A Step to Cut the Cable

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Carol Early Cooney

 

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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.)

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

Thanks for reading.

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Book Subscriptions and the Book Seer

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Carol Early Cooney

Instead of a book review this week, I thought I would share some information about book subscription services and a fun web site.

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Netflix for books

You may have caught on to my love for free or nearly free books. I have talked about this in the past. (Free Reading, )  I have voiced some frustration with using the library eBook lending service.  I have now found out about three new services that might be of interest to you. Two of them are services that are much like Netflix. You sign up for the service and then can read as many books as you would like during the month. The third service is built more on the Audible model – you can download books and then actually own them.

Oyster

Oyster (https://www.oysterbooks.com/?gclid=COPFitjXgL0CFRJo7AodZRYAbA) is actually getting the most buzz that I can see. Partially because they now have surged ahead in having more children’s books available. They claim to have over 100,000 titles available. From what I have read, they have been more successful in getting publishers to sign up books with the service. A subscription to Oyster is $9.95 per month and there is a one month free trial. You can look through the library before you sign up. Here is the problem I see with Oyster currently. You can only use it on Apple products.  As of right now, this service is not available to you if you use a kindle or a nook as your e-reader. There is a place on the web site to sign up for notification when it is available for other platforms. Okay, I know I am a small fish but this seems like a rather large oversight. Yes, I have an iPad but even I am getting tired of so many reading platforms.

Scribd

Scribd (http://www.scribd.com/) is the other Netflix based book lending model. Scribed is $8.99 per month and works on both Apple and Android based platforms.  Scribd apparently does not have as much of a selection as Oyster but it also claims to have over 100,000 titles.  You can also look through the library before you sign up to see if it looks like there is enough to interest you.  Once again, your kindle and nook are not part of the Scribd experience.

Entitle

Entitle (https://www.entitlebooks.com/) is the third company in the subscription book market. As I said before, this service works by letting you download and keep the book. The price you pay per month depends on how many books a month that you want to download. The “most popular plan” is 2 eBooks per month for $9.99. There is a free trial for 7 days.  Entltle works on all the ebook platforms.  So, if you were buying and reading a book a month, this is a better deal – as long as the books you would want to read are available. You can look through the catalog and see if you think there are enough books that interest you.  My only quick thought on this is that when you buy books from Amazon or Barnes and Nobel, they keep the books for you in the cloud.  You don’t have to keep all your books on your reader. Since, over time, books can take up space on your reader, you might want to make sure these books can be off loaded to your account.

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The Book Seer

I ran across this site today and thought I would share it with you. The site is The Book Seer. When you go to the site, it asks you for the name and author of a book that you like. It will then give you suggestions for other books that you might like.  I was surprised that I had actually read some of the suggested titles. I was surprised because they were not necessarily books that I would have connected to the original book. So you can try it for fun and see what it comes out with for you.

Have a great weekend!

Thanks for reading!

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Lists – Do you Automatically Read a Post if There is a List? What if it is a List of Books?

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Carol Early Cooney


list

Bloggers are often told the people love lists. Blogs with titles like “Top 5 ways to clean your sink”, “Top 10 ways to dump your husband” or “Top 5 ways mystery writers kill characters” will bring readers flocking to the blog. Or so we are told.

I am not really sure this is absolutely true. Although, I would like to read the one about the mystery writers.    Sorry, I made that one up. Although I bet you can find the answer on google. 

Anyway, it seems we are all supposedly enamored with lists. I will admit that I am a sucker for a list of books. This morning I received an email from Amazon with a list of the new books for March. At the bottom of the page was a link to the “100 Books to Read in a Lifetime – a bucket list of books to create a well-read life, from the Amazon Book Editors”. There was also a link to the list of 100 books from the Goodreads voters.

(I assume that you are familiar with Goodreads. Goodreads (www.goodreads.com) is a book review site.  You sign up and can review books and list all the books you have read.)

books on shelves

Proving the blog pundits right, I had to see the list. I was happy with some of their choices and surprised by some. The books run across all genres; which is why Goodnight Moon and Kitchen Confidential can be on the same list. I thought that the list from the Amazon book editors was a much looser or more experimental list of books. The Goodreads list did not hold a lot of surprises and tended to be more conservative.  For example, the Amazon list included one of my all-time favorites, Valley of the Dolls. Now, while I really liked the book, I would not expect it to be on a top 100 list.  (I have not read it in many years and I wonder how it has stood up to the test of time.) 

