Remember how I asked you all for your advice on making the big leap to give up cable? I couldn’t believe how many of you already had, how many of you had lived without it for years. I felt a little bad for those of you without it. You poor, deprived souls, living without your Bravo and HGTV. Oh, I didn’t want to have to suffer through like you had.
But, we would save $65 a month, nearly $800 a year. *sigh* So I stood idly by while my husband unplugged the cable box and drove it back to the Verizon store. And then I had a moment of silence for the loss of Teen Mom and Real Housewives of the OC.
Scott, being the frugal and handy man he is, built us a digital antenna that is now in our attic, and we get THIRTY THREE channels for free. Granted, half of them are Spanish and a third of them are religious programming and weather channels, but STILL. Free.
Among those, though, are actually some pretty decent channels. Did you know PBS plays kid’s shows Monday through Friday from 6 am through 5 pm? Not gonna lie, most days our TV just hangs on out PBS during the day. Well, that is after I get done drinking my coffee and watching Kathy Lee & Hoda (a sick addiction, I tell you).
We also get a channel called Qubo, which is kid’s programming all day, although it’s sorta like b-list, low grade animation programming, but it doesn’t seem to bother the children.
And here in Dallas, I’ve discovered NBC Nonstop, which, while not an HD channel (we can pick up the basic channels in HD with our digital antenna), it fills the void of not having HGTV and the Food Network just a little bit. You know, it’s just one of those channels that’s nice to have on while you’re folding laundry and not too invested in what’s on. They have programming about local food places, and home decorating shows.
If that’s not enough to satisfy my home decorating and cooking cravings for knowledge and ideas, I just turn to the internet. Pinterest is my new muse for both of these things.
Really, we’ve found things like the internet and digital magazines on the iPad, and, *gasp* books and toys to fill the time we used to spend watching crap TV on cable.
We still get to see all our favorite shows in some form or another. We can watch prime time shows on ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox in HD on our TV still. We have Netfilx hooked up through our Wii, and hopefully we’ll add Hulu Plus to that soon, too, whenever they release it for the Wii. We can hook our iPad up to the TV to watch shows we can find online.
The only thing we’re really missing at this point is a DVR, but Scott says he can make us one out of our old computer. Oh, and sports. I guess sometimes it can suck that we don’t get ESPN or TBS, but we don’t watch it enough to justify $65 a month, especially when you can still see plenty of games on the basic channels.
Honestly, seriously, we one hundred percent do not miss it. Sure, there was a bit of an adjustment period. I’d say it took a couple weeks to get used to it, but now I just can’t believe we went that long paying that much money for that much crap.
So there’s my update. We’ve been without it for 3ish months now. If you’re on the fence, I say pull the plug and give it a couple weeks. I really don’t think you’ll miss it.
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