It's that time of year when many of us feel as though we should give something back to the world. At least I always feel that way this time of year, whether because of altruism, guilt or just the desire to build up a little good karma, I don't know. One of the problems with being retired in these difficult economic times, however, is that we often don't have a lot of spare money to give. Fortunately there are ways to help other folks have a happier holiday season without giving away a lot of your fixed income.
One thing that my wife and I often do at Christmas time is to give some gifts to the local Blue Santa, Brown Santa, Toys for Tots or similar charities. There are usually collection barrels all over town where you can drop off toys. Sometimes there will be names hanging on a Christmas tree at Wal~mart or similar stores where you can find out what a child, or adult for that matter, would like to have for Christmas. They usually aren't expensive items, so you can buy them at the store and drop them in the collection box. We've discovered that most people like to buy things for babies or smaller kids. Many times the tweens and teens end up getting gifts intended for younger children because fewer people buy for them. So we usually try to buy something for the pre-teen and teen kids instead of the younger ones. Although things for kids of that age can cost a little more, if you look around a bit you can find gifts for pre-teens and teens for around $10 or so.
Another inexpensive way to help someone out for the holidays is to donate non-perishable food items to a local food bank. You don't have to donate $100 worth of groceries to help out. Even $10 worth of canned or boxed non-perishable food items would be a big help. My wife and I have also donated turkeys for Thanksgiving or Christmas. There is a food bank in our area that can handle the storage and distribution and one of the local supermarkets often uses turkeys as a loss leader during the holidays. They might have a sale where you can get a turkey for $1 or so when you buy $30 worth of groceries. When that kind of special is available we will break our grocery shopping up into smaller amounts so that we can get 2 or 3 turkeys for $1 apiece. Then we donate them to the food bank. We have learned, however, that it is best to get unfrozen, smoked turkeys because many people who need the food over the holidays don't have the facilities available to thaw or cook a turkey.
Another thing you can do if you don't have a lot of money to give to help someone out for the holidays is to donate your time. Many organizations need help serving Christmas dinner to the needy and would be glad to have you volunteer your time to prepare or serve a meal. In fact, Meals on Wheels provides the opportunity to volunteer your time throughout the year to ensure that seniors in worse shape than you get a reasonably nutritious meal once a day. I'm sure that the Meals on Wheels operation varies somewhat depending upon whether you are in a large metropolitan area or not. In our little town my wife and I were able to not only help distribute the meals but also to help package them into the carriers that are used to keep them warm while they are being delivered. The Meals on Wheels delivery person may be the only one who looks in on an elderly person on a daily basis, so volunteering to deliver the meals allows you not only to provide a meal for needy seniors, but also to chat with them for a few minutes to make sure that they have some contact with another human being. It also provides the opportunity to make sure that they are OK and haven't become ill or had an accident since the last volunteer looked in on them the previous day.
Other places that will need volunteers during the holiday season include food banks. They will have more applicants during the holiday season than they normally do. So many of them will not only be asking for donations of food, but also volunteers to help handle the applications, receive and sort the contributions of food, match applicants to need and deliver food to the needy.
Organizations which serve Christmas dinner to people in need will require extra volunteers to help with preparing and serving the meals.
Nursing homes and hospice facilities often have Christmas events and usually are in need of extra volunteers to wrap gifts, decorate facilities, help attendees who are not very mobile and even photograph the events.
There are lots of other organizations that provide meals and gifts for the needy at Christmas time. Most of them are understaffed and in need of seasonal volunteers. If you check the web sites of local newspapers or TV stations, you will probably find lists of those organizations which could use some help at this time of year. Lend a hand and help spread some of that Christmas cheer.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
A Brief Affair: Part Two
So here's where we are in the saga of my brief affair in the high tech startup world: After moving back to the burbs I got a job as Director of Development at Nestling Inc (this is just a name I made up to protect the innocent, or guilty, depending upon your point of view), a small software startup that had been in existence for a year or so before I joined the company. It seemed like a good fit to me. I felt like it was the ideal job. I was learning new things by working for a small company and I felt that I was contributing things I had learned from years of developing software in a large company.
