Category: Everyday Life

Somehow dull…

Typhoon No.1 changed to an extratropical cyclone, but it has still been windy and raining, so I don’t feel like being outside. I looked outside casually, and people who looked like they were related to some kind of religion were gathered together under their umbrellas. I’m impressed at those people’s serious activity; however, I don’t want them to come to our house. Greedy Kuro (our main garden cat) ate too much and threw up all his food yesterday, and Komoku (a female cat who comes to our yard for food) broke into the plastic bag that had Kuro’s mess in it and was eating it… Aa-ah.

Recently our TV often has a bad picture when we watch the UHF channels. (In this case, FBS and TVQ).

We usually don’t watch TV shows, and of the sports programmes, we only watch sumo. But even we suddenly watch soccer games before the World Cup. The Japan vs. Bulgaria game had a good picture. But Japan vs. Scotland didn’t. (Our shichirin buddy Ms H went to see that game at the studium in Saitama.) The bad picture started at almost the same time as the game. The order was like this:
• At first, the picture started to flicker.
• Then, the picture from one of the NHK channels started to be doubled on the picture.
• At the end of the game, we couldn’t tell which team was which. We only understood by the sound.
• At the very end, we couldn’t see any objects in the picture. We heard only voices. (So sad.)
Even though we pay our NHK fee (our TV tax), we don’t need to see their picture when we don’t want to. Actually, we’ve sometimes given up on watching movies on UHF channels after 9:00 p.m. in the past few months because of the bad picture. (Sometimes the sound is also bad.)

We were going to ask our neighbour about her TV, but we kept forgetting. But finally we asked her about it. And we found that she and our other neighbours also often see a bad picture when they watch the UHF chnannels. Even in the daytime, but we didn’t know about that. For some reason our house and the house next door haven’t had TV antennas since before we moved in.

We don’t know who we should ask about it, and as I was checking on the Internet, I found a BBS on very, very local topics. It had been written some years ago. I knew what many of the contributors were talking about and read them all, and then I started to feel gloomy. I don’t know who wrote all that, because it was anonymous. But just because it’s anonymous doesn’t mean people can write anything they want.

Sorry for such a topic, on a day that might have topped the discomfort index if we’d had a high temperature.

–YS, 19 May 2006

19 May 2006