Spa Trip

The wonderful thing about having children is that a visit to the spa sometimes means you don't even have to leave the house. Our children took great care of their mother's hair today and the session ended with her looking more beautiful than ever.

Book of Mormon Reading

We've been trying to help David with his reading. As a result, we came to the conclusion that, if we want God to help us with this task, we need to have David doing his share of reading during family scripture reading. David gets to read his own verse each night. He's learning a lot of big words and the techniques for sounding them out. We highly recommend this approach.

Over The Air

First off, it should be stated that we are cheap. If we can get something for free, we'll generally try to avoid those who might try selling it to us. For example: bottled water. It's ridiculous that something that occurs naturally should have to be paid for.

Thus, we've never had cable or satellite television in our home. We've been operating with a old fashioned set of "rabbit ears" as our television antenna. In Great Bend that was fine, since we lived just down the road from an NBC-affiliate broadcast tower. Thus, we had a trustworthy news source for finding out when tornadoes were in the area.

Alas, in Ellsworth, we are too far from the towers to get anything other than PBS with any consistency. Sadly, they don't have a news team that reports on severe weather. So we decided to invest in a better antenna. We wanted something strong enough to reach a major station while being small enough to be placed inside (since neither of us know enough to be able to properly ground a roof-mounted antenna against lightning strikes).

We came up with the Antennas Direct C2-V-CJM ClearStream 2-V Long Range UHF/VHF Indoor/Outdoor DTV Antenna with 20-Inch Mount (at least, that is what Amazon calls it). We ended up mounting it in the garage, running a cable through the crawl space beneath the house (which was a bit of an adventure), then up through the living room floor and straight on to the television.

Not only did we get NBC and PBS, we also added a CBS station that we did not expect (since the antenna is pointed in the wrong direction to be pulling that in). Not only that, but when the atmosphere is doing a little something called Tropospheric Propagation (which basically extends the distance a signal can travel), we can pull in FOX, CW, and some other random station called MyNetworkTV. There is even a "Tropospheric Ducting Forecast" to let you know when your area has the best chance of getting stronger signals. You can check out the forecast for Western North America and Eastern North America.

Well, we hope you enjoyed the little science lesson at the end here as much as Ben did. Some day he may even try to persuade Elizabeth to let him buy another, slightly stronger Antennas Direct antenna to point in the direction of CBS to see if there are other channels that can be pulled in more consistently (without the help of any tropospheric ducting/propagation stuff).