Ah, the plight of the not quite-upper lower-class: living from paycheck to paycheck. Well, we didn't quite make it this time, so we had our cable/internet shut off over the weekend. We knew it was coming, so it's not like it caught us off guard. We were prepared, mentally prepared our child, had plenty of DVDs at the ready, and simply shrugged when we found that we had a little "This channel is not available" message when we turned on the TV on Friday.
Personally, I thought this might be a nice little break from being so "connected." We have the tv on far too much - basically all the time, and most of the time we're not even watching anything that we're interested in - we go through the guide over and over just to put on something that we can tolerate just for "something to watch" and still just sit there in the living room doing nothing. Also, throw in the fact that we would have no internet, so there would be no hours of facebooking to "kill time" We would actually have to do things like play games or read or clean or *gasp* go somewhere.
The cable was shut off on Friday and the internet on Saturday. Because of this one night gap, the boys were still able to stream Netflix all night, so they were basically unaffected. Saturday was the day I was waiting for. I got up, took my walk/jog, made coffee, sat in the silence and enjoyed it. That is, until my son got up, remembered he didn't have to be online in order to play video games and commenced slaughtering some Nazis. Not long after that, the hubby got up and decided to tether the laptop to his cell phone so he could still get internet.
Hold the phone here...no, no, no...no internet. If we're gonna be shut off, let's be shut off! Apparently he didn't feel the need for this little break from cyberspace, so he spent a good amount of time online watching millions of episodes of Farscape streaming on his large laptop screen on Netflix. Sigh.
I filled my days by reading (though every time I did, I'd end up falling asleep), walking, making lists of movies that we own, getting the guys out of the house from time to time, and constantly checking my BlackBerry for emails and facebook updates. Okay, okay, I didn't do too well either, but I found I could tolerate the lack of cable. It was the internet that seemed to be the tough part.
So, we've come to the decision that we're going to get rid of cable tv and rely on the internet for any of our television viewing. It's going to be a bit of a change for us, but at least it's a step. It's also going to be saving us a chunk of change every month (remember the paycheck to paycheck thing?) and maybe it might get us out of our "watching something for no good reason" habit. Once we get that accomplished, maybe we'll get working on the "killing time doing nothing on the internet" habit. Well, maybe we'll have to see about that. One can only hope!
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