So, I gots me some enthusiasm.

Imagine, if you will, a time in which you had to sit down in front of yout TV at, say, Friday night at 8:30, to watch, say, the Planet of the Apes TV show. If your parents were talking and you missed what the astronauts said as they were making quinine out of tree bark to save the malaria-stricken ape village, you had to hope that one of your friends had caught it and would tell you on the playground on Monday.

So it's almost hard for me to articulate how much better my life is for having my TiVo hooked up to the television without sounding like some sort of cult member. We've just celebrated our eighth anniversary together, my TiVo and me, and I wanted to send it a little love letter.

I didn't want to get the TiVo, but Mimi really did, and so I said, "OK, but this is like a puppy. You have to take care of it, because I don't want to deal with this thing AT ALL." I'm not exactly a technophobe; I can hook up the gizmos and rip-and-burn CDs, and that sort of thing… but the gadgets need to have the bugs worked out before I want to get behind 'em. I wouldn't be nearly as an early-adopter of the new gee-whizzes as I am if it weren't for Mimi.

As long as they keep making what Garth Ennis calls the "wee notebook" and something to write in them with, I won't be getting a Crackberry, for example.

But the missus really wanted the TiVo, so there you go.

So, she brings it home, and spends an afternoon setting it up. "Hah," I think, "it takes three hours to set up? What a piece of crap." Until she explains it's getting info downloaded from the TiVo mothership, or something, and that the two or three hours set up only has to be done once, and it's basically a computer, and that's how long it took to get the office computers back together after we moved, so I should just shut up.

So I put on some tea, smugly, thinking that she was wasting her time with this thing that, even if I had heard some glazed-eyed techies talking about it in worshipful tones, could not possibly be as cool as they said it was. So we read the documentation on their website, and I had to admit that the set-up interface was very approachable, and I found myself going from "get that away from me" to "cautiously optimistic" about it.

I have never missed an episode of DIRTY JOBS.

Oh, I love my TiVo. Love it love it love it. I actually spend less time watching TV, instead of more, because it's only stuff I want to watch, ready for me whenever I damn well feel like watching it. It is a little black box of heaven made just for me.

TiVo; oh, I love you.