the end of an era

Good morning!

We're having a good weekend so far. Sunday was a lay low day for me. Craig spend a good deal of time doing bookwork, while I played pc games and surfed the Internet. Still looking to finalize our last 3 trips. Monday was productive. Craig did laundry, vacuuming and dinner, ( which ended up being that wonderful Cabagge roll cassorole he made here!) I spent a good part of the day taking out our Motorola Satellite receiver and adding a digital converter box for our big Toshiba 50 inch projection TV.
Back in 1989 since we didn't have cable where we live, we installed what you'd call, a big dish.

This sucker is 10 ft across! And it sits on the side of the back yard in one of the perennial beds. And we loved it! What was great about the big dish is unlike cable and the small dishes, we could get all our programing a la carte! Just order and pay for just the channels you want. No having to get a basic package and add premium channels. We could also get channels for just a set number of months, Like ESPN. We'd only subscribe for 6 months to watch college football and basketball. No sense paying for an entire year! But that era is coming to an end. As the big dish market shrinks as more people turn to cable and the small dishes, Programmer's are offering fewer and fewer channels due to cost. First we lost Discovery, than History, and ESPN. So we decided to not renew our subscription, and I've finally gotten around to taking the receiver out. I've seen on e-bay that I can probably get $200 for it. So now we have just our roof top antenna. But with the digital converter box, we get like 25 channels! And we don't really watch a lot of TV, so this works for now. We just can't justify getting a small dish for the price they charge for programming. I can't believe people pay so much to watch TV!