...Yup, interrupted.

The new DVR that I got on Thursday to replace the one that was losing it's mind? It's already on the fritz.

Maybe.

You see I was watching Animal Planet on Sunday which was running a big Steve Irwin tribute, and I cried buckets because it's so sad that someone so full of a life that he adored is gone. I decided I'd had enough of crying and needed to change the station and find something happier. So I start flipping and get this unusual error that says 'Satellite signal has been lost. Signal acquisition in progress" and the information about what channel, satellite and transponder it was.

I'm getting this for random channels. Some are coming in, some are not. I quickly figure out that it's not just east coast feeds or west coast feeds, it's a mix of the two. So I decided to start writing dowm satellite numbers, and it wasn't just one satellite. Nor was it a specific transponder either.

So I pick up the phone for what feels like the hundreth time this *week* to call Dish Network and straighten this whole thing out, because I'm thinking it's a problem on their end, right? Not so, says the girl on the other end of the line. So we run through a bunch of tests, and she suggests that we need to replace the receiver.

Wait a second, I *just* did that because my DVR was trying to lose it's mind. So she suggests a service call, we set up the time and everything and guess what? It's going to cost me $50.

I. Don't. Think. So.

End result: 45 minutes of phone call, over half of it spent on hold, and a supervisor later and I have a tech coming out tomorrow afternoon to take a look at my Dish and explain to me what has gone wrong. DH thinks they're going to replace the reciever again. A former co-worker thinks that it's going to be part of the dish that they're going to replace (because a very similar thing happened to him last year) because it's probably damaged from the heat we had earlier this summer.

If that's the case, then I wonder how anyone in Arizona manages to keep their dishes alive, unless they're constantly covered in shade. Mine is on the sunny side of the house where the sun beats down a significant portion of the hottest parts of the day. Somehow I really think that that is the solution to the problem, but we'll have to see.

So meanwhile, I can't record anything that appears in the middle of the day. There's no satellite interruption in the early morning or in the evening after the sun has gone down. It's only in the middle of the day - which supports the heat theory. That puts a crimp in my ability to rebuild my Good Eats episodes, but doesn't totally kill the Days of Our Lives thing, since SoapNet shows that at night and again in the early morning hours.

So, here I sit, a television junkie interrupted because after 10 years the bloom is off the rose and the dish service isn't behaving like it should. And I was so proud that I installed my replacement receiver all by myself. DH was busy readying for his camping trip, and he's always taken on the installations, but I figured that I could do this because 1) I've watched him do it every time, and 2) the instructions were easy and 3) I'm reasonably intelligent. And how hard is it to plug something in, and press a couple of buttons to make it work, right?

Right? *sigh*

I just want my television back. I want my Good Eats episodes back. And I want my Dish to work, darn it.

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(For those wondering from the last blog as to what characters have returned that I'm watching the show to see - Patch and Kayla are back... and what longtime Days watcher is going to miss *them*?)