31 Days without Internet and Television

 

We moved into a new house, and it took 31 days to get internet and TV.  It’s not a huge crisis.  No one got hurt.  Nothing catastrophic happened.  But it was hard – surprisingly hard.

Yes, we bonded – we played board games, we went out to family dinners and we watched lots of DVDs.  (We actually got through 3 seasons of Friends, which even 10 years later, is one of my favorite shows.) And we made it.  We survived.

And that’s what I am writing about: we managed. 

The first few days, we were going nuts.  We were bored.  We were snapping at each other.  And I was on the phone for hours with Comcast and AT&T, raising hell.  And then we started doing other things.  I read a magazine in the bathtub.  My husband baked a ziti and went to a friends’ to watch football.  My sons both actually got into Friends, with their mom, and watched lots of old movies.

Please understand, this i s a light-hearted revelation on my part.  Everyone goes through rough patches – some much more important and life-changing than this.  I just found it interesting that we figured out how to manage.  That one week deadline of “we’re going to just get a satellite if we don’t get service from Comcast or AT&T” stretched to 2 weeks and then a month. 

People were stunned, when they would ask us after a week, then three, and we would say, nope, we still don’t have service.  They would laugh and say, “I don’t know how you are doing it.”  My husband started out grudgingly going to Starbucks to sync up his work files every morning.  Then, it became part of his routine, and I think he actually began to enjoy it.

Sure, there are some situations that are unimaginable and unlivable.  This wasn’t one of them.  And we made it just fine. 

I am not sure the Mental Health relevance of all this.  But in the back of my brain, I felt like I was living in an experiment for the last 31 days.  So I thought I would share to give you a little laugh. In fact, I guess that’s the point:  try not to sweat the small stuff; make the best of the little things and enjoy.  Just enjoy.