The Mobile Home Woman

Okay, a little late, but some of you might be taking down lights from the holidays… and here’s a little trick we learned and LOVE.

Take each strand of lights and roll gently into a ball. They stay together pretty nice and roll right off the ball next year when you need them. And they are fun to turn on and look at, in a ball! (I wouldn’t leave them on for any length of time unless they are those nice LED cool bulb ones… the old ones do get a little hot and might melt the plastic around them or something like that…. )

Then pop each ball into a plastic bag and tie up! Viola! Perfect storage for these little nasty strings of lights! Has worked well for us and we’ve tried all kinds of other ways….

Well… I got my cable bill and I was looking at it and said, this is crazy. We’re paying an extra $25 for cable that no one is watching. We haven’t watched the TV in the living room now since we were bagging rocks. And that was only for something mindless to do. So we haven’t turned it on even for the last 3 weeks.

I had signed up for the thing in a moment of weakness. I thought, well, maybe with winter here, we would like to watch a little tv. And with that whole change over to digital TV, we lost our 3 stations that we could pick up. And we were getting a little extra $10 from the state for Maggie’s online school ($10 was for internet for her classes online) so I thought, well, that kind of makes cable available for us for $15 a month. Not too bad. We’ll give it a whirl.

Well, no one is watching it. We all have our own computers and we prefer to surf and use them instead. The girls have an older TV in their room that they play video games and watch DVDs on. But it’s not digital ready either, so it doesn’t pick up anything other than what it is directly fed. And they didn’t want a cable hookup for it. Weird kids.

So, I was thinking that I should probably ditch the cable. And the thought of ditching the old big TV crossed my mind as well… because I kind of hate looking at the big black void in my living room. But then I thought, what if I missed it, or like, for some reason the government insisted we watch tv for some important announcement or something. What would I do?

I went to turn it on and it wouldn’t turn on.

Oh… it was unplugged, because when we built the shelf on Monday, we had to move the tv and all, plus we put plastic up on the last window in that room and had to move stuff around.

Maggie plugged it in for me and we turned it on. Static.

She poked around, she’s my resident IT/AV guru and she says, Mom, you guys pulled the coax connector out of the back of the TV!!! HAHAHA! Oops. Not just the cable, mind you, the whole connection was broken off and alas, that I find is a $70 fix! Considering that the TV is very old… 15 years or more… and HUGE and bulky… I really don’t want to invest $70 into something we don’t want or watch or need. So… it’s going to the Goodwill tomorrow. It will still work if you attach a DVD or VCR to, which I have neither, and someone might like the parts and such. And now I have a HUGE big open area in my living room!!!!! YEAH!!!

I love it when things are decided for you, and you don’t have to labor over the decision for very long.