20 months without cable TV

Jeff has introduced me to the TV series, "Rome." Some GREAT writing here. Good thing, too, else I'd be way too turned off by all the gore to keep watching. Jeff and I both love relying on DVDs rather than TV; we've been without cable TV for 20 months now, and neither of us miss it. I estimate we watch about 1-3 hours of movies and/or recorded TV shows a week at most...FAR less than back when we had cable.

I admit there are times when I feel a wistful twinge, especially when some of my favourite shows start their new seasons, knowing I have to wait. I get used to hearing the occasional spoiler of shows that haven't come out on DVD yet.

But y'know, so far I've found the payoff well worth it.

I'm doing a lot more reading, as I've mentioned before. And learning new skills. Right now, I'm learning Quickbooks and XHTML. Quickbooks because I've finally come around to the fact that I need to be more organized about my finances; my freelance income has also been climbing, which helps with the motivation. I bought Quickbooks For Dummies at Chapters/Indigo earlier this week because it seems geared toward my level. :-)

As for XHTML...as I mentioned in Technonerdgirl recently, I find that the more I learn about CSS, the more I realize I need to learn about other stuff as well. Like XHTML. I'm determined to clean up my messy hackwork HTML code! Right now I'm working through an XHTML tutorial on Lynda.com as well as continuing a tutorial on CSS Design. I watch bits at a time, whenever I take an arm break.



I'm also using non-TV time (time I used to spend watching TV in the old days) to do more music. Did some more work on my Chocolate song last night. I'm starting to transcribe the five vocal parts in Finale. A bit tricky, since I'm also learning how to use Finale at the same time...the old version of Finale (which won't run on my new machine) had a VERY different user interface.

Another bonus of avoiding TV is that it gets me off my butt! I sit all day in front of the computer, after all. Now I do more running after work, working in the garden, taking walks. Some days it's tougher to get exercise than others, particularly when I haven't been exercising in a couple days in a row (funny how exhausting not moving around can be).

Still no word from the publisher about my novel, but I'm plowing ahead with other writing projects meanwhile. My "2006 overview of the book and magazine industry" article for Writer's Digest magazine is due next week. I finally decided to splurge and subscribe to Publisher's Weekly. I've been resisting for a long time because of the hefty subscription fee, but so far it's been SO worth it. For more details on why I finally decided to subscribe, see my Will Write For Chocolate blog post (below the comic strip).

Life's good right now, and I'm grateful. Yay, and I get to see my friend Luisa today!



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