"Unplugged"

Last Wednesday evening I was upstairs making Olivia’s bed while she soaked in the bath. I was watching The Act on Hulu through my phone.

Alyssa was in her bathroom, ‘grooming’ before her shower. She was watching YouTube.

Tom was…doing something downstairs. Probably packing something to be shipped the next day.

The show on my phone started buffering and then stopped completely. I closed the Hulu app, thinking I was just too far from the living room, which is where our router is. It sometimes does make a difference where you are in house for the WIFI to reach your device.

A few minutes later, Alyssa came in, all fresh from the shower.

“Are you in the WIFI?” she asked, wanting to know if I was hogging all the bandwidth.

“No,” I informed her. “My Hulu was being weird so I turned off my WIFI.”

She flounced down the stairs to see if Tom was on the computer, which, by its very proximity to the router and modem, is the first served by our WIFI.

He wasn’t.

Huh. Weird.

Later, Tom mentioned he thought he’d heard the router sizzle earlier that evening.

Whatever the case, we had no internet.

It was 7:45pm on a Wednesday.

Whatever were we going to do with ourselves without precious weefee!?!

I mean, sure, we have more DVDs than I care to count. We have antenna TV, we have books and board games.

But you’d have thought we were in the middle of a blackout without access to candles.

We did end up watching a rerun of The Goldbergs and the last half of Chicago Med and then the first ten minutes of the newest season of The Amazing Race (fucking Rupert from Survivor is on there, back in his stupid ass tie-dyed shirt, OMG!) and then were all in bed by 9:30, with lights out and eyes closed.

It was actually kind of amazing.

Of course, we expected to come home on Thursday to find that Tom has gotten everything fixed.

We were disappointed by that expectation. Though it was softened by spending almost two hours at my mom’s after school and work, soaking up her lovely WIFI.

When we got home, Tom announced that the new modem he’d purchased that day for $150 did not fix the problem. Our internet provider would be out sometime the next day, Friday, with a new router.

So we spent another evening without WIFI. Both Alyssa’s and my phone have access to data but it costs us. I was able to check emails for Tom and get addresses for his shipments but there would be no Hulu or Netflix.

We ended up watching The Hunger Games on DVD.

And we were in bed again by 9:30.

There’s something to be said for being unplugged, even if just a little.

But yes, I was incredibly glad when the WIFI was back in full force. I mean, come on, now that I’ve experienced Hulu…I don’t want to give it up.

What We're Watching

We’re a television watching family. I am not necessarily proud of this fact but I don’t let it get me down much either.

Yes, we should all move more. Yes, we’re a sedentary nation and I’m part of the problem. Blah, blah, blah.

Kiss my fat butt and make room on the couch, it’s time to turn on Netflix or Hulu.

We don’t have cable or satellite at our house. We can’t justify the cost of monthly payments.

But I do buy Hulu and Netflix cards every few months.

I justify those with the rationalization that I’m making the conscious decision to spend that money each time I buy the cards. I don’t use a credit card to allow Hulu or Netflix to automatically charge me for monthly services.

I know, it’s a stretch but…we all do what we have to do to justify certain expenses.

We first started Netflix in the months after my surgery and ensuing chemotherapy treatments. One of my fellow breast cancer survivors sent me a care package and included in that box was a $30 Netflix card.

I watched all the seasons of Black Mirror, six seasons of The Great British Baking Show, six seasons of Call the Midwife and so much more.

These days, we’ve also discovered Hulu, which is so awesome because I can watch it on my phone in my room while Olivia bathes.

We’re currently on cycle 16 of America’s Next Top Model. It’s so much fun to watch these shows now that we can google the winner at the start of the season. I know, that ‘spoils’ it for most but we LOVE being spoiled. So yes, we go into the first episode of the season knowing who wins.

I’m watching The Act on Hulu as well. What a show. It’s based on the real life case of Gypsie Rose and her mother DeeDee, a psychopathic woman who went so far as to have her perfectly healthy child’s salivary glands removed. She even found a doctor who inserted a feeding tube into a Gypsie, who was capable of eating by mouth. Patricia Arquette is so great at DeeDee, so creepy, so scary. Joey King plays Gypsie Rose and she’s just amazing.

I have to wait each week for the next episode, so it’s not like I’m binge watching (which I would TOTALLY do it I could…)

On Netflix we were thrilled last week when season three of The Santa Clarita Diet was added. This show is so much fun. I don’t care that Drew Barrymore’s character is a human-eating zombie, she and Timothy Olyphant’s character have the one of most healthy marriages on television these days. And their daughter is such a badass.

Hulu also has the Spring Baking Championship showing new episodes every Tuesday. Something to look forward to, is what I’m saying. Duff is such a nice judge. The ladies who bookend him are okay too.

I am eagerly awaiting season three of Stranger Things, which I think comes out in July.

Queer Eye is another show that I always eagerly anticipate each new season but it’s only ever eight episodes at most and that makes me sad because those guys are so kind, we need to see more of them.

So much to see, so little time.