I know, you want to see for yourself.  I don’t blame you.  Here is the link to the Amazon book editors list and here is the link to the Goodreads list.

Let me know what you think. I am not sure which list should be worked through first. What do you think?

Thanks for reading.

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GLITTER AND GLUE: A MEMOIR

Posted on February 28, 2014 by Carol Early Cooney

glitter and glue

I liked this book. I liked this book more than I expected too. I don’t think that I had been “woowed” by a book lately and so it was a nice feeling.

As the title suggests, it is a memoir. It  tell about a time in the author’s life when she became a nanny for a family in Australia. She was hired as a nanny because the wife/mother of the family had just died and the husband needed help caring for his two children. The story of Kelly being a nanny is wrapped inside her own story from several years later when she is sick and needs her mother.

As literature and life will tell us, mother/daughter relationships can be hard. Kelly and her mother went through a time when they were in conflict. Well, perhaps Kelly didn’t understand her mom. It is interesting to see how she came around and then could understand so much. It could make every mother/daughter hope that it could work out for them.

This may sound odd but one of my favorite things about the book is the title. Sometimes you can read a book and not really see the significance of the title. You might pick it up in the story but the significance eludes you. (An “Okay, yea…” moment) Kelly’s father is Mr. Positive. He thinks every day is full of sunshine and as his child, you are a fantastic person.  He was the easy parent to like. He was exuberant and supportive. Kelly’s mother was the realist and what could be termed “the bad cop”. She had to enforce rules and dole out punishments.  At one point, Kelly’s mother describes their relationship as “He is the glitter and I am the glue.” When you read it in the story, it perfectly describes the situation.

Throughout Kelly’s time in Australia as a nanny, she hears her mother’s voice in her head. For example, whenever the children are referred to as “kids”, the inner voice would say something like, “Kids are goats. Those are children.” I not only appreciated Kelly’s mother’s voice but I thought that it was really done well in the story. The voice of Kelly’s mom fit right in and improved the story.

Kelly found out and shows us in the story that while glitter is wonderful that sometimes the glue is more of what you need in your life.

If you are interested in hearing Kelly speak to a group about parenthood and “the Great Adventure” I have include a video for your pleasure.

Thanks for reading!

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Wordsmith Studio Weekly Prompt: Bench

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Carol Early Cooney

(Each week, my writing group, Wordsmith Studio, posts a word prompt to be used as inspiration for a poem, photo, or short story.  This week’s prompt is BENCH.)

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The Man on the Bench

She ran past the same bench every morning. She noticed one day that a man was sitting on the bench staring out at the lake. She didn’t know if he had been there before but once she noticed him, she saw him there every day. 

She began to take an interest in him. After all she was doing her morning run and her mind was not occupied all the time. She didn’t have much time as she ran by but little things started to capture her attention. He sat looking out with his hands on his knees. He was dressed in a suit on work days and in jeans and a sweater on weekends. 

She usually ran at the same time seven days a week. Weekday or weekend it didn’t matter she hit the trail at her self-appointed time. One morning she was delayed. She noticed that she had missed him that morning.

“He must have a set time also” she thought. 

She thought that he looked sad. She wasn’t sure why since she didn’t really know him and didn’t have time to really look at him each day but she felt that he radiated sadness. 

She started thinking about him and creating stories to explain his visits to the lake. One of the stories that she created was that his young wife, who had recently walked out on him, loved going to the lake and he went there to see if he could see her. Another story was that he had a very stressful job and his doctor had suggested that he take a few minutes at the start of each day to relax with the sounds of the waves. Or there was the sad tale that his child had drowned in the lake and he came by daily to mourn his loss.  Each time she started weaving her stories she shook her head and told herself to stop being silly. 

Then one morning she tripped on her run and fell. She fell right by the bench. As she laid there for a moment trying to collect herself, she waited for him to acknowledge her. He didn’t. It took her a minute to get up and when she did, she found that her ankle really hurt.  She limped over to the bench. He moved down the bench but other than moving down, he didn’t acknowledge her. She sat there for a moment trying to gather her thoughts.  Her ankle hurt so much. She looked down and it was swollen to the point that she knew she had to take off her shoe. When she bent down to take off her shoe, he stood up and walked away. 

Her kind thoughts about the sad man on the bench evaporated. Once again she had let her imagination meet reality and found that reality paled next to her imagination. She pulled out her cell phone and called for help.  

Thanks for reading!

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