Hello ferret guru's Shelli Blair commented on the effort and preparation she made to see "Pet News" on Fox that early Saturday mourning, only to be ridiculed by her boy friend. Well Shelli you stand not alone! Not that your boy friend ridiculed me, but the fact that we also suffer from "Ferret Insanity" and not from just TV, but from ferret anything. Our preparation started early Friday evening around 6:00 PM with the "great tape search". In most cases this happens five minutes before a show starts and you are searching for a blank tape you know you just bought. After searching through all the "Barney the Dinosaur", "Thomas the Tank Engine, "Power Rangers" and all the other preoccupation aids (For those of us with kids). You finally get to the tapes you can call your own, only to find out that new tape you bought is not there. And adding to the frustration is four curious George ferrets, who feel it is their duty to tumble the neatly stacked tapes and explore a cabinet cavity they have never seen before. So now that we have found some tapes (without labels) you can record to, at least you think they are blank nobody would record to a tape and not label it. WRONG!! And then you hear a voice from another room "You better check those tapes". Heaven forbid we would record over some Barney or Thomas episode. After fast forwarding through 8 tapes I finally found one with sufficient enough blank space to record the momentous event. Now I have everything in order, a blank tape, set the VCR timer and put all the tapes back (No thanks to my four friends) all before 8:30 PM. And what do I hear! "Dad did check and see if the VCR would record? It didn't work the last time I tried it." WHAT!! I couldn't believe it. He sat behind me the whole time and didn't say word until now. Sure enough the @(!^!@!#! thing would not record. That's OK we have two VCR's. So I replaced it, plugged it in and turned it on. Guess what? It wasn't working either. What did I do to deserve this? By this time a small panic was starting to set in. The possibility of not being able to record Fox's Pet News and the ferret story was out of the question. What was I going to do? I was to embarrassed to call any of our friends (Non ferret owners) they already questioned our sanity. So asking them to get up early and tape a show they would never watch, would probably be a little unrealistic. The obvious choice was family. I called every immediate family member on both mine and my wife's side. Only to find out nobody was home or the VCR virus had struck them as well. It was now close 9:30 PM and things were starting to get really desperate. I was ready for just about any idea, except for the one my wife blurted out "Lets go buy a new VCR" and she was serious. While pondering for a possible solution my five-year old son said "Dad are you going to fix the VCR". Now in his eyes I can fix anything, just ask him. I 'm a systems engineer and have a pretty keen mechanical aptitude but very little electronics background. So what was the worst thing that could happen? By12:30 AM. I had successfully disassembled, cleaned and reassembled both VCRs to their original but cleaner non-working conditions. I couldn't imagine the disappointment on the faces of my wife and kids. Not having a taped copy of what was sure to be a glorious and educational ferret experience. My mind was racing. Maybe I will have to drive to our 24 HR Walmart or Myers and buy a new VCR. Then like a divined intervention the solution came to me. THE CAMCORDER!. I forgot the camcorder. After several trail and error steps I finally got it to record from the cable. SALVATION!! (At 1:45 am) The only bad thing was the camcorder had no automatic recording timer, so it was necessary for me to be up and get it started. Fortunately for us Pet News did not come on here until 9:00 am so everybody was already awake except for my wife. I let her sleep until it was show time (That's the kind of husband I am). At 5 minutes before 9:00 AM I started the morning preparation, I woke up my sleeping wife, got all the fuzzies gathered in the living room, started the camcorder and sat down for the eagerly anticipated event surely to be a revaluation to ferret owners around the world. Seven minutes later my wife was turning to me asking that same question heard around the globe by those eagerly awaiting ferret owners "Is that it??" I have to wonder if they used a bulldozer to help Sally, her table of goodies and the fuzzies off the stage just to save time and get to their dog and cat stories, like there isn't enough of those. God I love this FML Jerry [Posted in FML issue 2256]