No TV November – Halfway Mark

We’ve passed the halfway mark for No TV November and I thought I’d do a little reflection and confession.

Confessions first. I’ve watched 3 movies and 2 hockey games. But I knit through both the hockey games and two of the movies, the third I was babysitting Zoey and put on Alice in Wonderland to keep her entertained. I regret nothing!

Reflections:

I go to bed a lot earlier without television. Without stupid TV shows distracting me and tempting me to stay awake I usually read or knit or bead until I get drowsy then just curl up in bed to sleep.

I get a lot more done. This wasn’t a big surprise, I think anyone would get more done without the television on all the time, but what’s surprising is the amount of things I’ve gotten done. Let’s review:

4 beaded bracelets
69! beaded stitch markers
1 cabled hat (made out of malabrigo and silk garden. So yummy!)
1 skull of the We Call Them Pirates fair isle hat
Prologue, character development, plot outline and beginning of first chapter of a new book.
Design and test knitting of a new fun little creature pattern
3 chapters of Pride & Prejudice

And all that is on top of working overtime this and last week and having my drive changed from 35 minutes to over an hour by construction on the train tracks, spending a few nights out shopping (for beads, it’s an addiction I swear) and other distractions. Think if I stopped watching TV for 2 months I could take over the world?

In addition to the productivity my imagination is also in hyper-drive. I shall give you an example in the form of a dream I had last night:

I’m driving to a business to drop something off for my mother. I stop at a gas station to grab a root beer (another addiction I’ve recently formed) and notice two guys standing close to my car and staring at me. One looks very young, probably in his late teens, while the other is probably closer to 30. I get in my car and drive away.

I drop the stuff off and my mom’s work and head back to my car. There’s a familiar van parked very close to the driver’s side of my car, one of those huge beasts with the fake wood paneling on the sides and the little ladder up to the roof. There’s a guy leaning against the front bumper and staring at me. I realize it’s one of the guys from the gas station. I start to back away and the other guy appears behind me. They demand, of all things, my iPod. Rather than give it to them like a sensible person I knock the younger guy over and run for it.

The older one catches up to me, it’s winter and very icy in my dream so I can’t run very fast, and pushes me against the hood of a car. I try to tell him that it’s not an iPod, it’s a Philips and has absolutely no resale value. He produces what I can only explain as a cattle prod and shocks me. (I think the jolts of pain I was feeling were attached to the chest pains I was having this morning, cause he always got me in the chest or shoulder). I pulled the MP3 player out of my purse and tried to throw it under the car I was being held down on, but the younger guy saw me. He picked it up and the older guy gave me another good shock in the leg before they ran off.

The dream went on for a while longer, with me calling the cops and other stuff but how weird is that? How many people dream about being shocked with a cattle prod?

Sometimes I’m afraid of my own mind.