Well, after 8 long years together, my Tivo is officially kaput.

Here today, gone tomorrow. It was working one day and not the next. In some ways 8 years doesn’t seem like a long time, but then I think about how that Tivo has been with me longer than Evie and I do feel a little sad. I suppose 8 years is a pretty long time for a piece of electronics.

Of course, this meant an immediate, 2 hour re-wiring of my entire entertainment and computer networking systems. I tore everything apart and put it back together so, as Sara put it, everything can basically be the same. What’s that you said about having laundry to fold? But now I know it’s done properly, and I can sleep easy at night. Oh, and I removed about 10 pounds of excess copper wire from our living room.

I guess this is officially going to put the final kibosh on my tv watching. I just can’t imagine sitting down at a certain day and time to watch a show. That seems so…anachronistic. But I can’t really justify spending any money on a DVR, when we hardly watch any tv anyway. (Can you believe we’ve been without cable for more than 3 years already? Based on my calculations at that time, we’ve saved around $1750 so far by not having cable.) Off the top of my head, the only two shows I can think of that I’ll miss are Downton Abbey and Supernatural, which are both available online for free anyway.

I have not regretted reducing my tv watching time at all, so I guess the silver lining is even that much less tv watching (and thus, more time for other things. Certainly right now I have a lot more projects I want to do than time to do them. So it’s probably all for the best.

But it does sort of seem like the end of an era, losing a device that’s been with me for so long and that I once described by saying, “TV with no Tivo is like having electricity without anybody ever inventing the lightbulb. What’s the point?”

I guess it’s back to living in the dark for me. Fortunately, that is increasingly where I want to be.