We gave up Dishnetwork...

How odd, and how weird, to feel relief in giving up our satellite receiver. Yes, we gave up our Dish network after many years with them.

Why, you ask?
I guess because we finally decided that there:
A) Wasn't much worth watching, at least at that price
B) It was now nearly $80/month just for the second tier, including a $7 DVR fee (was $6).
c) We decided that we were going to change our viewing habits, and much of the regular programing was not included in that change.

 We found that for the most part, we only watched about 3 or 4 channels out of hundreds.  We only watched for 3 hours or so a night, plus maybe 4 hours on weekends.
We also started ruling out any 'R' rated movies.  PG-13 is getting so bad with violence and language that I can't trust that anymore either.
We calculated that we would be spending about $900/yr on TV, not including PPV movies at $5 a pop.
Let's see, what would I rather spend $900 per YEAR on?  Oh, I could think of a lot of things!! I do need a new washer and dryer, I would like to have a kayak, a horse, pay off the car, a house of our own, rent a cottage for a week or 2 each summer...and so much more. See, there are many things I could do with that $900 (each year!).  And TV moved WA-a-y-y down the list.
So we shipped the receiver back yesterday, dropped it off at the UPS store.  I was surprised to hear my husband say later how relieved he was that it was gone!  I knew I would be, but he was a bit harder sell on this idea, but he does really like Netflix.  He says ' it's there if you want to watch something, but you don't have to if you don't want to.'  Meaning, it's at our leisure.  That movie will wait.  Yes, the DVR did kind of do the same thing, but we ended up with dozens of things to watch, and no time to watch them, because we were still watching live TV too.
Do we miss anything?  Yes, there were trade-offs.  I miss the TCM channel (Turner Classic Movies), sometimes HGTV and he misses NASCAR.
However, like I said, we do have Netflix, and there is a small selection of old movies for me to start with there and we bought a $39 Mohu leaf indoor antenna from amazon.  It allows us to get several local network and PBS channels, and Fox - which is broadcasting several weekends of the Sprint cup.  My hubby is thrilled.
We also bought a router and new DVD with wireless capability to make this setup work and it's working great! We do want to try Amazon Prime at some point, maybe next week when our free trial at Netflix runs out.
We also can pull from our local and state-wide libraries for viewing free DVD's.  What a resource!  
We did have some up front costs, like the router and wireless DVD player, to change our viewing habits, but we are still saving a lot of money.  And funnily enough, TV has a lot less hold on us now and that's a good thing in my book.  There is so much of life to be lived outside of the living room.  Don't you think?