Goal 60. Get a decent media system

Well, the Christmas season has drawn to a close and Prince Charming and I are getting back into the regular routine of things. Prince has had the last week off, so our house was been running like a wonderful machine, with him doing all the laundry and dishes, plus vacuuming! It's great to have someone around who helps out so much.

Over the holidays we celebrated with family and actually had a house full of guests. In order to do this we had to transform our "office" into a guest room for my parents, and during this transformation we took Prince's Mac Mini desktop out of the office and into the living room.....

Which we LOVE!

We moved it initially just so that he could access it while my parents were staying in the room, but now it has a permanent new home. Since we don't have cable, and prefer to watch streaming video (my fave site for this is Sidereel), we have long been wondering how we could get a TV and yet be able to still watch our favourite shows.

If you currently have cable, but are finding it a tad expensive, you really should check out online streaming options. Even living in Canada, where we don't have Hulu, and always avoid actually buying episodes we have certainly never run out of options. Adam was able to watch both the World Juniors Final games yesterday on TSN.ca. We even cancelled our Netflix account last year before moving. One of the great side benefits of this is that we can avoid getting sucked into watching bad TV through flipping channels, and actually have to get up to change the show, so we are much more conscious of what we are watching. For someone like me, who can easily watch TV all day (oh yeah, I have been known to make pies in the living room, so I could keep watching my show. Until I got a laptop  that is, and now just move the show into the kitchen!), having this forced decision-making point is good for me and helps me to make more intentional choices.

So now, without having to buy anything we have got our decent media system. Although, we did end up buying an used iPad from Cogsworth, which Prince is also LOVING. He takes it to bed with him every night, which is really slowing down his ability to read all 5 JRR Tolkien books. But he'll get there.

Sometimes it is great in life, how things end up turning out better than you thought, and you sometimes do save money, when you wait and let things unfold naturally. We are so excited to have ended up with a fantastic media system, and haven't had to spend the $1000 we were thinking it would cost. For that price we would have had to become alchemists.

I hope that the rest of you have ended 2011 on a positive note! We are so excited to have seen that some of the big risks we took in 2011 are starting to work out for us, and we see 2012 as another year of building our futures. Hopefully the next year will see the same kind of progress as last! And I will certainly be continuing to work on my goals and posting them here.