As little use as I have for television in general and TV sets in particular, I knew what to get Barb for her birthday that would be a surprise. 
  The antique 19” TV in our loft is the one Barb had when I met her nearly 20 years ago. It is a color set, but the controls are knobs. It doesn’t work with a remote, and when you turn it off, it spews a loud burst of electronic noise. 
  We don’t have cable. Our neighbors received PBS from Seattle on an antenna, and that’s about all we really cared about. 
  I put up the biggest rotating antenna Radio Shack had in stock. It gets Seattle, Victoria, Vancouver, and Bellingham. What it doesn't get very well is PBS Channel 9, and when the wind blows hard, the antenna twists in its gearbox and locks against the stop. All in all, it’s an unsatisfactory arrangement for anyone who wants to watch anything other than movies on the VCR. 
  I haven’t watched TV regularly since Northern Exposure went off the air, but there are some programs Barb likes to watch, especially when I’m at work and there’s no one for her to talk to but the dog and the cat. 
  So I decided to get her a new TV and a dish. Old dishes are as large and unsightly as a deep space radio telescope, but new ones are small and unobtrusive. 
  We’d talked some about getting a dish, but, for some reason, Barb considers lack of local programming a minus. It looks as if Congress is going to allow satellite companies to offer local channels soon, though, and we can still use the windblown antenna. 
  With my penchant for long-range planning, I went shopping the day before Barb’s birthday. I’d first thought to get a small screen TV. Big screens suck people in like black holes; people watch even when there’s nothing to watch. 
  The new TV wasn’t going to be for me, though, so, after I bought the dish at Mobile Music in Port Angeles, I stopped off at Costco on the way home and picked up a 25” TV with audio/video inputs on the front where you can reach them. 
  Barb didn’t see me stagger into the basement with the TV box. I set it amid the clutter on my side of the garage, hidden in plain sight. I left the dish in the truck. 
  Barb was going to Silverdale the next day—her birthday—to look for a couple of Christmas gifts she couldn’t find locally. I got to work installing the dish as soon as she left. A couple of hours should be plenty, I thought. 
  Bolting the dish to the side of the house above the back door was easy. So was setting the 35-degree elevation by the markings on the support. I added the 21 degrees magnetic variation to the 155 degrees the man who sold me the dish said was the proper direction for the satellite and eyeballed the initial setting. 
  The antenna cable runs through a hole in the roof under an eave of the upper level, sheltered from rain and plugged with roofing tar. I chipped out the rock-hard tar and ran the dish cable through the same hole. 
  All of this took several hours, but Barb’s shopping took longer. I had the new TV in place, cables connected, boxes and manuals hidden, and tools put away by the time she got home. 
  I told her I hadn’t forgotten to get her a birthday gift, but that she had to find it. I wanted her to find it before dark because refining the aim of the dish toward the satellite would require both of us. 
  She found it fast. When cleaning up, I’d missed a box that had been full of installation parts. 
  Barb stayed inside with the phone watching the display on the TV screen while I went up the ladder with a wrench and a cell phone and made adjustments as Barb called out signal strength numbers from the screen. 
  We got the dish aimed and went out to dinner, but I’m not through yet. I have two new manuals to read, and I have to read the VCR manual again to get all this stuff to work together. And three different remotes are two too many. 
  The dish remote can be taught to talk to the VCR and the TV, the book says, but I’ll try to figure that out tomorrow.