So there’s this thing going on right now where people from all of these different countries get together and run around and stuff.They only do it every four years – probably because airfare is so expensive these days – and this time around it’s China’s turn at bat.

Maybe you’ve heard of it?

Now I’ll freely admit that I’m not really much of an Olympics fan – all of that running and jumping and overall competing makes me tired just thinking about it! Give me a sport like competitive spell checking or paper airplane making or even just sitting around, watching TV and I might be able to get a little more into it, but otherwise I’d just as soon watch reruns of The Simpsons and find out who got the most gold medals in the paper in a couple of weeks…

Of course, I’m sure I’m not the first one in this situation to discover that even when you’re not that much of a fan yourself, your TV viewing habits are certainly still affected by the big Olympic games when you share a home with someone else who just can’t get enough of that competitive fix! And I’m not even talking about the idea of chicks and dudes bending and stretching and contorting into impossible positions on the tube every time I walk into the room – just between you and me, I think I’d actually prefer gymnastics to some of those creepy murder-mystery, crime-solving shows that my own fiancée is forever hooked on – nobody ever dies at the Olympics. Or at least they don’t take great lengths to show you the bodies from 27 different angles and 143 different hypotheses of just how the killing might’ve gone down.

My situation, you see, rears its ugly head long after my loving fiancée has gone to bed and I’m looking for a little recreational time in front of the old boob tube before turning in myself, for I soon learned after that explosive opening ceremony last week that although she may be in the bedroom with dreams of sugarplums dancing through her head, every facet of the Olympic spirit, from gymnastics to swimming to men’s pole vaulting, is alive and kicking on the TV for the purposes of being streamed into our DVR for later enjoyment. Which by itself is fine – that’s the whole point of having a digital video recorder – except for one slight problem … TV existed on our DVR before the Olympics.

Meaning that basically, for the last seven nights, my TV viewing activities have basically consisted of the following steps:

  1. Turn on TV.
  2. Select favorite station.
  3. Sigh in disappointment when told that between the Olympics and any of a number of my fiancee’s absolute favorite shows, roughly 100% of our DVR’s available viewing capacity is currently in use.

So not only is non-stop Olympic coverage dominating the recording space on our DVR to the point where we had to delete shows that have been lingering around since last Christmas, it’s even cutting deep into what I can watch in real time at any given moment. Basically, unless I’m interested in watching dudes in spandex swimming the backstroke or dudes in spandex jumping over stuff, I’m going to actually have to do some work in the evenings instead of just watching TV! Clearly no good can come from this situation…

Seriously, what’s a TV lover to do?! Two excruciating weeks of some of the fiercest, most impressive competitions the world will ever see – now if only it didn’t stand between me and the usual tasteless drivel that I zone out to in the wee hours of the night! I could order a second DVR from the cable company to help even the score, so to speak, but something tells me that between the laughs from the cable company and the scoldings from my fiancée for senselessly blowing money so close to our wedding, that solution might not go over so well, either! Maybe next time around, we’ll see Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin and even Bender competing for the gold at the 2012 Olympics in London – now that I might actually watch!

Of course, until beer, beer, and hard liquor become mainstays in the Olympic games, I’m kind of thinking that my favorite cartoon characters are going to be on “vacation” those weeks, too. But it’s only another nine days – nobody’s ever gone into television withdrawal after only 16 days, right?

Right?!

It’s starting to get fuzzy around here already. They say that they reception is the first to go…