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Friday, September 6, 2013

Cutting the Cable

     Well, we did it. We cancelled our cable. I had gotten to the point where I felt television was taking over our lives. We had gotten bad about having it on ALL. THE. TIME. We would leave it on during dinner, if we quickly ran to the store, sometimes we would even fall asleep with it on and leave it on all night.

     We had many discussions on the pros and cons of cancelling cable. I was hoping that it would keep the t.v. from being on all the time and it would save us around $100 an month. My husband was worried about the availability of sports programming if we just had local channels. In the end, we decided to try it. We figured we could stream Netflix or something similar through our smart t.v. and of course we could always have cable re-installed if we decided we just couldn't live without it.

    It has been five months and we are still here! The world hasn't ended and the sky hasn't fallen. We have spent more time doing things like this:


     I will say it is a pain not having cable. For various reasons we ended up cancelling our internet when we cancelled cable. No internet means no smart t.v., so we went and bought some rabbit ears and have been using those. They aren't very reliable. Sometimes we get six or seven channels, sometimes we get two and we only get reception in the living room. It has taken some getting used to and while I'm glad we did it, there are a few things I'm not happy with:

  • The lack of children's programming: we are unable to get the local PBS station with our antenna and there just isn't anything available for Baylee to watch. Saturday morning doesn't even offer cartoons anymore! We have acquired more dvd's since cutting the cable.
  • I miss watching the news. I am a NEWS JUNKIE and not being able to watch CNN or FOXNews is very hard for me. I've been getting all of my news (even local) by following various news agencies on twitter. Not quite the same, but it works. 
I know my husband wishes we had cable back. While he still gets most of the football games, he hates having to get up to adjust the rabbit ears when he flips back and forth between channels. I hate having to hear him grumble about having rabbit ears hooked to a $700 television every time he has to adjust them. The Winter Olympics will be on soon, so I'm sure something will have changed by then.

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