After going eight grueling months without it, I am pleased to announce that we have DVR again. (I know, you were waiting for this news with bated breath, constantly checking back to find out … did she get DVR yet??? Your wait is at an end.)

The DirecTV commericals about their latest kind of DVR got me thinking, and I looked into Comcast’s pricing yesterday. Since we’ve been customers for more than six months (and hadn’t bounced a check or had the cable shut off), we could get the DVR box for free, no deposit. No installation fee, either, because Matt dropped off the old box and picked up the new one to install himself — he said it was blindingly easy. We dropped a channel package and are paying a total of $5 more per month for DVR instead. SO WORTH IT.

However, the DVR’s hard drive has a freaking LOUD fan that’s always on, even if the power is off. (Not if you unplug it, or in our case, turn off the power strip.) That might take some getting used to.

It has the most bizarre way of toggling the closed captioning. It was on when Matt hooked up the box, and neither of us could figure out a combination of buttons to turn it off — complicated by the fact that the captioning itself covered up menu options — and Comcast’s online FAQs directed me only to a mythical User Settings menu, without giving me a path to get there. My Google-fu then led me to a forum where people bitch about cable TV (there’s forums for everything, apparently). A post there said that to get to the User Settings menu, you have to turn the box off, leave the TV on, then push the Menu button, and the User Settings menu appears on the TV screen. Make a selection and turn the box back on. I am here to tell you it works, even if it is unbelievably weird and counterintuitive.

That done, I can record anything I like, even if it’s on during a Caps hockey game (Matt is a fan). Unfortunately, I’ve been out of the TV loop long enough that there’s nothing in particular I want to record. Suggestions, readers?