The Last Hurrah of the Rabbit Ears?

My wife and I have never had our cable TV or internet with our current provider go out due to an electrical storm. On the random occasions when it's been out, they've never really given us an explanation.

We had gotten out of Praise Team practice at our church this evening about 8:30 when it started to thunder and lightning pretty intensely. We hadn't eaten dinner so we decided to stop by our favorite local meat&three/grease joint. As we were eating, the lightning was getting closer and the thunder was getting louder. Then here comes the local fleet of fire trucks barreling down the road past the restaurant in full response mode.

"There goes Scott," I said to my wife. Scott is a friend of ours from church who is a member of the local fire department.

Knowing some nasty rain was about to start dropping, we hurried up, got in the car and headed home. It poured for about half of the way home and then stopped, along with the lightning and thunder.

"Crazy Upstate storms," I thought.

When we got in, we turned on the TV to check the local weather -- and we saw snow. I went into the office to check the Internet connection. Nothing.

Called our cable provider's service line. They said the electrical storm had knocked out service for a large part of the county, and they would call us when it was restored. I still haven't received that call.

Top Chef was about to come on, which we both wanted to watch. Now we couldn't. Neither of TVs were picking up any air signals on their own.

Then my wife asked, "Don't we have a box somewhere of all kinds of wires? Can't you rig something up?"

Yeah, sure. I'll McGyver something together. So as I hunted through our storage closet, I found the box I was looking for --- and inside was the set of rabbit ears that that my dad had bought probably 20 years ago or more at Radio Shack and I had taken to college. Sweet, let's give these a try.

I was hoping they would come out of the box with a coax adapter attached. No such luck. I did some more rummaging and found one. I did a little bit of repair work on one of the wires, crossed my fingers, and connected the rabbit ears to the TV.

Snow.

Ok, time to pirouette with the antenna, bend over backwards, point my finger in the air like John Travolta and see what we get. After some manuvering of the antenna to and fro, turning of its dial back and forth, and bracing one of the ears on the window curtain, we were set.

They picked up pretty good -- all of the immediate local channels and even, to a degree, the ABC signal coming down from the mountains of North Carolina.

"Enjoy it while it lasts honey," I said, "Next year this time, this isn't going to work."

H-Day. Feb 16, 2009. The day when all the TV stations are to have stopped broadcasting analog signals.

Maybe the the first electrical stom to take out our cable will end up being the last time I take out the rabbit ears. If that winds up being the case, they just got their last 75 minute hurrah.

I'll keep them around until then. But I'm not sure if after that February day next year I'll keep them stuffed in that box or throw them out. I really would have no reason to keep them around, other than as a prop for a forthcoming "When I was your age, I didn't have millions of little 0's and 1's coming down a beam of light into the TV. I used this baby right here to pick up TV signals" anecdote to be told to my yet-to-be-born children.