I have eight brothers and sisters and we all share a cabin in the mountains south of Lake Tahoe. This cabin has one of those old, rear projection “big screen” TV’s in an oak cabinet. We were ever so shrewd to demand that it stay when we bought the place. Now I have no idea how we are going to extract the monster when it dies.  And it is very near dead.

Well, on top of this behemoth sits a pile of more recent innovations. A nice Marantz A/V Receiver hooked up to  Cambridge Soundworks surround speakers. An Onkyo five-disc DVD player. A Pioneer Karaoke player complete with two mics (we all love to perform, just not in public). And an old DirecTV receiver. Add to all this the old PC running Windows XP which I stupidly gave a wireless connection to the broadband router so that it could be better located.

Now all of my siblings know that I taught myself how to program a computer in the ninth grade. I was always the kid who could not stand to walk by a blinking VCR without setting the clock. And now I can tell them why the grey bar at the bottom of their iPhone screen no longer contains icons. Or why they can see the Karaoke on the TV, but hear the DirecTV over the speakers. They know all they need to do is call. And they always call. Especially from the cabin.