Stuck in the house? I have the solution for you.

Okay, I just used that title because I really wanted to tie in this unrelated picture of Dean. He LOVES the dollhouse and the other day he apparently wanted to move in there. At least learning to climb the stairs won't be a problem, as he's holding them in his hand.

Here's the real deal: I want to tell you about our TV situation. We don't have cable. We don't have dish. But we still watch all our favorite shows every week.

We have a Roku. I might say this ranks in our top 5 best purchases of our married life. We can stream all sorts of things on it. We use our Netflix there, of course, and we also have a Hulu Plus account. I found that my Picasa Web albums can be linked there, so I can have up a slideshow of all the pictures on my blog going on my TV. We have an Amazon video account where we can order movies for about $5 if we're too lazy to go to Redbox and we want to watch something new. (Also, their customer service is EXCELLENT with Amazon video - once we ordered a movie that had trouble streaming, and they gave us our money back automatically. I didn't even have to call or anything.) We listen to all our Pandora stations on there - it's great to have music coming from our TV in the middle of the house instead of a computer in a back room.

Last night I discovered possibly my new favorite feature. It's called The Gymbox. Now instead of doing the same workout video all the time (as much as I love Jillian), I can get new videos every week. This morning I did my first one...a TREADMILL workout. Hello? That is SO genius. I have a treadmill, but I'm not a runner, so I never use it. Now it's like I have a trainer to tell me how to use my treadmill. She tells me what my incline and speed should be at and leads me through hills and sprints and whatnot - things I wouldn't figure out on my own. Walking and a bit of running. It was an awesome 30 mintue workout. There are a million categories on there - kickboxing, yoga, dancing, strength training...it's awesome. I'm on a free guest pass right now, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to upgrade to the membership ($10 a month, I think) so I can continue to get new videos.

I also found last night that all the major news stations do a little recap of the day's news. ON a free station, of course. This is becoming a must for me as I NEVER watch the news and have to find out about all major news through the grapevine, way delayed. (Like Japan - I embarassingly didn't even hear about that tragedy until a week later. You'd think I lived under a rock.) No excuse for that in this decade, right?

There are all sorts of stations you can download, most of them free. Games, kid drawing stuff...it's awesome. And it's not like the TV is on all the time - it's what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, and it's way cheaper than a cable bill with DVR.

Obviously I'm not being paid to tell you about this, but I just wanted to pass along the info. Get a Roku if you don't already have one (I just saw they are now only $60!! We got ours for $100 a couple years ago. Still worth the price.) and discover all the awesome things you can do. We use ours dozens of times a day - for working out, music, distraction for the kids, and relaxing for me. In the words of Kip, I love technology - especially my Roku.