Ed Icionsub

The weather forecast is pretty certain that Nashville will be getting a big snow storm sometime Thursday night or Friday morning. They are predicting at least 2 inches – maybe more – for all of middle Tennessee. That is a lot of snow for us – we don’t usually have an accumulation of snow. Most years we have a few days with flurries and it melts within hours or the next day. It will e interesting to see if we really get 2 inches from this storm or if the weatherman turns out to be wrong again.

A few years ago I had great success planning face to face meetings for a group of friends on the internet. I made arrangements with various hotels and restaurants for meeting space and guest rooms at a discount, and for a party room or banquet room for at least one group dinner during the events.

Several of those same friends have approached me recently about planning more meetings this summer. I will be looking for a hotel in Atlanta, GA for the first meeting, hopefully in late June. Atlanta is a good central location for people along the East Coast and the southern states, like Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

The second city that we’ll go to in July will either be St. Louis, MO or Chicago, IL. As much as I love Chicago, it has been very hard to find hotels that are willing to give good discounts on the guest rooms and most of them want to charge for the use of their meeting space. The hotels in St. Louis have been much more accommodating in the past. But I plan to check with both metro areas and see if conditions have changed.

If everything works out as planned, we might have time in August for a meeting in either Buffalo, NY or Dallas, TX. To be honest, about the only time of year I am willing to go as far north as Buffalo is August. I just can’t abide the cold weather, but in August the upstate New York is just gorgeous, and you can easily drive across the bridge and spend some time in Canada.

Today I decided to take a long lunch and drive over to Metrocenter to the cable company office so I could exchange my remote control. They didn’t seem to have a problem with it at all. They gave me a new remote control and it even has a pair of fresh batteries with it. I can’t wait to get home and try it on my TV in the living room. I hope the new remote will turn on the TV and end the problem. If the new remote doesn’t work, then I’m facing a few weeks of no TV until I can get some money together and buy a new TV to replace it.

Although I don’t watch many shows on TNT, I did watch a series preview for a show called “Men of a Certain Age,” on my bedroom TV. I guess I won’t be watching the good TV in my living room for a few days until I can get by the cable company office and exchange my remote control.

This TNT series started several weeks ago and I hadn’t paid much attention, but while surfing channels tonight I came across the show just as it was about to start. So I gave it look.

Here the storyline from the internet listing:

Daddy issues plague both Joe (Ray Romano) and Owen (Andre Braugher), as Joe pays a visit to his curmudgeonly retired father (Robert Loggia) and Owen’s dad produces an auto-dealership commercial that suggests Owen isn’t his son and leads the viewers to believe that Owen’s coworker is the son. Elsewhere, Terry (Scott Bakula) is rejected for a youth-mentoring program, sending him on an obsessive quest to find out why he was denied.

For some strange reason, when we hooked up my TV to the digital cable box, we did something that has caused the TV to not turn on and off by the TV’s push button or switch. The only way to turn on the TV is to use the remote control that came with the cable box. And tonight the remote quit working. I tried new batteries and nothing seems to make the TV come on.

I thought that it might be worth a shot to borrow the cable remote from a neighbor and see if the remote is the problem or perhaps the TV is no longer working. It’s one thing to replace a remote and quite another to replace the TV.

My neighbor to the south was home, as I saw her car in the driveway. I dashed over to her house in between the snow flakes and knocked on her door. When she came to the door, I asked if I could borrow her cable remote. It was at that moment that I realized she does not have cable. She has a satellite TV dish in her yard. DUH!

Since I was already over there, I talked with her for a few moments about her satellite TV service. She told me that she loves it and that if I am interested in becoming a subscriber, I should check for DIRECT TV Offers to see  if there are any DIRECT TV Specials that I can use to save money.

Turns out that you can get online and easily check for DIRECTV Specials for different packages and free offers for new subscribers.  When you have the opportunity present itself to rethink your service, it might be the chance to save a little money or perhaps get more bang for your buck, like the DIRECTTV Specials I found online tonight.