed to make it back to live television. Thinking of all of this reminds me of that old commercial – is it live, or is it Memorex? You tend to lose track of that while using a DVR. I think the best thing of all of this is really a simple thing: you can always play back your television...

...but you can never play back your life.