Free TV is a lot of work

I have always felt that television, like lions, should be free.

But more than half of U.S. homes have cable TV, a fact which amazed the tightwad in me until I tried to install my own digital TV antenna this week. Now I appreciate cable's allure.

Although free digital TV signals may be sharp and beautiful compared to the old VHF ones, without an antenna they are as elusive to capture as Rachael Ray's appeal.

We muddle by in the living room with a set of digital rabbit ears, which are about as aesthetically pleasing as a couple of celery stalks on a wedding cake. Plus, arise from the couch and you block the digital signal, turning the TV picture into instant modern art—Man Swatting Tiny Cubed Bees, perhaps.

In the bedroom, we have been analog for years. That is not a double entendre, we just have an old TV. Had. I finally set it out on the curb last weekend with a sign—"Vintage. Still works. Picks up original episodes of 'Gilligan's Island.'" It was gone in minutes.

The digital TV which replaced it did not come with an antenna, of course, because TV manufacturers own stock in HBO. So I went to an electronics store, where the grudging acknowledgment of non-cable-subscribed humans was on display via a whopping two choices of antennae.

I chose one which purported to be "indoor/outdoor" and "water resistant." In my experience, "water resistant" is to "waterproof" as abstinence is to contraception. They both do the same thing, but one of them only does it right up until it doesn't.

My thinking was, I might put the bedroom's antenna on the roof, free from signal interference, but then I realized that would involve buying an extension ladder, and once you own an extension ladder, you are invited to perform any number of tree-related jobs you don't really want.

I thought about putting the antenna up in the attic, but that would require going into the attic.

So I resolved to mount the antenna, which was of a pleasing white plastic Tupperware Moderne style, high on the bedroom wall, where it would be unlikely to encounter any water requiring resistance.

The mounting plate came with four screws, which for some reason were not long enough for the job. Or I did the job wrong, a possibility whose odds I lay at about 50/50.

Luckily, my garage is awash in screws—slot-head, Phillips-head, hex-cap, spline drive, spanner head—because if there is one thing a man cannot throw away, it is a screw. Screws are to men as yarn is to women.

So I had screws enough, four long ones, but first I had to drill them a home. The joys of owning an old house are many, but they do not include the task of drilling through lath and plaster walls.

Lath, when introduced to a drill, bows away playfully, then pushes back. Old plaster seems to be as much sand as it is anything, and happily coats your new digital TV set, which you have thoughtlessly forgotten to cover.

But never let it be said that there is a wall I could not bend to my will, even if the result does require a half-day repainting job.

I angled the antenna this way and that and managed to snag most major channels and even more obscure ones. Who knew they had Armenian soap operas?

The good news is, our bedroom TV now gets a crisp, spectacular signal. The bad news—mornings I cannot manage to pry myself from bed until I have found out whether Anoush will take Vartan back, the philandering creep.

Sometimes I think we were better off before electricity.