YOU, ME AND TV

I've noticed that as I have grown older, I find myself spending a lot less time watching TV and a lot more time doing... I guess as we get older, we find other items to consume our time. Family, friends, church, career, building my relationship with the Man upstairs, Upward basketball... For the majority of us, the old tale that time gets shorter and shorter as we grow older is becoming truer and truer for me.

If I could have one wish, I would wish that my body only required the same amount of sleep as a Giraffe. I know, do what, a Giraffe. Why a Giraffe? Well, simple. I have been told (But not confirmed) that a Giraffe only sleeps fifteen minutes a day. Man, imagine what you could get accomplished if you have twenty three hours and forty five minutes a day to get your stuff done. We could have a forth meal a day for real. If that was true, what would Taco Bell do for a commercial? you know that extra time might be a bad thing. The work week could go from forty or fifty hours a week to a eighty plus or even more. But, even with that, there would be a positive. The salary would get a major boost, or we would be getting a lot lower salary for a lot more work. Hum, I wonder how the Giraffes handle all that extra time in there society...???

For some of us, we would facebook or blog or Twitter ourselves crazy. Some of you are probably ready for me to take a vacation from The Dose anyway. Your inbox on facebook may be the graveyard for a few hundred e-mails from The Daily Dose. Hey I can sympathise with you, I mean, I'm the guy writing all of those crazy updates. But, I want to do my job and keep you as updated as possible. The great thing about facebook or an email or any of the electronic media is that you can always delete them, dump them into your junk mail folder or just totally ignore them and let them build up until they consume your entire inbox. Here at The Dose, we are convinced that those intriguing and inspirational updates we send NEVER get overlooked. In fact we have heard of people actually sitting on there facebook account waiting for the next Daily Dose update.

But, since I don't have twenty three hours and forty five minutes in a day to do everything I want, I had to learn to sacrifice something and for me, that something was TV. Time to watch shows like American Idol, The Bachelor or even the news became consumed with other activities. Every now and then I can get in a football game or maybe a basketball game, it just depends if Kentucky is playing or not.

Even with the lack of time and the drastic cut back on TV consumption over the last two years, I have still managed to keep up one TV habit. That habit is a minimum of one hour per day, normally at 12:00 or 1:00am, to watch one episode of The Andy Griffith Show and one episode of The Beverly Hillbillies. For me the DVR has been the greatest invention for the TV since I've been born. Right now I must have at least a hundred episodes of the two shows consuming tons of space on my DVR's hard drive. In fact, I probably delete more shows then I can watch. On a daily basis, they must show four or five different episodes of Andy Griffith and The Hillbillies on TV Land and of course my priority is taping everyone of them. In fact I have watched so many episodes of these two classics, that I could honestly say I don't think there is one episode that I have never seen. Actually, I am convinced that I could honestly say there's not one episode I haven't seen at least twice.

Get with me here. Who can resist these characters. Barney Fife, Andy Taylor, Aunt Bee, red headed Opie Taylor, Goober, Gomer Pyle, Floyd the Barber and all of the other charming characters in a town called Mayberry.

And heading West, how could you not love Granny, Jed, Ellie May, Jethro, Mr. Drysdale, Mrs. Drysdale, Jane Hathaway, Pearl Bodine and all those other backwoods characters who have been thrown into the uppity class city of Beverly Hills.

I am probably the one oddball in the state of Arkansas, maybe in the entire country, who can't sleep without first watching at least one episode. Even those nights where I drag myself to the bed, I still drag myself through at least one, loving every minute of a show that sometimes I could almost quote. Even today, I still find myself laughing at something I've seen umpteen times before. I guess that's what keeps me coming back... No matter how many times I watch the same show, I always seem to find something that breaks me into a laugh. Sometimes to the point of tears.

Granny busting Jethro on the head with a frying pan or seeing Barney riding up to the front of the courtyard in his huge goggles on his World War II motorcycle. All of them are classics. They were classics then, there classics now and I think it's safe to say they will be twenty years from now. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I'll be watching Andy, Barney and the entire Mayberry gang when I'm old and hanging out on the front porch, if the good Lord allows me to stay that long.

If you ever just want to check out a show, you can see them just about any day of the week on TV Land or you can go to TV Land's web page and watch any episode on demand.

From all the gang in Mayberry and the back wood country folks in Beverly Hills, thanks for reading, writing and participating.

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Until next time,
Chip