Life without TV... It can be done.

Due to Glasgow's New Year's Street Party being cancelled, us having no TV and since Christmas have had massive colds, our New Years was incredibly low key. We rang in 2007 with cheap juice champagne, playing any online board game that we could find for free. We found a site that did an online count down to 2007 (in the UK time zone even) and with 10 seconds to go, watched last year's ball drop in times square from a video Mike found on YouTube. The video was actually pretty good, but not the same as watching it "live" via the television.

You might ask yourselves... "what do they do without TV??"

Well...

• This is the reason why there are so many posts on this page.
• I play LOTS of Spider Solitaire.
• We have started playing Backgammon and Chinese Checkers. Thank goodness for Target's dollar bin of games!
• I usually email my mom and dad, James and Stacey, and Chris pretty frequently.
• Read, and read, and read some more, which I love to do. I am so incredibly glad that I was able to get a library membership. If I hadn't I would have been reading the third Harry Potter over and over and over again. Mike does not get to read for fun as I do and reads quite a bit more than me, good thing he likes what he does!
• We watch Comedy Central's the Motherload, a lot. Unfortunately, our favorite shows, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, are on holiday, so there are no current shows. WHAT were they thinking!! We need their humor over here!!
• Mike has also found South Park episodes online. I hate the show, but he thinks it's hilarious. And since there is nothing else on, I (usually) watch.
• Mike also (of course) spends way too much of his time dealing with all matters historical and trying to figure out what the hell his advisers and professors are looking for him to turn in.
• Continuing with the theme of historicity Mike also is becoming very well acquainted with his pocket German dictionary and spending time in overly professional and inadequately useful archives.
• We have been playing quite a bit of Uno. At least we think that we are playing it. We started playing and realized that neither of us could remember the rules. More than likely we are playing some bastardized version of Uno and Crazy Eights.
• We walk all over. By the weekend, I have been cooped up in an office all week, and Mike studying in the apartment. Many weekends we decide to go out for a short walk and end up spending all day walking through the city. Its a great way to explore new places!
• Mike now knows more about the Ruhr Crisis (if you don't know what it is ask when we get home I can tell you all about it) and Postmodernism (don't ask about that - not that I can't talk about it - I just would prefer not to...) than he ever desired. He also likes to share his new found facts with his wife... who just looks at him and smiles.
• Mike has also widened his vocabulary as apparently Postmodernists like to use words that NO ONE uses nor has EVER heard of. Again, Mike likes to share these ridiculous new found words with his wife... she, once again, looks at him and smiles. (but who can deny the inherient excitement in learning such words as jingoistically, tautological, stultifying, and antirepresentationalism.)
• We have watched what few DVDs we brought with us several times now. Mike was wise enough to bring some DVDs of The Simpsons (which I do like). I even got Mike to watch Gone With the Wind with me. It might be the only time though since he thought the ending sucked. It was no condolance when I explained that really the story is only half done and he will have to wait until we return home to our storage unit and watch Scarlett. He is not exctied.

Mike did help in the writing of this blog. Probably because I nagged him, or as I like to call it, asked him a lot.