Of course the problem with startup companies is that they are kind of like hatchlings. A lot of them make it out of the egg but only a few survive. I knew that when I took the job but I didn't realize at that point how close Nestling Inc was to falling out of the nest.
Although Nestling Inc had been around for awhile by the time I went to work there, it had yet to produce a product or sign up a customer. All of the money that was used to run the business at that point came from private investors. After I joined the company I discovered that it had burned through almost all of the initial investment capital and the company coffers were nearly empty. For that reason one of the things we spent a lot of time doing was talking to potential investors to try to generate the cash we needed to deliver a product that we could install in a customer account ... when we got one.
The problem there was that most potential customers wanted at least a beta version of the product to try out before signing on the dotted line and most of the venture capital firms and private investors we spoke with didn't want to invest in a company that hadn't delivered a product and didn't have at least a couple of customers already on board. Catch 22.
We did have a couple of potential customers interested in the product we were building but they needed something they could install in a test environment in order to commit to an order. So we were working heads down on the delivery of an initial version of the product, which in software development is called an alpha version. This is where we began to run into trouble with design on the fly. The programmers wanted to make a technology change at the very time we were trying to deliver something that might allow us to get a customer or two to sign on the dotted line so that we could get some new investors on board. The management team didn't want to make a change like that at such a critical time, but with money for salaries rapidly running out, they didn't want to alienate the software engineers either. So things got pretty interesting.
Very quickly the company reached the point where there wasn't enough money left to pay the rent on the office space we were using or the salaries of the folks who worked there. The founders' response to this was to use the last of the money to throw a party at a local brew pub and try to convince the programmers to work on the project at home with salaries temporarily suspended until we got another infusion of cash. The company officers promised to help the programmers find other employment that would leave them some spare time to work on our product. All of the programmers agreed to this plan.
I was ready to bail out at this point and try to find some other work but the founders asked me to stay on without pay and help them try to raise some cash to get back into full operation again. I was reluctant to do that, so they verbally agreed to increase my stock options to the same level as theirs. Even though I was way old enough to know better, I let myself get seduced by the chance that my share of the company might some day be worth some big bucks and I agreed to stay.
During the next month or so we ramped up our efforts to attract investors, visiting every venture capital firm and angel investor that would see us. The range of people we talked to was eye-opening. Some were formal venture capital firms that wanted to take over the company and drive it to an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. We didn't really want to do that but we were desperate enough to agree. However, there was that little problem of no product and no customers. The venture capital firms we spoke with were only interested in companies that were already making money so that didn't work for us.
The angel investors offered a better opportunity to get the company solvent. Angel investors are people who have some money to invest and want to get in on the ground floor of startup companies. In return for their investment they get a piece of the company and, if it becomes successful, they stand to gain a very high return on their investment. They are a diverse group. Many of them are entrepreneurs who have started one or more successful companies of their own. Others have inherited wealth and are interested in building it up. All of them are highly individual. About the only thing they have in common is that they are "wild and crazy guys" who are willing to take a big risk if there's the potential of an even bigger payback somewhere down the road. One of the investment angels that we met with was a bigger-than-life individual who had inherited money and built his fortune up from there. He dressed in Western wear, had a custom pickup and lived in a big house that was decorated with cattle horns and the heads and body parts of more animals than I could identify. The house was in an exclusive area with guards to keep us common folk out. We tried really hard to interest him in Nestling Inc and we were pretty sure that he wanted to buy in to the company. Unfortunately his investment adviser was much more cautious and had more of a venture capitalist view of the world. We couldn't convince the money man that Nestling Inc would be a good investment so our pickup driving angel turned us down.
