1 year

I remember it clearly because I was "counting down the day" and unsure how we would survive or react.

Monday June 9, 2008 was the day we had told the satellite company to turn off our "connection" to their system. It was the day we moved to only what we could pick up with rabbit ears.

Y'all...we bought an HDTV LCD television in April of 08. Then, less than 2 months later I had killed the connection to television shows on cable. That TV, while we love it now, at the time could have had a sign put up on it that said, "Stupid Tax."

If you don't know what Stupid Tax is, please please go visit DaveRamsey.com. ;)

We do not consider ourselves very weird at all, but perhaps we are. We are loving life without cable television. It's not life without TV though. We still watch shows and movies. We just rent movies/shows/dvds through Netflix OR we stream things through the internet.

As we're a slightly "geeky" family, and as such had more computers than people (not really but not far off either), we now have a dedicated "dinosaur" of a computer that is connected to our TV and directly to our HIGH SPEED cable internet (oh how we dream of a T1 connection or our old really fast DSL). Nothing is on the computer anymore, it's a glorified terminal to the internet. It doesn't really have as much RAM as we'd like, so things are not perfectly smooth...but oh...all the shows you can see!!! Well, they do have commercials, but only 1 or 2 every commercial break period.

Except it seems more people are doing this so less and less are free, and more and more sites have fees associated with them...fees like $5/month. Netflix has instant play shows, and LOTS of them...shows like Engineering an Empire on PBS (yeah...we're a tad weird, but I have already admitted to being a geeky household).

I foresee a future though where instead of cable we're streaming tv shows, movies, news, etc. and watching on the tv. We'll have to pay for the service, but I predict that we'll be paying on a per site basis...so this household would pay for Sci-Fi and CBS most likely and leave the Golf channel alone. Oh, we'll have to pay for the NASA channel as well I guess as the boys seems to love it for some odd reason.

This was all part of a self-reflection on being wasteful with resources. We didn't really USE the cable television, we didn't get the $55+ enjoyment out of it every month, so why have it? It also started something in our lives where we were cleaning out all the unnecessary things, simplifying things somewhat...and it was all part of that quest for "finding family time" with each other doing things the old fashioned way...you know, not connected to electronic things 24/7.