how to survive without a TV (it's called Yahtzee)

OK so we arrived in India with just our suitcases, and as you may remember from earlier posts, we waited nearly a month for our stuff to arrive. During that time we had no TV, no radio, very few books, no power cord for my computer (thus no movies) and Randy's computer wouldn't allow DVDs. We also had no car and it was scorching hot outside. It was sort of a bad time. This photo is Isaac and Miranda spinning sockets from Randy's tools. Making a game out of it. That is how bored they were! Luckily, I had cross-stitch to work on (something I hadn't touched in about 3 years) and we had a travel game of Yahtzee. Randy had to pretty much break it to get the dice out of the travel holder, but then we could play. And play we did. Hundreds of games of Yahtzee. When our stuff got here and we had board games and cards and crib board we were so happy! And I suspect we will not play Yahtzee for a looooong time!

Even when our stuff arrived, we (Randy) burnt the karaoke so that was out, we had a mini DVD player and a piano but no transformers so we couldn't plug them in! Still kind of rough.

Once the transformers came it was better, but even I had to agree that playing a two-player Playstation game on a 7inch screen was pretty lame! Really just a GameBoy :)

Finally after weeks of "Are we seriously going to go 2 YEARS without a TV?!" from pretty much everybody in the house, I buckled and we bought a TV.

Then I really caved and got Satellite TV. Yikes! But the price will astound you - I paid $60 for the dish itself, $25 to have it installed, then after the free 2 week trial period, we pay $8 a month. For 110 channels. So I guess the bargain hunter in me won. On the down side, of those 110 channels, 90 are in some other language! :) And the package would have been just $7 but I pay extra for Animal Planet (and 13 other Hindi channels). One other good thing about TV here is that they clean up HBO. They remove most of the smut and much of the language and the worst of the gore. So the movies are short, but safe to watch! You can also watch cricket 24/7 on 3 or 4 channels. We don't, but you could.

Notice in the photo our games up top, a few DVDs, books, DVD player on top of TV, then on the right of the TV is a transformer for the DVD player, and the all important UPS - Uninterrupted Power Supply - basically a battery backup. The power goes out 10+ times a day here, and altho we could probably live with interruptions to the TV, when the DVD goes off you have to start all over!