Things went on like that for four to six weeks. We couldn't find an investor and the programmers were all busy working on their new jobs and weren't able to devote much time to the Nestling Inc project. Finally we all agreed that the company was buzzard bait and we went our separate ways.
I was sorry to see Nestling Inc turn belly up, but I did learn a few things about retirement jobs from the experience. One of the things I learned was that a retirement job can be a lot more fun than the career you've had for most of your life, even if it is similar to what you have been doing for the last twenty or thirty years. Assuming your previous career has left you with enough income to live on, you can take a retirement job that pays a lot less than what you earned before you retired. That allows you to concentrate on finding something that you enjoy doing without worrying so much about the salary.
Another thing I learned was that years of working for a large corporation had made me kind of naive about protecting myself as an employee. If I was going to take a fling at a job with a startup company again I would check out the company's financial position before I ever agreed to work there. In addition, I would not accept verbal agreements or deferred written agreements regardless of how small and informal the company was. I would insist on written agreements for everything up front and I would have my own lawyer go over them before signing.
The whole Nestling Inc experience was a whirlwind affair for me. I didn't get rich. In fact, I think I only got paid for a month and a half and my stock options just evaporated. Never-the-less I had a ball. It was such a different experience for me from working in a large company, as I had for my entire adult life up to that point, that I found it exciting and satisfying. I've had several retirement jobs since my Nestling Inc days, but if we could have gotten even one more investor to sign up I probably would be working there still. Of course, it would have turned from a retirement job into a second career, but that's not a bad thing.
Of course the problem with startup companies is that they are kind of like hatchlings. A lot of them make it out of the egg but only a few survive. I knew that when I took the job but I didn't realize at that point how close Nestling Inc was to falling out of the nest.
Although Nestling Inc had been around for awhile by the time I went to work there, it had yet to produce a product or sign up a customer. All of the money that was used to run the business at that point came from private investors. After I joined the company I discovered that it had burned through almost all of the initial investment capital and the company coffers were nearly empty. For that reason one of the things we spent a lot of time doing was talking to potential investors to try to generate the cash we needed to deliver a product that we could install in a customer account ... when we got one.
The problem there was that most potential customers wanted at least a beta version of the product to try out before signing on the dotted line and most of the venture capital firms and private investors we spoke with didn't want to invest in a company that hadn't delivered a product and didn't have at least a couple of customers already on board. Catch 22.
We did have a couple of potential customers interested in the product we were building but they needed something they could install in a test environment in order to commit to an order. So we were working heads down on the delivery of an initial version of the product, which in software development is called an alpha version. This is where we began to run into trouble with design on the fly. The programmers wanted to make a technology change at the very time we were trying to deliver something that might allow us to get a customer or two to sign on the dotted line so that we could get some new investors on board. The management team didn't want to make a change like that at such a critical time, but with money for salaries rapidly running out, they didn't want to alienate the software engineers either. So things got pretty interesting.
Very quickly the company reached the point where there wasn't enough money left to pay the rent on the office space we were using or the salaries of the folks who worked there. The founders' response to this was to use the last of the money to throw a party at a local brew pub and try to convince the programmers to work on the project at home with salaries temporarily suspended until we got another infusion of cash. The company officers promised to help the programmers find other employment that would leave them some spare time to work on our product. All of the programmers agreed to this plan.
I was ready to bail out at this point and try to find some other work but the founders asked me to stay on without pay and help them try to raise some cash to get back into full operation again. I was reluctant to do that, so they verbally agreed to increase my stock options to the same level as theirs. Even though I was way old enough to know better, I let myself get seduced by the chance that my share of the company might some day be worth some big bucks and I agreed to stay.
During the next month or so we ramped up our efforts to attract investors, visiting every venture capital firm and angel investor that would see us. The range of people we talked to was eye-opening. Some were formal venture capital firms that wanted to take over the company and drive it to an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. We didn't really want to do that but we were desperate enough to agree. However, there was that little problem of no product and no customers. The venture capital firms we spoke with were only interested in companies that were already making money so that didn't work for us.
