apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Wow! Thanks for adding me to the Parenting Blog Round Up. Long time reader here so it was a little surreal to my blog listed here. You've made my month!

We've been 9 months without cable. 2 channels (one of them PBS) with rabbit ears on our spare-room TV. Certain things I miss, but I know I've been much more productive without it. Will be interesting to see how our lives change when our basement family room is finished and our new TV plugs in.

We've been unplugged from cable for quite some time now. After reading The Plug in Drug, by Marie Winn, I just couldn't justify having it. We have a very specific selection of DVDs that we allow our two year old to watch, but certainly not every day and they are not full length movies.

Sassypiggy, I wish we got PBS, that's one channel I really do miss. We can only pick up two channels with rabbit ears and sadly, that is not one of them. We always got it in Minneapolis though!

We didn't bring the tv when we moved last November. We have a little portable DVD player so we can watch shows or movies on that, but that's it. It was a weird adjustment and one that is a little frustrating at time (for instance, knowing the Heroes premiere is coming up) but overall it's been lovely.

We've been without cable for a long time; it was frustrating at times because we couldn't get certain channels. Most of the time, though, we just turn it off and do other things, which is wonderful.

We got a digital converter box for Christmas, and we ended up getting all of the channels with a crystal-clear picture, plus a bunch of additional digital channels we weren't aware of (the local networks have extra channels that are weather all the time, and now we have 5 or 6 PBS channels, and more!). Check your area to see how many digital channels are available. If you don't have an HD-ready TV, you'll have to get a converter box in 10 months anyway, and (I think) an antenna. We're lucky--our condo building has a rooftop antenna. Didn't help much til we got the converter box, though.

With cable, there would always be something on and we wouldn't have much motivation to turn it off. So it's been a very good thing, plus a money-saver.

We haven't had cable in 10 years. It is one expense we can definitely live without. Of course, living in Chicago, we can get 10 channels in English and a few more in Spanish. We even get two different PBS stations, so it is not like we're roughing it. If we did have cable, I'd just watch too much TV.