Life without Television.

For the past two years, my husband Andrew and I have been conducting an interesting experiment: living life without television. We didn't intend to make it an experiment- quite frankly, our television-less state evolved from a move to a new apartment in which we were too lazy to call the local cable company to set things up and a strong desire to save fifty bucks a month. We had plans to at least get an antenna- but as we were too lazy and cheap to call a cable company, we never got around to that (as a side note, a relative got exasperated at our television-less state and bought us an antenna for Christmas last year. When we hooked it up in August, we were amused to see we only got two very fuzzy channels in languages we can't quite comprehend).

Being television-less has some interesting side effects. For one, we miss out on a lot of water cooler conversation. No, we haven't seen the latest Survivor or that action packed episode of 24. We're lost when it comes to Lost. We don't have a favorite hero on Heroes. Occasionally, we go through withdrawal. We had been addicts of shows like Law and Order and Monk, and suddenly, they were gone from our life. We'll never know if that criminal was brought to justice or what weird small clue solved the case. I in particular feel cravings for the Home and Garden channel, because I absolutely need to know the latest on home design (I like to dream!).

On the other hand, we find we have a lot of time on our hands. We read a lot. The latest Stephen King? We've read it. The final Harry Potter- we read it the night it came out (Okay, so did everyone!). We play games: Andrew still has yet to catch up to my some 5,000 point lead in Rummy, and I still can't beat him at Chess. We go for lots of walks. We play with out cats. Sometimes, we watch movies (we have no cable or antenna, but we still have that big black box collecting dust). We talk a lot. It's a nice quiet life, and we rather like it.

How long is this experiment going to last? I don't know. We've been dancing around the subject for a while now, wondering when we'll cave. The one thing we know is that when we do decide to get reconnected to the television life, we're going to make sure we know where that off button is and make good use of it.