Found dad up before me again, he had managed to change the TV to the country music channel that plays country music videos pretty much all day. I have spent the last 2 hours trying to convince him that it’s just a music video channel. It’s not cable TV or a video that someone rented. He was going to wake up one of his grandsons to ask him if he rented it. Note we don’t have cable or satellite TV. I guess its okay, but since some of the people in the video are dressed for summer he is convinced that it must be some sort of soft-core pornography. I guess if you are not having a good day with Alzheimer’s a 3 minute music video is a full length movie and as good to watch as anything else.
In hind sight, we have no idea how he survived how dad managed after the analog to digital TV transition, we sent dad the coupons for digital TV converter boxes but apparently he gave them away and we lived too far away, at the time to do anything more, and he said his TV was working fine. When we picked up dad before we moved here we did talk to a neighbor that told us how he mostly just watched the one channel that still offered an analog TV programming which broadcasted primarily in Spanish with some shows in English or with English captions. No idea why dad didn’t just go down to the store and buy a new TV or subscribe to cable TV, he had more than enough in savings to easily buy one and the thousands of TV commercials and the near nightly stories on switch over that described the process in great detail before the switch over should of given him some idea what was going on, but dad can be stubborn. Sitting at home watching one channel mostly in a language he didn’t understand for hours on end surely didn’t help motivate his brain, I keep going back to the adage, if you don’t use it you lose it.
To add even more complication to digital TV is the whole channel dot or dash number channel thing is confusing as well. I guess as a major geek I never really considered how complicated the whole thing would be to someone with mental issues. So now dad is trying to grasp the whole 4.1, 6.2, and 36.3.
Other channels that dad have found in the past were NBC’s weather channel that repeats the weather endlessly, with the first time giving local weather and the next segment would be weather for some other part of the nation so dad was convinced that we had some drastic weather or were due some shortly because he was watching it on the TV.
Dad is still confused about this channel, “I have never paid anything for TV or radio, I just don’t get it” I told him this is free over the air broadcast of country music videos. Since dad was up to 10pm last night watching TV, well after sundown had taken over today could just be compounded by a bit by the lack of sleep perhaps a nap later will help things.
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