Desperately Seeking New TV

Fourteen weeks ago, I barely had time to watch TV. I was going to school, working 55+ hours a week -- who had time? Now, the irony of life is such that now that I'm on bed rest, watching TV makes up the majority of my day -- and what luck, I'm on bed rest in the middle of a writer's strike!

When I started bed rest 13 weeks ago, a little piece of me became excited about the fact that I wouldn't miss an episode of Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice or Desperate Housewives. I thought; I might even be able to check out a few new shows, not that I expected to be able to maintain all of this TV watching after our girls were born -- but I looked forward to a few weeks of good TV.

It amazes me the shows that are now on TV -- mostly bad reality and game shows. I watched that lie detector show for about 15 minutes -- and that was all I could take it was so bad. I know these shows are nothing but a desperate ploy by the networks to garner ratings; they're probably going into the "reject" can to retrieve show that were previously passed on, just to take up air time with something other than re-runs.

And what about today -- Super Bowl Sunday, a day where 99.9% of the men in the world are all watching the same thing, and their wives are either with them at some Super Bowl Party hanging out with the other wives talking about their kids, or watching the game for the commercials (I do acknowledge that there are some women who actually do watch the game too). Not me. While Geoff is downstairs watching the Super Bowl, I am upstairs looking for something good to watch on TV, and there is absolutely NOTHING to watch. Over the last four years, Geoff and I have enjoyed watching the Animal Planet Puppy Bowl -- which is a studio converted into a football field where they let about a dozen puppies loose to play, roll, bite and jump all over each other. It is amusingly cute, but it's nothing you can watch for several hours.

You would think the cable networks would take this opportunity to appeal to the Super Bowl wives who don't really want to watch a football game. Where are the chick-flicks? I would think these networks would get a lot of viewers by playing a chick-flick marathon. I watched a Sex And the City marathon today on WGN, but it only ran from 12 to 4 pm, so here I am left with nothing else good to watch. Silly me -- we got a Netflix shipment yesterday, and I watched all 3 of the DVD's yesterday -- leaving me nothing to watch today. Not one of my smarter moves.

I know, I could read a book, and as much as I do love to read -- I fall asleep. I have a time and a place where I enjoy reading -- and it is not while laying in bed, especially when you have to lay on your side. It's just not conducive to good reading.

We have some DVD's that I could watch -- but they are all movies I've seen before. I suppose I could watch them again, but I'm in the mood for something new, something I haven't seen before. I know that I only have a few more weeks to worry about this, since our girls will be our entertainment for quite a long time -- maybe by the time the new TV season starts next Fall we will have a handle on this parenting thing and I will be able to catch a few episodes of my favorite shows once in awhile, but then again -- who knows...