The angel investors offered a better opportunity to get the company solvent. Angel investors are people who have some money to invest and want to get in on the ground floor of startup companies. In return for their investment they get a piece of the company and, if it becomes successful, they stand to gain a very high return on their investment. They are a diverse group. Many of them are entrepreneurs who have started one or more successful companies of their own. Others have inherited wealth and are interested in building it up. All of them are highly individual. About the only thing they have in common is that they are "wild and crazy guys" who are willing to take a big risk if there's the potential of an even bigger payback somewhere down the road. One of the investment angels that we met with was a bigger-than-life individual who had inherited money and built his fortune up from there. He dressed in Western wear, had a custom pickup and lived in a big house that was decorated with cattle horns and the heads and body parts of more animals than I could identify. The house was in an exclusive area with guards to keep us common folk out. We tried really hard to interest him in Nestling Inc and we were pretty sure that he wanted to buy in to the company. Unfortunately his investment adviser was much more cautious and had more of a venture capitalist view of the world. We couldn't convince the money man that Nestling Inc would be a good investment so our pickup driving angel turned us down.
Things went on like that for four to six weeks. We couldn't find an investor and the programmers were all busy working on their new jobs and weren't able to devote much time to the Nestling Inc project. Finally we all agreed that the company was buzzard bait and we went our separate ways.
I was sorry to see Nestling Inc turn belly up, but I did learn a few things about retirement jobs from the experience. One of the things I learned was that a retirement job can be a lot more fun than the career you've had for most of your life, even if it is similar to what you have been doing for the last twenty or thirty years. Assuming your previous career has left you with enough income to live on, you can take a retirement job that pays a lot less than what you earned before you retired. That allows you to concentrate on finding something that you enjoy doing without worrying so much about the salary.
Another thing I learned was that years of working for a large corporation had made me kind of naive about protecting myself as an employee. If I was going to take a fling at a job with a startup company again I would check out the company's financial position before I ever agreed to work there. In addition, I would not accept verbal agreements or deferred written agreements regardless of how small and informal the company was. I would insist on written agreements for everything up front and I would have my own lawyer go over them before signing.
The whole Nestling Inc experience was a whirlwind affair for me. I didn't get rich. In fact, I think I only got paid for a month and a half and my stock options just evaporated. Never-the-less I had a ball. It was such a different experience for me from working in a large company, as I had for my entire adult life up to that point, that I found it exciting and satisfying. I've had several retirement jobs since my Nestling Inc days, but if we could have gotten even one more investor to sign up I probably would be working there still. Of course, it would have turned from a retirement job into a second career, but that's not a bad thing.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
A brief Affair: Part One
After my wife and I moved from the country place back to the burbs ( The Egg and Us ) I found that I had a lot of time on my hands since I no longer had the upkeep of the 10-acre property and 1-1/2 acre garden to keep me busy. So I decided that I needed to get a job. After a false start or two I ran across an ad in the paper from a small software startup (let's call it Nestling Inc which, hopefully, isn't the name of a real company) that was looking for a chief programmer. Since I had only worked for large companies in the past, I thought it might be fun to work at a startup.
So I called the number in the ad and made an appointment for a telephone interview with the Chief Technical Officer. The phone interview went well and the CTO said that he would like to take things to the next step. Even though I was interviewing for a high-level position, the CTO asked if I would be willing to take the same programming test that the software developers were required to pass. He justified that by explaining that I would be the programmers' boss and they would want to know that I understood the technologies they were using. He told me that normally they would ask me to come in to take the test, but given that I was interviewing for the chief programmer position, they would be happy to email it to me and let me take it at home and then send it back, if I would rather do that. I told them that that would work better for me, since I was in the process of moving into a new house and had a lot of balls in the air at the moment. So the CTO sent me a copy of the test. His asked me to take it without using any reference material. As soon as I looked at the test I knew I couldn't do that, however, so I just researched what I needed off the Internet and used that info to take the test. Then I sent it back. That might seem a little dishonest, but I had 30 years of high tech experience under my belt by that point and I was used to coming up to speed quickly on technology with which I was unfamiliar, so it was just business as usual for me.
