We cancelled our cable more than six years ago when we took part in the “turn off TV week” campaign, where families were challenged to do without their television for an entire week. (I don’t think they run this campaign anymore now that media access has changed.) It was scary and it was hard; we even had to rig the cord to make it difficult for the kids to plug it back in. After the week we realized that not having the constant drone was actually kind of nice, all of a sudden there was time to do things, we spent more time together and were more creative in what we were doing.
So we thought why not just continue? We cancelled our cable and that’s when we started accessing the library, particularly for dvd’s. Our local branch had a huge in house selection, not to mention the FVRL online catalogue has thousands of new releases, classics, documentaries and lesser known goodies. We’ve found many eclectic, quirky and downright fascinating series; movies we would have never rented at the movie stores — and it is all FREE! Our borrowing has branched out to include music cds, books (of course) while accessing some cools programs put on by the library.
Inevitably when talking with coworkers about what’s on TV, I tell them about our viewing habits and it’s surprising that most don’t even know the library carries dvd’s. We’re fortunate to have a great library system and one which is important to us, as one of our top relocation criteria is: “must include access to a library”.
