It will be a bittersweet time here at our house, beginning Wednesday. That is the day we've arranged to have our cable television shut off.

But unlike so many of our friends and neighbors who have ditched their cable TV, we won't be receiving a visit anytime soon from the satellite TV guys to hook us into another media I.V. line, so we can still tune into the same 200 channels.

We're not shutting off the television Cold Turkey, but what will be left is not exactly hot Thanksgiving Day dinner, either. As of Wednesday, we'll be an official Antenna TV family.

My guess is, we'll be down to around eight local channels, maybe more, maybe less, depending on our success at hooking up the antenna. We'll save $84 a month.

And what will we lose in the process? It remains to be seen. But with the average American watching five hours of television per day, or 12 years of television during their lifetime (according to the A.C. Neilson Co.) we may have more to gain than lose.

Cable has been a part of our lives for awhile now. My first exposure to cable television started when I moved to Hanford 18 years ago. I was a young Navy wife, new in town, whose husband was gone on detachment frequently.

Cable television and its abundance of viewing choices was often company for me during the day and evening hours when my husband was away.

Of course back then, channels like Discovery and The Learning Channel actually offered educational programming, CNN was strictly a hard news network, and the angry, argumentative buffoons of the Olbermann and O'Reilly ilk had not yet come on the scene at Fox and MSNBC. Cable was OK -- actually, cable was better than OK. It was pretty cool.

But as with everything in this big country of ours, eventually cable got a whole lot bigger, and not necessarily better. So-called news shows began catering to "infotainment" needs more and more, to a point where you might miss a story like a huge earthquake occurring in Indonesia, but still be able to find out exactly what Michael Jackson's corpse was up to that day.

The so-called "educational" channels have not evolved into much that's worthwhile, either. One of the problems is that reality television has reared its ugly head there, along with far too many other places on the channel box.

Thanks to reality TV, we are now treated to marathon viewings of shows like "Ice Road Truckers" and "Ax Men," where approximately every third word must be bleeped out because the show's participants either don't care or have never been instructed to curb their language in light of the fact that what they're saying will be broadcast on -- hello! -- television.

(As an aside, I'm sure the guys who operate the "bleep" device for these shows have a mean time of employment of around six months, after which they fall by the wayside with repetitive-use finger injuries from having had to hit the button so much to bleep out four-letter words, over and over.)

And if you're not in the mood for shows about manly, foul-mouthed loggers and truckers, there are always other shows, which fit into categories such as Shows About People Who Had WAY Too Many Children, Shows About Really Graphic Medical Procedures, or Shows About Interesting Birth Defects.

Add to this melange several teen shows about fashion, girl-fights and campus sex, little kids' programming like SpongeBob Squarepants, sports shows, and a few thousand home shopping channels, and you have the state of cable television today.

I'm not saying that there are not quality television shows on cable, or that network television does any better.

There are, and it doesn't. But with hundreds of channels to choose from, the good often falls through the cracks as we surf past entire networks we never even watch to find the few diamonds of television programming, bobbing like buoys in the vast sea of media debris.

As far as my own family goes, there are things each of us will miss about cable. For me, I'll miss seeing the end of the three-part series on The Beatles which I've been watching on VH1.

My husband will miss Giants baseball. But it's my eldest who will miss cable the most, since he's recently taken to rotating back and forth from computer screen to television set, eating breakfast and lunch while channel surfing, and vegging out and watching five hours of "Overhaulin'" on sunny weekends when he could probably be outside doing other things, like mowing the lawn.

Which is, of course, exactly why we're doing it.

I don't know if it will work, but by giving ourselves less choices as far as what to watch, I'm hoping there's some chance it will translate into doing something better with our time.

Spending four hours a day, or 12 years of our lives watching the antics of overwhelmed parents of eight and foul-mouthed loggers seems such a waste of a perfectly good day ... just over a decade's worth of them, actually.

Diane Sayre is a freelance writer living in Hanford. Her column appears weekly in the Sentinel. Readers can write to her at The Hanford Sentinel, P.O. Box 9, Hanford, CA 93232.

(Sept. 7, 2009)