The folks at Nestling Inc must have been happy with the test results because they invited me to come in the next week for a face-to-face interview with the officers and a meeting with the software engineers. I wasn't surprised at the interview with the company officers but I was curious about the meeting with the programmers. The CTO explained that, since the firm was small, they had to be sure to hire someone who would fit in well with the other employees. I could only guess what the other members of Nestling Inc would be like, but I used the time between the phone call and the face-to-face interview to brush up on the technology they were using so I could carry on an intelligent conversation about it.
Meeting the staff of Nestling Inc was quite an experience. The founders were all younger than my kids. In fact, I have clothes older than most of the people that worked there. We met for lunch at an iconic local restaurant. I let the programmers lead the conversation and we mostly chatted about the latest developments in the high tech industry. After lunch we drove to Nestling Inc's office. I drove myself so that the company officers and staff could discuss whether I would fit in without the need to do that in front of me.
When we reached the office I huddled with the CTO and the other two founders. They told me that the programmers approved of me and that they wanted to hire me as Chief Programmer. Now here's where working for a small startup is different from working for a large high tech company. I told the founders that I would rather be Director of Development than Chief Programmer and, without a moment's hesitation, they agreed. We talked a bit more about salary and duties. They couldn't afford to pay the salary that I wanted so they sweetened the deal by offering more stock options than we had originally agreed upon. I asked what they thought my duties should be and they told me that they weren't sure about that and the CTO and I would have to work that out as we went along. That wasn't a problem for me because the first item in the performance plan for most of the jobs I had had for the previous twenty years was “Figure out what your duties should be”. So I was pretty comfortable with that. All of this was done verbally, by the way. The only paperwork I filled out that day was the form necessary to get the third party payroll company to cut a check for me twice a month. I left the office after filling out the paperwork and started work the next morning.
Working at Nestling Inc was a continual source of amazement to me because it was so different from working for a large, long-established high tech company. For starters, there were fewer people in the whole company than I had had in first-level development departments that I had managed at the large company where I had previously worked. So everyone in the company knew everyone else and the atmosphere was much more informal and egalitarian than I was used to. This had pluses and minuses. On the one hand, if you needed someone to help with a technical problem, you just asked them. On the other hand, a programmer might quit working on a critical component of the production system to help another employee resolve a trivial and non-critical problem. It could also happen (and did) that the programmers would get tired of working heads down to meet a critical deadline and they would all decide to take a break for several hours for an impromptu foosball tournament or to drive across town for pork chile rellenos at their favorite Tex-Mex restaurant. It wasn't that the programmers didn't work hard and smart. They did. They just didn't think about the timing of breaks or whether one person taking some time off on the spur of the moment might cause a critical component to be late that would set off a chain reaction and cause a major checkpoint to be missed. There
was also a lot design on the fly by committee with little or no documentation, which made it hard to regress if the new design had flaws. So one of the first things that the CTO and I talked about was putting a little more rigor and formality into the development process. Surprisingly the programmers were in favor of it. They just didn't want to take time away from product development to work out the processes. So I got that job.
That was the way it went for the whole time I was with Nestling Inc. I would see problems that were more procedural than technical and the CTO and I would agree that I would address them while he resolved the technical problems. That's how we determined the split between what he did and what I did. It worked out really well for me and I was a happy camper. Yeah, I was making less money than before I retired from a large company, but I had a bigger impact and I enjoyed the small company atmosphere. I was able to mentor the programmers and I also learned a lot from them and on my own about the technologies they were using and the advantages of development in a small company with a close-knit staff. I felt like this was what a retirement job should be.
