It's good to have friends in high places. My friend, who works for Bend Cable, helped me this morning set up my Dad with all his cable needs. He's in Bend Villa Court, and he loves the Military and the Golf channels, and we were having trouble getting it all to work and stay working.

We just bought Dad a new T.V., and he brought a marvelous remote with BIG numbers on it for him to use.

He also hooked up my downstairs, office T.V. (a very nice color T.V. that my Dad had been using) to cable. Believe it or not, up until now I had a black and white T.V. with rabbit ears, that I would sometimes turn on if there was a documentary I really wanted to watch on PBS. Other than that, it stayed in the closet. Now I have a nice new color T.V. with all the channels.

I have to be careful about that. It would be easy for an old married couple to end up watching completely different programs in different rooms. Linda, for instance, can apparently watch Law and Order all day long, whereas I could go the rest of my life without seeing it again.

Mostly, though, we agree on the prime time shows, and I want to be sure that continues.

We have about the biggest old-line T.V. you could have, and it works great. So I just can't justify going for the big screen T.V. But when I do it, I'm getting the biggest most ginormous one I can find.

Meanwhile, like I said, I've been watching downstairs on a black and white, so obviously I'm not fussy.