Life Without Cable And The Bachelor Without Cheesy Music

Parker and I took the plunge and decided to get rid of cable back in 2013. We were paying $100 a month and just didn't feel like we watched enough TV to justify that. So we cut the cord. We told the cable company "It's not you, it's us"... but really it's you. We lived without it for about 9 months until it was football season. Then, all bets were off, and we needed our cable.
Parker and I are not avid sports watchers. We don't watch basketball, baseball, soccer, or even the NFL, but college football has our hearts... and our $50 a month for cable. That's right, we took the plunge again. We did manage to cut our bill in half the second time around (we started with DirectTV and ended with Cox for those that are curious), so that was a plus. The great thing about Cox is they didn't make us enter into a contract. We knew we were only going to pay for cable through the end of football season, and we would be back to our streaming, cableless lives in January.  

Thankfully, Rosie the Riveter was there to tell us that we could, in fact, do it. We could live without cable.

Honestly, living without cable is so easy for us. The biggest reason to have cable, in my opinion, is sports. Since we don't really watch sports, it was an easy thing to give up. I will say the one thing I miss is the DVR. Spoiled, first-world child alert: it's nice to be able to fast forward through those commercials. The DVR was nice, but the commercials are really minimized with Hulu anyway, so it's not so bad. While we are on the subject of Hulu, I totally did not understand the point of Hulu plus. Unless you want to binge-watch a show from the first season (Hulu Plus has multiple seasons of a lot of shows), you could watch the recent episodes of all of your favorite shows with regular free Hulu. At least, that's how it was in the good old days. I got on Hulu the day after the first episode of the Bachelor aired to watch it, and it said it wouldn't be available for another week. WHAT? I can't wait that long for the drama! I immediately texted Parker to let him know $8 per month would be coming out of our accounts for the foreseeable future because I had to watch the Bachelor. So, Hulu did something really smart. They took away the redeeming qualities of regular Hulu and reassigned those qualities to the not-so-free Hulu Plus. Well played, Hulu. Well played.
I do have to share a funny story with this. Parker and I have surround sound, but somehow the surround sound was put to a different setting or not working properly or something. I can barely turn the silly thing on, but Parker knows. Anyway, I'll omit the technical details. So we started watching the Bachelor one fine Monday evening (He would like for me to point out that he does not condone this show. I'd like to point out that I think he secretly loves it.). After a couple of minutes of trying to figure out why it seemed like unedited, raw footage, we realized we couldn't hear any background music. We could hear voices loud and clear, the wind blowing, etc, but the cheesy background music that really makes the show was gone. It. was. painful. Parker figured out how to fix the sound after the show was over. Talk about a great person to have around 5 minutes after a crisis. I don't recommend watching The Bachelor without the background music. I just don't. 
This isn't the best example, but check out a clip from the rose ceremony without the suspenseful background music. Not so suspenseful. 

To sum up, life without cable is still life, and I recommend it. However, The Bachelor without the background music is most definitely not The Bachelor we girls are all addicted to. 
Also, if you are thinking about getting rid of cable, apparently Dish just released a new deal where you can get most of your favorite channels (HGTV, ABCFamily, all the basics, etc) for $20 per month. You can then add on all the sports channels for another $5 a month. Dish did not put me up to saying this and has no idea who I am, but we will be taking advantage of this come college football season 2015, so I wanted to pass on the good deal. 
Do you have cable? If you do, do you think life would be the same without it?