Of course, in the dynamic world of high-tech startups things can change rapidly. Stay tuned for the next installment to find out what happened next.
So I called the number in the ad and made an appointment for a telephone interview with the Chief Technical Officer. The phone interview went well and the CTO said that he would like to take things to the next step. Even though I was interviewing for a high-level position, the CTO asked if I would be willing to take the same programming test that the software developers were required to pass. He justified that by explaining that I would be the programmers' boss and they would want to know that I understood the technologies they were using. He told me that normally they would ask me to come in to take the test, but given that I was interviewing for the chief programmer position, they would be happy to email it to me and let me take it at home and then send it back, if I would rather do that. I told them that that would work better for me, since I was in the process of moving into a new house and had a lot of balls in the air at the moment. So the CTO sent me a copy of the test. His asked me to take it without using any reference material. As soon as I looked at the test I knew I couldn't do that, however, so I just researched what I needed off the Internet and used that info to take the test. Then I sent it back. That might seem a little dishonest, but I had 30 years of high tech experience under my belt by that point and I was used to coming up to speed quickly on technology with which I was unfamiliar, so it was just business as usual for me.
The folks at Nestling Inc must have been happy with the test results because they invited me to come in the next week for a face-to-face interview with the officers and a meeting with the software engineers. I wasn't surprised at the interview with the company officers but I was curious about the meeting with the programmers. The CTO explained that, since the firm was small, they had to be sure to hire someone who would fit in well with the other employees. I could only guess what the other members of Nestling Inc would be like, but I used the time between the phone call and the face-to-face interview to brush up on the technology they were using so I could carry on an intelligent conversation about it.
Meeting the staff of Nestling Inc was quite an experience. The founders were all younger than my kids. In fact, I have clothes older than most of the people that worked there. We met for lunch at an iconic local restaurant. I let the programmers lead the conversation and we mostly chatted about the latest developments in the high tech industry. After lunch we drove to Nestling Inc's office. I drove myself so that the company officers and staff could discuss whether I would fit in without the need to do that in front of me.
When we reached the office I huddled with the CTO and the other two founders. They told me that the programmers approved of me and that they wanted to hire me as Chief Programmer. Now here's where working for a small startup is different from working for a large high tech company. I told the founders that I would rather be Director of Development than Chief Programmer and, without a moment's hesitation, they agreed. We talked a bit more about salary and duties. They couldn't afford to pay the salary that I wanted so they sweetened the deal by offering more stock options than we had originally agreed upon. I asked what they thought my duties should be and they told me that they weren't sure about that and the CTO and I would have to work that out as we went along. That wasn't a problem for me because the first item in the performance plan for most of the jobs I had had for the previous twenty years was “Figure out what your duties should be”. So I was pretty comfortable with that. All of this was done verbally, by the way. The only paperwork I filled out that day was the form necessary to get the third party payroll company to cut a check for me twice a month. I left the office after filling out the paperwork and started work the next morning.
Working at Nestling Inc was a continual source of amazement to me because it was so different from working for a large, long-established high tech company. For starters, there were fewer people in the whole company than I had had in first-level development departments that I had managed at the large company where I had previously worked. So everyone in the company knew everyone else and the atmosphere was much more informal and egalitarian than I was used to. This had pluses and minuses. On the one hand, if you needed someone to help with a technical problem, you just asked them. On the other hand, a programmer might quit working on a critical component of the production system to help another employee resolve a trivial and non-critical problem. It could also happen (and did) that the programmers would get tired of working heads down to meet a critical deadline and they would all decide to take a break for several hours for an impromptu foosball tournament or to drive across town for pork chile rellenos at their favorite Tex-Mex restaurant. It wasn't that the programmers didn't work hard and smart. They did. They just didn't think about the timing of breaks or whether one person taking some time off on the spur of the moment might cause a critical component to be late that would set off a chain reaction and cause a major checkpoint to be missed. There
was also a lot design on the fly by committee with little or no documentation, which made it hard to regress if the new design had flaws. So one of the first things that the CTO and I talked about was putting a little more rigor and formality into the development process. Surprisingly the programmers were in favor of it. They just didn't want to take time away from product development to work out the processes. So I got that job.
