I wrote back in January about “Cutting the Cord”  and getting rid of cable. At that time, we had ordered the indoor antenna and antenna booster. It has taken us longer than it should but we have finally installed the antenna.

After attaching the antenna and antenna booster to each other (10 seconds); my husband attached the antenna to the TV and then to the wall (less than 5 minutes). The next step is to change the TV setting from cable to antenna. At this point, the TV has to use the antenna to find channels. This process took about 15 minutes. The TV found 47 channels. I was surprised. While I cannot tell you what I expected, I guess I didn’t expect that many.

First impression – WOW! The picture was great. I was amazed at how clear it was. I would almost tell you that it was better than cable.  That was reassuring. We then proceeded to look at the channels. Keeping in mind that we had gotten the antenna just to receive the local over the air channels, they were all there. The extra channels are quite frankly, questionable. There seems to be a channel or channels that have the oldest TV possible. Yes, there are shows from when I was young. While we didn’t watch them, we could have watched “McMIllian and Wife”,” Petticoat Junction”, and the” Patty Duke Show”.

The second day of “antenna only” was Friday. We settled in and watched shows on network TV and our local PBS station. We ran out of shows and it was 8 p.m. Okay, no problem, we switched to Netflix. Since we are not really avid movie watchers, Netflix is a bit of a challenge. We settled on watching the first episode of the PBS “Sherlock” series. I enjoyed it and would watch the rest of the series. Not sure that my husband was that thrilled but it might grow on him.

On Saturday, CBS had disappeared from our selection possibilities. We were not totally surprised.  We had experienced difficulties in the past with reception for CBS. I think it was just strange to not have the option but truth be told we didn’t really miss it. I can’t tell you what we watched Saturday night. How awful does that sound? (No, I had not had too much to drink!)  Whatever it was just wasn’t memorable. I will tell you that we both played card games on our iPads while we watched.

Sunday late afternoon, my husband turned on the TV and CBS was back. He watched a little TV and then decided that he should just turn it off and read.  We didn’t turn on the TV until the WGN news at 9 p.m. (Don’t judge – we get up really early in the morning and so there aren’t a lot late nights around here.)

How do I feel it is going so far? Rationally, we have not missed a thing. We saw a show that we probably would not have watched  via Netflix and that is good. We have turned off the TV several times and that is not all bad either.
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My problem right now is emotional. While I know it is not true, I feel like I am missing something. It feels that by restricting our TV to network TV, I am being shortchanged. Also, part of it might be just that it is different and I need to get used to it.  Seriously, I never watched most of the cable channels that we received.  I think the hang-up is just that it is different. I think when this becomes the norm that it will be fine.

I do miss the TV guide channel. I think that would help us figure out what was on at any given point. Of course with the shows that we saw though flipping through the channels, I am not sure that a TV guide channel would help.

We did agree that the other step that we had talked about taking was missing. We do not have a smart TV and that would solve the missing CBS problem as we could go to CBS.com on the TV and watch shows. To that end, we looked online at smart TVs last night. Now we are not sure that we want to invest that amount of money in a TV. It is up for debate and it may be that we need to really check our TV watching to see how important that would really be for us.

I think that life without the DVR will be hard but when you can watch shows on the computer at any time, the DVR might not be very important. I think it is hard to lose a service you are used to even if you don’t need the service.

As of right now, we have not cancelled cable. We are not using it while we test out the new system. I really think it will work. Up until a few weeks ago we were not watching that much TV. I think that we may have to think more about what we are doing with our time. It sounds like we might dust off some games in the evenings.  Not a bad idea at all.

Oh and I might have a few books to read.

Happy Spring! ( It is my positive mental attitude.)

Thanks for reading.