The Best Belated Christmas Present Ever

Let me give you a little background information on the girls' section.

They have a TV and a DVD player, but they lost the remote control ages ago. That means they can't use any DVD menus; they just have to play DVDs as they are. But a big majority of the DVDs here come in English and can only be switched over to Spanish by navigating to the setup part of the DVD menus. So, the girls can hardly ever watch regular DVDs in Spanish, which means they are always asking me to bring the volunteers' DVD player down to the section, which means the DVD player is missing from our house on a regular basis. It's kind of a pain in las nalgas. For them, for me, for my housemates who wonder where the DVD player walked off to, pretty much for everyone involved.

So, drumroll please....I bought the girls a universal remote control! Yayyyy!!

I brought it down to the section last night, and good lord was it the most impossible thing to program. Their TV and DVD players are such old/crappy versions that none of the remote control's listed codes would work. Instead, I had to hold the remote still, pointed at the DVD player, for forever so that it could search for the right code. But it found it eventually!

Then, after climbing that big hurdle, we ran into the problem of navigating the DVD menus. The only arrows located anywhere on the control -- just volume and channels -- didn't do a dang thing on the menu screen. Well that figures. Another 20 minutes later, after reading the entire instruction manual and then just resorting to trying every button on the control, I discovered that on this particular remote you use the numbers to navigate menus. (In other words, if you want to select the 4th item listed on the menu, you have to press 4 + Enter.) Who on earth has ever heard of that? Guatemala is so weird.

However, when all was said and done, the instant I got that DVD to play in Spanish, I just started shrieking -- and the girls started shrieking with me. I'm not actually sure who was more excited about this exciting development in our movie-watching experience, me or them.

Later, after forcing Yohana and Estrella to pay close attention and learn to use the remote control so they could teach the other girls, I headed home to bed, exhausting from so much trial-and-error and general brain frustration. But thanks to the new working universal remote, I was in the best mood EVER! :)