Television

Please note that this is NOT our house, but our antennae looks pretty much exactly like this.

"Antennae?!?" I hear you, my dear readers saying.

Yup. We have an antennae. When we moved into the house, we discovered that the television was run on an omni-directional antennae. The cable box for our neighbourhood is on our front lawn, but no one has ever run it to the house. None of the previous owners wanted it. The last year we were in our apartment, I decided to try out going with just basic cable (because all we were watching was the Home and Garden network and I figured an extra $25 for that per month was ridiculous), so we were open to the idea of antennae television when we moved in.

Turns out that we plugged it all in and there were 20+ channels on our antennae television. Each year we've managed to get a couple more channels. Although we tend to discover that after a power outage, when we reprogram the television.

Two years after we moved in, we had a terrible wind storm, which knocked the insides of the antennae askew and despite the whole neighbourhood's efforts, we were unable to resuscitate it. So we went on the hunt again. Checked out the price of cable, then satellite...and realized that for about $50/month we could have the same as what we had for FREE with out antennae. So we ordered a new omnidirectional antennae (it was exactly the same as the last one), paid the $200, and have considered it a good deal.

This spring we started to lose channels. Our antennae is digital capable, but our television is 10 years old and is not. We've been losing our American channels. Oops. So, our kindly neighbour Nick picked us up a converter box in the States this past week. We're going to hook it up and see if it works. I'll let you know.

Oh yeah, so we are up to $240 for almost 6 years worth of television.