Change Can Be Good

Living with Thaddeus (the Luddite), we are required to have a land line for our phone service.  Trying to convince him to get rid of the land line and use just a cell phone was a fruitless argument.

Options and Results
He does have a cell phone...it's a go-phone that he pays $100 a year...for $100 he gets WAY more minutes than he will ever need.  In fact, he just completed the annual renewal this month and he has almost twice the number of minutes he started with since he could carry over all his unused minutes (less than 50 minutes of cell phone in a year!)  And honestly, we don't use our home phone very much at all.  Since we had to pay for both the local phone line and a monthly rate for long-distance capabilities...we were paying about $50 a month for our land line.

His concerns:

• Didn't want to lose his home phone number
• Didn't want to have to carry a cell phone with him all over the house (we currently have a total of six extensions all around the house)
• Preferred the simplicity of a land line

Options we consider were:

1. Replace the land line with a cell phone and get a blue tooth base with cordless remote extensions so he could leave his cell phone in one place and have extensions all over the house. 
2. Replace the land line with a box from Verizon called Home Phone Connect that would allow us to continue to use our existing cordless phones (which costs about $25 a month with a 2 year contract).



3. Go with Vonage as one of the more popular Voice Over Internet Protocol services (VoIP).
   


4. Expand our current involvement with Comcast and get their VoIP phone service (initially, it would cost us less than we currently pay per month, but then after a year or two would be more).


5. Look at other VOIP options that are cheaper and relatively well rated by users.

We ended up going with the last option.  Thaddeus found a company named VoIPo, who charge for the initial router box ($129) and then charges under $6.00 a month for all the services we could possibly want (especially for the Luddite).  We were able to port over our home number very quickly, and use our current cordless phone system.  We've had the service for a bit over a week, and so far, we're quite pleased with it.

Current Knitting

I think I'm at that point in a knitting project where I think it will NEVER be finished and even when I complete a lot of knitting, it doesn't seem to have added anything to the garment.

Fortunately, I absolutely love the fabric of this blanket and the colors I'm enjoying more and more as it refuses to grow.  So, it's a good bet that I'll finish this blanket as quickly as infinity will allow.