Finally my good friend has taken my advice and chosen the path of surrender over futile resistance against the hypnotic pull of televised sporting events.  She finally got a PVR.  For those of you who haven’t yet joined the ranks of the less righteous, this means that live TV can be paused for pee breaks, replayed and recorded at the click of a button.  No more setting up the clock on the VCR to record your favourite show…only to be bitterly disappointed when you find out you’ve accidentally recorded Sesame Street at 8am instead of the lovely Jamie Oliver at 8pm.

But how did the PVR save my marriage?  Well my husband, like my friend’s, is a  sports fiend – hockey and football mostly.  But when a major sporting event like the World Cup or Olympics is on, the kids and I could go to Mexico and leave a Roomba vacuum and a couple of those flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz to keep the house noisy and messy and he wouldn’t notice us gone.  We used to squabble when sports were on when the 5-7pm witching hour was upon us.  While I do enjoy watching hockey, the din of cheering fans and bubble-headed sportscasters was just too much to take over the regular racket of hungry kids and pets.  Now those early east coast games get PVRd so that we can have dinner and conversation, do homework and unfortunately listen to my daughter’s violin practice (sounds like she’s killing the cat) before the game goes on.  The best part of it is that 3 hours of hockey can get condensed into 1 and a half.  Brilliant!  And Football Day (known to most as Sunday) can be shortened, paused and best yet – deleted.

Now I have to say that I like the PVR too; I can record my shows while he’s watching hockey or football or sailing (major snoozefest).  There was one particular day in February that the PVR probably saved us from divorce or at least full scale mutiny.  My youngest was invited to a Birthday party that happened to be in the middle of the gold medal Olympic hockey game.  After a heated discussion about whether it would be considered bad parenting to put her in a cab, I agreed to drive her.   We had a houseful of people here for the game and when it was time to take her we paused it, I left a bucket of wings to keep everyone busy and I drove at breakneck speed (55.5km/hr) through completely deserted streets to drop her off; I may have even left the car running outside in the loading zone.  I returned home and we shut curtains, closed windows and didn’t answer the phone as we’re were watching 20 minutes behind the rest of the world, but eventually we caught up to the live broadcast and rejoiced with everyone else.  Three cheers for Canada…and the PVR!

While I’m not suggesting that TV runs our lives and I know that a lot of you are saying that I should just turn it off.  I could and I do.  But if petty squabbles over televised sports can be eliminated for pennies a day, I’m in.  We have enough to argue about.