The one about TV

Maybe I’m just becoming a crotchety old man now that I’ve hit my thirties, but I’m sick of paying for things that should be free. Or at least not so expensive. If you beam a signal at my house, I should be able to do whatever the crap I want with it. Or something like that. It was thinking like that that got me to cancel our cable television. Well, not so much cancel as stop paying for it. And then pay for what I got because collections agencies suck.

A couple weeks before the wedding, I decided we really needed to buckle down on some expenditures, so I just tossed the cable bill. Wouldn’t it be great if doing that were enough? Well, it was good enough for me. And two days after the wedding, it was good enough for Comcast, too. I am amazed at how long they will let you wait to get service that you want to pay for compared to how quickly they will respond when you no longer pay for said services. I figured we wouldn’t use it for the two weeks we were in Hawai’i, and it wasted our time and money anyway. Especially considering we no longer used Netflix as a source of excellent movies and instead watched things like The Punisher and Seinfeld re-runs non-stop.

I picked up a crappy little antenna at radio shack so we could at least catch local stations from time to time, but my long term goal is one of these babies. That’s right, I want to snag HDTV channels from down in Philly. We’ll see how successful that is, but at the worst it would cost me the same as about a month with the cable company – I think I can deal with that. Actually, we already have an antenna up on the roof that should give us decent reception for now. The problem is getting access to it. I managed to shimmy all the way across the rather steep incline over to the chimney, but the sucker is just out of my reach, and I can’t find anywhere to connect the coax.

In the meantime, Lisa and I just have to wait a day after any shows we follow air a new episode so that I can procure a copy via nearly legal methods over the ‘net. It’s even better than DVR because the commercials are already taken out for us. So now we are keeping up with the following shows:

• Prison Break – That’s right, we finally got into this one just in time for the second season. What a shame, considering the second season isn’t that great. We’re still watching, but interest is waning.
• Lost – Ah, the classic. I wasn’t thrilled with the season opener, and the second episode looked iffy, too, until *SPOILER*Sun finally shot that woman – thank god for some bloodshed! Oh, sorry for that…
• House – We still love it. Yes, it’s formulaic, but the characters are fantastic.
• How I Met Your Mother – Got into this one late in the first season. It’s cute and funny and Neil Patrick Harris just plain rocks. I’m holding out hope that Alison Hannigan’s character is on her way out as I don’t really like her.
• My Name is Earl – We just caught the first episode of the new season and I had trouble holding back the laughter. Actually, I’m sure Lisa will testify to the fact that I didn’t even try.

I’m hesitant to even talk about the new series (Heroes and Jericho) that we’re really enjoying after all three of the sci fi/mystery/thriller shows from last year went belly-up. There’s also the mid-summer ones that we got into (Kyle XY and Eureka), although that somewhat fizzled (largely because Lisa couldn’t get into Eureka at all). I’m wondering why I ever thought it was necessary to pay for 200+ channels that I never watched and another 20 channels I shouldn’t have watched.