Follow-Up

Phone - After the beginning of this year, we decided to discontinue our telephone landline and depend entirely on our cell phones. This allowed me to upgrade our DSL service.

The only time I miss having the landline is when I must deal with automated answering devices with those infernal menus. Some menus are very long; some don’t repeat your options (my doctor’s office, for example). The menus are easier to deal with if the keypad is not on the receiver. We had two wired phones with the keypads on the bases instead of the receivers. The keypads on the base are also easier to use when refilling prescriptions by phone.

Another problem is changing your number with all the people that had our telephone number. It’s easy to forget to change the number at the pharmacy or the library.

The best result is that we no longer have to deal with telemarketers and charities asking for donations. It’s embarrassing not to be able to give as I used to.

My faster internet connection speed is not that much faster than our DSL Lite was and every week or so it begins to slow perceptively. I have to unplug the router for a few seconds; it seems to correct the problem. It’s just annoying.

Bathroom – I decided to use the bathroom downstairs rather than taking a chance on falling in the upstairs tub/shower combination. The downstairs has only a shower stall.

I bought new accessories and it looks nice, and I feel much safer.

The one problem is litter. One of Little Girl’s litter boxes is in that bathroom. She likes clay litter, but she tracks it out of the box. Stepping on those little clay particles with no shoes is uncomfortable to say the least. However, a little pain from stepping on litter is better than breaking something if I fell while getting out of the bathtub.

Kindle – I love my little tablet with the Kindle program. It’s so nice to be able to download a book in the middle of the night if I finish one book and need another one.

One of the things I don’t like about it is the amount of errors in the text, i.e spelling, spacing, missing pages. I’ve found mistakes in mainstream books as well as the self-published ones. There was one written by one of my favorite authors which was so flawed, I found it difficult to read. The author happens to be a college professor so I know he knows how to correctly paragraph dialog. I’ve never had that problems while reading his printed books. I spent half my time reading his Kindle edition book trying to decided who was talking. It was so aggravating. The one I was reading today skipped a page or two. I’ve noticed that the self-published ones have more spelling errors and typos than the mainstream books.

The other problem is that it’s just too easy to use. If I’m not careful, I could go WAY over budget each month. I buy an Amazon gift card with a set amount to keep myself in bounds.