The Great Cable Debacle

Last year, at the close of college football season, we canceled our cable subscription. We only watched three channels, The Food Network, EWTN (the girls especially enjoy their cartoon shows), and any station broadcasting a college football game. Dh had these grand plans of watching all these things via the Internet. So, with all the money we were saving, we (he) purchased more and more equipment to hook our computers to the tv. All of this is a little beyond my technical knowledge (and for that matter-- interest), and I simply observed as packages started arriving. Cordless keyboards, little doohickeys with cords, new hard drives to hold the downloads, etc. Countless evening he spent on this endeavor.

The girls could indeed watch their EWTN shows. They also started the Leave It To Beaver series. We have simply done without the Food Network, which has given us less screen time. Dh and I also watched downloaded shows, which we enjoyed. We could watch them on our time schedule and the quality was really pretty decent. I should note we own old, ancient tvs and none of them are HD so our expectations are low. All in all, we were happy not paying that cable bill.

Then college football season began. Dh had done quite a bit of research and the Thursday night season starter approached. That night we had a tailgate dinner, we were all dressed in our game day gear, revved up for the start of the season. He couldn't get it to work. We missed the kick-off, and most of the first quarter. He did eventually get it working, but the quality was not there, even with our low expectations. By half-time he was on the phone with the cable company discussing our options.

Since we were going on vacation (blog posts forthcoming), he scheduled our installation for cable (and Internet) in late September. And since we didn't need double coverage Internet coverage, he canceled that as well. We would use our city's Wifi coverage for the few days without Internet access. Unfortunately, dh did something more typical of his dw (me), he scheduled the installation for late October, not late September as he thought.Here we are, using the city Wi-fi which is h.o.r.r.i.b.l.e, I can barely get logged into the girls' school, and every page required 2-3 refreshes before it actually comes up.

I have all these great vacation pictures to post and a few other posts in the works, and none of it matters because I can't get to anything. Even this post will be long and dry, without pictures, because I have to disconnect and reconnect and deal with a poor connection to get to them.

After much wrangling and many, many, many calls, my wonderful dh has somehow managed to get an overbooked cable company to come to my rescue. They will be installing this afternoon. I will be able to get the girls' school back on track, able to catch up on email, hopefully able to get out a few posts, and most importantly able to watch this Saturday's Big Ten opener.