Saturday, September 11, 2010

A Weekend Lost To Television

I kind of gave in to what I always said I'd never do today - I got cable.  Not cable cable, mind you - just the sort of super basic cable that allows us to watch local TV channels again.  

When we moved into this house, it was hard to get TV reception without cable, but Lone Star Pa got a basic outdoor antenna and we were good. I enjoy a little TV but never wanted the sort of TV watching that I think would happen with all those cable channels.  I am frankly not sure I could resist SyFy myself.  When the TV channels went digital, we got one of those free-after-rebate converter boxes so we could keep watching our local TV channels without cable or an expensive digital TV.   The box didn't work great, but it worked well enough.


Sometime during the summer, though, it just stopped working at all.  Lone Star Pa was fine with being Tv-less, but I was sad that there was no summer PBS kids for the Lone Star Baby and I do want to watch V when it comes back and the occasional late night Roseanne rerun ... but it was not a huge deal.  The kicker for me, though, has been not having convenient access to the local weather reports on the news.  You can get them all online but it takes all this searching and loading and it just isn't convenient.  I feel more secure if I can watch local news reports when things, especially storms, are going down.


So...I called around.  Grande doesn't service our area and besides them, only Time-Warner seemed to have a small local channels package, so I went with them.  It costs more than I like but it costs a whole lot less than what most people seem to consider "basic cable".  The cable guy came today and installed it.


And...surprise, surprise...we have all the channels that come in what most people consider a basic package - not just the ones we paid for.  To much distress from the other members of the household, I ran outside to catch the cable guy before he left.  He said that it would be like this for a little while, probably and then someone would come out and restrict the channels.  Oh.  


So the kids are having a predictable Disney Channel marathon.  Sigh.

1 comment:

Saints and Spinners said...

Funny! It's hard to be the Voice of Reason.

I loved it when thunderstorms would knock our basic cable into one that got MTV. That would last for a couple of days, and then in the middle of a video, it would be gone.

P.S. Not sure I could resist SyFy either.