Tom and I are going without television for the summer. There are so many trees here at Wilderness Road Campground that we can’t get any kind of a satellite signal for our Dish TV system. We have been other places where it was difficult to get the signal, but here in Virginia it is impossible.
The first couple of weeks were difficult. We like to relax with an old movie in the evenings and we missed that. We could stream Amazon Prime video, but we don’t have enough gigabytes on our phone hotspots to do that without quickly running out of highspeed internet. Besides, most of the things we want to watch require paying extra. If we had known we wouldn’t be able to hook up to Dish, we might have brought along some DVDs. We have a DVD player in the RV. But we didn’t and we aren’t spending the money to buy more of that old technology.
After a while, we got used to going without television. I’ve been reading a lot and Tom spends a lot of time surfing the internet. We take a walk every evening which is a relaxing thing to do with your spouse. We have been playing some games together. Scrabble Go is our current favorite even thought Tom always trounces me. I make great words and he makes words that get lots of points. Last night I made a 6-letter word that got 12 points and he modified it with one letter to get 58. Hmph! Playing games with Tom keeps me humble up to the point where I get tired of losing and stop playing.
We have gone to see three movies in the theater so far this summer. We saw “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Oppenheimer,” and “Barbie.” We enjoyed all three of them very much, even though they are different from each other. It would have been harder to convince Tom to see three movies if we had television.
There are two problems with going without television. The first is I’m not getting an knitting done. I knit when I watch tv, so no tv means no knitting. I tried knitting and just listening to music the other night but it wasn’t something I want to do regularly.
The second problem is coming up: football season. I will be okay through August, but when football season really starts in September I will miss television a lot more than I do now. Football season is the only time that the television is ever on much at our house. It is the reason we got Dish TV to begin with, nine years ago. If there is a football game on the television, I probably have the television on. I don’t really care who is playing. Fortunately we will be going back to Ohio in September, so it will only be a problem for a couple of weeks.
Going without television has been a good thing this summer. It got us out of the habit of turning on the television every evening. Perhaps we will be more deliberate about when we turn it on when we get home. But then again, maybe not. After all, football.