One surprising aspect about moving to Dublin is how it has forced Will and me into the 21st Century. In Gurnee, we had basic cable and one old mobile phone that we shared. I believe we may have been the last two people in Gurnee to share one mobile phone. Now, living in Dublin, we have been forced into the high tech world (the high tech world of 2003, that is). We each have a mobile phone – Will’s even takes pictures! We send each other text messages and actually use the features of our phones. It’s crazy.
The other high tech addition to our lives is the Digital Video Recorder (DVR) that came with our satellite. While most of our friends had DVRs or TiVo for years, we resisted. We like video tapes, we would reply when asked about what we had. They are more flexible and we like recording things on the VCR. Oh, how wrong we were. The DVR is wonderful. We can pause live TV. We can set up to record a series (say, the Sopranos) and we can know that we’ll never miss a show.
The other thing that the DVR has allowed us to do is to explore certain historical television programs, like Dallas. One of our stations is showing the series Dallas, in order, from the beginning. We’re learning all about 1978 hairstyles and fashions while we watch the Ewings and the Barnes battle it out over the OLM (that’s the Office of Land Management, in case you were wondering).