Define "Television"

As most of you may know, I have rabbit ears.

I didn't start out my life with rabbit ears - I had a full blown...not rabbit ears (wow, what do you have if you don't have rabbit ears?). Up until fourth grade, I think, when we moved out of my first house and into the house I live in now. The house hadn't been built yet, so we had to rent a house for a few months during the summer. When there, we decided to save money and now pay for cable (or satellite or whatever) sense none of our shows were on.

Strangely enough, a show my Mom wanted to watch, called 'The Mole', was playing that summer, so we watched it. It was really hard to watch, because rabbit ears give you a sandstorm behind both the audio and visual of every station, even the better ones. However, we suffered through it, and when we moved into our new house, decided not to pay for cable (or satellite or whatever), since we'd learned to live without it.

When we had cable (or satellite or whatever), the only shows I would watch were the ones on cable networks, like Nickelodeon and Disney and Animal Planet. Afterward, when we only had the local stations (I.E. Fox, ABC, and NBC), I started watching the hour-long dramas there. Since switching to Rabbit Ears, I have started to watch a lot of the local dramas, and now the shows on cable networks look kind of silly to me.

(Oh, in case you didn't know, local networks actually broadcast across the country, just like cable networks, except that they happen to have broadcasting towers nearby that analog antennas will pick up)

Recently, however, the local networks have been hosting a lot of their shows online. During the second season, if I missed an episode of Bones, the only thing I could do was read a very detail episode summary online; now, the entire episode is online for a few weeks after it aired. The same goes for all of my shows - Bones, Chuck, Heroes, Lie to Me, Castle, and anything else I decide to start in September.

After watching my shows online, the sandstorm on the TV really started to bug me. I mean seriously, I had to turn my volume up way high just to hear over the dishwasher, and half the sound coming out was sandstorm. It got to the point that I just planned to watch every show the next day online, whether I'd missed it or not. When this whole "digital switch" thing started to make the papers, I though 'good - let's just get cable (or satellite or whatever) and get over with it.'

Mom went out today to get the converter box for our rabbit ears. It's just one more electrical box sitting on top of our screen, and we have to go to the third input to access it. And you know what? NO SANDSTORM! It's like watching Online Television - but on our actual television!!

I was amazed. Then dad bumped the antenna and it took us twenty minutes to get it back to normal. Then I was amazed again. We actually watched "So You Think You Can Dance" for about twenty minutes, admiring the costumes that we could now properly discern. I think I can finally cut three hours of my computer use each week! *.*

(Or maybe I'll just use that extra time to watch Japanese dramas - Because, you know, I can't get THOSE with my rabbit ears.)