TV

When I first married my husband he had 4 television sets. He lived in a college town where graduating students would put the stuff they couldn't take with them out on the curb, so it wasn't hard to pick up a few. Then I brought my own television set into the marriage leaving us with a grand total of 5. There was one for the living room, one for the kitchen, one for the bedroom, one for the guest room and one for the office. I'm honest surprised we didn't have one for the bathroom! I immediately embarked on a quest to reduce us to a 1 tv set family. This was more difficult than I had imagined as my husband didn't want to give up a single set. But I finally wore him down and we moved to California with only one tv. After that I had a new goal. Get rid of the cable. For one, I hated that I allowed Mwende to watch so much tv. It just seemed so much easier to just let her watch tv to keep her entertained. I worked in a lot of playdates so try and offset that, but when we were home the tv always seemed to be on. In addition to that, my husband depended on the tv for his downtime. So when he got home from work the tv really was always on. (Especially in March for college basketball's "March Madness"). So at some point the tv started to stand for everything I didn't want in life. Zombies for kids and a husband who's attention I had to compete for.

So here we are in California with 1 tv. I started trying to talk Patrick into canceling the cable a couple of years back. He was definitely not keen on the idea. Then this past weekend he surprised me. He was in Indianapolis on a business trip and called me out of the blue to say that he thought we should cancel the cable and just order Netflix. I was ecstatic! Finally. So we made the calls to Time Warner and canceled the cable and upgraded the internet (from Road Runner Lite to Road Runner Basic) to enable streaming Netflix. We'll get some rabbit ears so we can continue to watch the news (and maybe a little American Idol! Okay, that's just me). I bet Patrick will even get the occasional basketball game on ABC or NBC or something. And if I can't get FOX with the rabbit ears, that's okay. I will survive without American Idol and I probably don't really want to listen to Mary Murphy's screeching on So You Think You Can Dance anyhow.

By the way, somehow we ended up with a new tv set through this whole thing. That's okay though, I made sure the old one went out to the curb.