Dishless

Last summer, we took advantage of Direct TV's deal where you can cancel service for up to six months. And we survived the long, dark winter with just Hulu and local stations.

Well, it took paying just one full bill for us to start tossing around the idea of dropping the dish for real. Forever.

$100 per month just for me to mindlessly zone out to Snooki and Jwoww once a week and binge on Bar Rescue marathons on Sundays just isn't a good value.

So, we took the plunge and as of midnight tonight, it's all over.

Now, we aren't total hippies, I mean, we love brainless entertainment as much as the next dudes. Between a Hulu Plus subscription and the recent discovery of the Amazon Prime app on the Wii, we'll still be able to unwind with some shows, but without feeling like we are paying for 200 channels we never watch.

Are you already getting your TV this way? Did I just blow your mind or am I like super behind the times? It's hard to tell.

The $5 fix

With my dear and darling Ma and Pa visiting us this weekend, I decided to get my tookus in gear and fix up the woebegone wall I shared last week. The fact that I scored three $1.47 frames from a Target clearance rack also helped.

Better, right? I'm no professional, but I see vast improvement and the darker frames add good balance and I'm pretty sold on them because they required no painting and were ca-ra-ra-ra-zy cheap. This is what we in the decorating world call "justifying."

We've got a nice shot from our first anniversary outing to Russian River Brewery.

The best fortune ever written, placed on some scrapbooking paper from the Hob Lob.

It says "You are the greatest in the world!" and it makes me quite happy.

I learned while we were engaged that if you send the President a wedding invite, he will send you a nice congratulatory card. I framed ours because it seems so quaint and like something grannies would do.

Yes, these are all camera-phone pictures taken in the dead of night. I not only never claimed to be a decorator, I also never claimed to be a photographer or person with enough patience to find the camera and wait for daylight.

Not bad for a $5 project, right?

Net Profit

Costs (tangible, intangible) of the outdoor project:

• One tetanus shot, for her
• One hammer, shattered
• One silver SUV, interioraly trashed
• About $1500 in lumber and rentals, invested
• About $1100 in patio-building supplies, invested
• About $600 in landscaping costs, invested
• Two months of weekends, gone
• Three pairs of men's shorts, ripped
• Three pairs of work gloves, ruined
• One riding mower tractor, bent under the weight of patio remnants
• About $450 in extras, table, grill, hot dogs, beer
• Two months worth of full trash cans, full of old deck bits
• One heirloom 1970s circular saw, dead
• One rose bush, mercilessly slaughtered
• One college t-shirt, stained
• One false alarm that we were done, emotional toll
• Remove obvious death threat and add power source for bumpin' tunes, $225 (electical)
• Permit, $71

Revenue (tangible, intangible) from the project:

• About 350 square feet of outdoor living space that we are not ashamed of
• New view, lovely
• Marital bonding, jump ahead to year three-levels of marital wisdom
• $18.52 in Google Adsense revenue
• Added property value, doesn't matter - we will never move
• Deck-building, patio-building knowledge
• Local economic growth, all major purchases made at locally-owned stores
• Ten more years of being tetanus free, for her
• Two egos, inflated
• Years of grilled pizza, in our future
• Light, won't kill us
• Tunage, wattage

Net results: Positive, totally worth it.

You might notice the electrician's fees in there. Electric Dan is coming by Friday to hook us up with a new light that won't be such a buzzkill (get it?). Ever forward, people, we move ever forward.

We also got word from the inspector that there is a slight dip in one set of stairs, but Hubs remains confident that this will be an easy job. I bit my tongue and did not remind him that we said each little process in this big project would be easy. It's never easy.