It started, innocently enough, with Hometime on PBS. A little framing, plumbing, or wiring (CAT-5… gaaahrgh) never hurt anybody. Then I started watching This Old House, even though Bob Vila makes me itch, when the 10-a-week syndicated reruns of Hometime on TLC weren’t enough. Then I came to Joanne Liebeler’s post-Hometime effort, despite its inane and repetitive instructions on how to do simple things like wire a light switch. If I surf through and see a wall being ripped open or cable being dropped, you have me. I will put the remote down. And eventually, I gave up all pretense of just “catching” these shows, because “nothing else is on.” On the other side of that mental leap, there lies HGTV. I am transfixed by Before & After, Lofty Ideas, Fantasy Open House, Extreme Homes—which is basically the home-show heroin. I’ve watched more HGTV in the last week than I normally watch television, total. I leave it on all the time now. If you snuck into my house while I slept and turned on my TV, you would find it’s tuned not to CNN, not to NBC, not to UPN, not to FX. (You’d also find a world of hurt, but that’s beside the point.) And now, just as I’m on the cusp of total addiction, comes a sign that not only am I not alone, I’m also far from the worst off among the pantheon of home-improvement addicts: the Hometime drinking game.