Why We Don't Watch TV

We don't watch television. When I say "we", I am referring to the collection of Bowers that reside at our little abode in Mooresville, NC. And when I say "don't watch television", it is not a set up and an attention-getting way of really saying that 'we experience it!' or 'we let it watch us' or something cutesie like that. No, it means just that. We don't watch it.

There are many reason for this, I suppose. First, our TV set is broken. Second, that whole digital changeover thing caught us. And, then, well, we never really missed it. Here's how I would describe the journey we've been on.

I realized a few months ago that we hadn't watched much TV for a while. Maybe it was the beautiful weather that the spring months around here supply. Maybe it was the busy season we were in. Maybe it was the new and different activities we were experiencing (watching your one-year old doing new 'firsts' all the time...what could be more entertaining?!). Whatever it was, we just were not engaged in flipping on the tube. Then early June arrived.

We were in the process of reviving the 'we're moving soon' routine again. Get boxes. Load up boxes. Move boxes around to make room for more...boxes. One evening, Jace and I were downstairs while Sarah and the girls were upstairs getting cleaned up and ready for the night with William already enjoying his sleep. With a little bit of slight exhaustion and a fair amount of laziness, I decided to watch some NBA Finals with my son. You know...bonding. But before we could get to grunting and high-five-ing, we found out that all we had when we turned the TV on was fuzz. I figured it was a station thing and began wondering how they could allow such a mistake to happen. When all the other channels showed the same thing, I thought maybe a wire was loose or something. But we finally came upon a station that was airing a special program. It was explaining the digital change that had recently been made to all the television programming in our little neck of the woods known as (what...USA?, North America, the world? I have no clue how far-reaching this this is).

Months ago, I had remembered some announcement about the soon-coming change (whatever happened to February 2009?). I was told that if you had purchased your TV set in the last couple of years (which we had), it would most likely be fine for use after the change. So I didn't think much of it. In the back of my mind, I knew February had come and gone and I thought we were safe. Guess not.

No big deal, though. Get a converter box and we're back in business. With the soon-coming move nearly upon us, I decided to wait until we got settled in to our new home and then deal with it. Now on to reason #1 above.

Have you ever had one of those surreal moments that just kind of lingers with you? Something is going on and you see it happen in slow-motion and there's nothing you can do? Well, that was me a few days after we moved in. We have decided to make our garage into a family/homeschool/'other' room. And that includes keeping the TV there. Long story short, I REALLY thought I was moving both the TV and the base upon which it sets forward a tad in order to finalize the wiring and set up in the back. A slight shove forward confirmed that this was NOT the case. TV went forward, base did not. Gravity took over from there. In the longest split-second in my life that afforded me the opportunity to grasp at every conceivable wire protruding from various electronic devices, the TV met the floor. I was expecting a crash, a shatter and a hurried command to all within the household to 'not walk near that' with bare feet for a while until all was cleaned up.

Well, there was no shatter. Even the case of the TV just looked slightly off. But off enough, it was. Subsequent attempts at using the TV have proven that it is most likely ready for the grave. (I will be hanging on to it and checking every now and then, you know, just in case...).

But I am pleased to announce that in the midst of all this 'can-you-believe-it' activity, we have not missed TV viewing in the least. Granted, we never watched much anyway. And we had no regular programs that were must-see for us. But I can honestly say that we don't miss it. Kinda' wish something like this would have happened earlier, in fact. We had always known that we didn't watch much, and had always desired to even watch less than the little that we did, but we just never did much about it.

Let's see, I usually try to watch the MLB All-Star game, but survived just fine. We would watch PBS occasionally for various offerings they supplied, but our brain cells haven't fried and we have more than filled the time with other options. And then there was...well, like I said, we never watched much anyway. Admittedly, you may want to check back when football season is in full swing as I tried to watch a little bit of a game here or there (again, a lot less with the Vikings not being on to tempt me). But by this time, we've got so many other options, that your accountability check-in to see how I'm doing come mid-October may be greeted with a puzzled response of "what do you mean 'am I missing it?'...missing what?".

Now, if you will excuse me, we've got some family corn-shucking to do for dinner before we ride our bikes to the tennis courts and get some exercise together.