Unplugging

Kevin and I have been fighting the "TV fight" for a while. It seems to ebb and flow. We find ourselves watching too much TV (and even that is not that much comparatively), and make resolutions to cut back. That goes great for a while until life gets busy and we end up tired at the end of each day. Then the TV becomes the "filler" for the evening. We are suddenly watching stupid stuff because we're too tired to do anything else.

I was at a party at my friend Monica's house and was amazed to find how many projects she was working on, and I envied the time she seemed to have to work on them. She is a mom of three who she homeschools, so I couldn't figure out where she was coming up with all of this extra time. Then I realized that they don't have a TV.

Kevin and I talked seriously about it, and decided that we really like being able to watch movies, so we didn't want to get rid of the TV altogether, we just didn't want to get sucked in to the other aspects of it. So just after the election we took down our rabbit ears. Now we don't get ANY channels. It has been almost a month and I have to admit, I don't miss it! There are a few times when I realized that I would have turned it on, but it is very easy to find something else to do. Maybe it would have been different if we had had the discovery channel or the history channel, and I will always have a small place in my heart for PBS. We'll keep our rabbit ears in a safe place for special occasions (like if Masterpiece Theater ever does a Jane Austen series again!), but in the meantime we are really enjoying the extra time we suddenly have to work on some of the things we really want to be doing.

PS - Thanks, Monica!