We dumped Larry the Cable Guy

Chris and I decided that we didn't watch enough tv to justify keeping and paying for the non-promotional and newly increased cable rates by our local monopoly, Time Warner, since our promotional bundled price was ending soon. So we turned in our DVR and ditched cable. We decided to go instead with antenna and got a signal converter box for the free network programming. We also joined Netflix and are having a lot of fun watching all kinds of movies that we'd never seen before (and not heard of before) because we refuse to pay the exorbitent movie ticket prices at the theatres. We then bought a netflix player, Roku, that lets us stream movies instantly over the internet to our tv. That is something that is included in the subscription price for Netflix (the instant streaming). People who don't have a netflix player can still watch stuff on their computer and we can do that as well. The instant selection is a bit smaller than the DVD selection that Netflix will mail to the house, but there is still plenty to choose from, including many television shows that are out on DVD as well, and it supplements the DVD's that come in the mail. So far, we are enjoying it immensely and I figure we are saving almost 100 bucks a month from doing this. (Well, this and I'm switching our phone and internet service to another provider that will save us about 20 bucks a month. Don't worry, our phone number is not changing.)

Anyway, there was something really empowering about dumping Larry the Cable Guy and we are happy with saving that money for something else! There's something really un-American about doing business with a monopoly, and now we aren't!