Freezing our Backsides

I have not been very consistent with posting. Here's my excuse - it's soooo cold in my house! ;) Normally, I post in the evenings after the kids have gone to bed. But, lately after the kids are in bed, Brad and I crawl under the covers to try to warm up. I turned down the thermostat - waaayyy down. Well, I'm sure it's not as far down as some people chose to go, but it's 10 degrees lower than we kept it last year. We have a pellet stove that we use in the early morning and evening to warm up the family room where we spend most of our time. However, we're running low on pellets so we're trying to ration them out to last another month. The exciting, makes me dance around the house, news is that we've cut our per day usage in half from last year at this time!!!! A good move environmentally and it's cut our utility bill by over $100 per month from last January. Woohoo!

No More TV

I guess it would be more truthful to say no more satellite. We can still turn on the tv, but all we get are our fuzzy local tv channels. The only station that comes in ok is CBS, and there's not anything that we watch on CBS. Instead, there are a few storage boxes parked in front of our tv set right now. Surprisingly, it was a tough decision to cancel our paid channels. We had talked about it before the lay off, but always came up with a reason why we should just keep it. Our biggest reason (excuse maybe) was that we're homebodies. TV was our only real splurge besides eating out. But, since we're faced with trying to make a little last as long as possible, the satellite had to go. At $65 a month, it just wasn't worth it. We had some tears from the kids. B was especially upset because he was going to miss the new Clone Wars episodes. But we told him, we'd find a way to get Clone Wars. The episodes are only $1.99 on iTunes and free with commercials on Cartoon Network. We took the kids to the library and let them each pick out a video to check out. I'm normally a scrooge when it comes to checking out videos. I get irritated that they have to be returned after a week and feel nervous that we're going to scratch them up. But, since it looks like we'll be using the free library a lot in the coming weeks, I decided to ease up a bit. ;) We still have internet, the kids still have the xbox to play video games on, and they can watch dvds. It's not like they're going to be media starved. Even with those other things, our house seems so much more peaceful. It's not the easy fix of just flipping on the tv when we're bored. Now, when the kids watch a video, there is an end to the video - an automatic place to turn it off. When the tv was on, there was always one more thing to watch. I'm really liking the change. I'm guessing that we'll probably turn it back on once we get back on our feet financially. But, I'm not really missing it much and might want to keep it this way for awhile.