It seems we cut the cable cord just in time. Look how much my Optimum bill went up because some “promotional rate” I didn’t even know I had has “ended.” Thankfully, we should be refunded part of this bill since we’ve now parted ways with the cable.

When Optimum, without any warning, canceled my CBS station the other week, that was the last straw. My husband and I had talked about divorcing the cable company for quite a while, and the days I went without CBS provided the impetus we needed. I’d never forgiven Optimum for eliminating Channel 9 a few years ago. No more Greenville news and ECU sports with Brian Bailey.

Oh, I had a long list of grievances with the cable company. Ever increasing rates (cable creep, it’s called), poor customer service, the above-mentioned arbitrary canceling of my favorite stations.

I was also sick of my telemarketer-plagued landline. Doing away with cable meant I would no longer have the phone package that always seemed to be thrown in as part of the deal. I have now unplugged every landline in my house and will bury them in the electronics graveyard in the attic.

Good-bye to annoying telemarketers, at least until they find me on my cell phone.

Firing Optimum cable doesn’t mean I’ve gone off the grid, though. At my house, we now have YouTube TV, and so far, I’m loving it.

I call it TV for electronics dummies. People like me, who for years have been baffled by how to even turn on the daggone television. Now it’s no more multiple remotes and making sure the cable box is activated as well as the television. No more switching back and forth between something called HDM1 and HDM2. All that jazz that I struggled to remember and often had to call in tech support, my husband, to do for me.

Today, I’m down to a sweet little firestick with only a few options that even a tech-challenged Baby Boomer grandma like me can easily master. Look how streamlined this gadget is.

You Tube TV is not the only new entertainment in my life. Back in the fall, I learned to play Mah Jongg. Oh my goodness! Y’all, I’m in love with this tile game. I’ve never been a card player–don’t know a thing about bridge–but I’m under the Mah Jongg spell.

I know this Mah Jongg card looks complicated, but the game really isn’t all that difficult. Part of winning is strategy, and part is luck (jokers are involved). I play online and also with a group of ladies one morning most weeks. It’s time off I give myself to do nothing but have fun.

We’ve had some really cold temperatures, at least by eastern North Carolina standards. It could be the winter of our discontent, or we can look outside and appreciate the season. A beautiful January sunrise caught my eye at Emerald Isle.

This scene in the North Carolina mountains reminds me of the Robert Frost poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

And the budding daffodils show me that spring isn’t far away… or that my annual battle with rabbits that want to snip off my flowers is starting.

That daffodil on the ground was detached from a stem above it. The one that looks snipped. Look for it. Aaargh!

Crazy rabbits, crazy world–there’s still much to appreciate even in the dead of winter.