That was the way it went for the whole time I was with Nestling Inc. I would see problems that were more procedural than technical and the CTO and I would agree that I would address them while he resolved the technical problems. That's how we determined the split between what he did and what I did. It worked out really well for me and I was a happy camper. Yeah, I was making less money than before I retired from a large company, but I had a bigger impact and I enjoyed the small company atmosphere. I was able to mentor the programmers and I also learned a lot from them and on my own about the technologies they were using and the advantages of development in a small company with a close-knit staff. I felt like this was what a retirement job should be.
Of course, in the dynamic world of high-tech startups things can change rapidly. Stay tuned for the next installment to find out what happened next.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
More Whisking Away
This is the fall festival season in Texas. The weather is finally cool enough to enjoy being outside for long periods of time without either immersing yourself in a lake or downing a bucket of margaritas. So my wife and I expanded the whisking away game that I mentioned in an earlier post to include trips to local (well, at least within a day trip) fairs and festivals.
One of the things that we like about festivals is that they often don't charge an entrance fee, or if they do, it is pretty small. One that we went to recently in Austin was the Gypsy Picnic which celebrated Austin's trailer food trend. The mobile food vendor thing has caught on pretty big in Texas, at least in the Austin area. We aren't talking about “roach coaches” here, but basically entrepreneurs who sell a variety of food from trailers or motor coaches that either move around to where the customers are or hang out in parking lots and other places where they can put out some picnic tables and sell their wares. For the Gypsy Picnic about 30 or 40 vendors set up shop at a local outdoor events venue. Each of them had at least one sample of one their food specialties for $3 so you could try samples from a variety of vendors for a small amount of money. There was no charge for the festival itself and it included free live music all day. My wife and I went to the Gypsy Picnic partly to sample goodies from some food trailers that we had never been to, partly to hear free live music and partly just to watch people, because that's one of the things we enjoy and festivals are a great place to do that. In our area, at least, festivals bring out a cast of colorful characters who are interesting to watch and to talk with. That's half the fun for us. We had a great time at the Gypsy Picnic, ate some good food, heard some live music and met some interesting folks and the whole thing, including parking downtown, probably cost us less than $40.
Recently I whisked my old girl away to the Texas Renaissance Festival near Plantersville, Texas. The Texas Renaissance Festival is sort of an ongoing medieval fair that is held at a permanent festival ground and runs weekends from early October through the end of November. The general theme, as the name implies, is the renaissance period but each weekend has sort of a mini-theme. There is an Oktoberfest weekend, a Pirate Adventure weekend and a Highland Fling weekend to name a few. The festival staff, vendors and performers all dress in medieval or fantasy garb and role-play characters from that era or from the mini-theme of that particular weekend. My wife and I have been to somewhat similar venues where the attraction consists mostly of jousting and a meal and costs about $65 per person. The Texas Renaissance Festival tickets are much less expensive (advance tickets are only $16 per person) and you get much more for the money.
The festival includes the jousting and horseback games you might expect to find but also there are between 15 and 20 stages where shows are constantly playing and all of them that we attended were included in the ticket price. There are musicians, dancers, puppeteers, comedians, a birds of prey show and many more. The festival grounds are huge and include a couple of hundred shops and eating and drinking establishments. These all cost extra, of course, and frankly the prices are pretty high, but the variety is mind-boggling.
As I mentioned above, my wife and I love to people-watch and I can't think of a better place to do it than at the Texas Renaissance Festival. Not only do the staff, vendors and performers dress the part, but many, if not most, of the patrons do as well. We had some interesting and usually tasty food at the festival, heard some live music, saw some shows and lots of characters. This was a little more expensive than the Gypsy Picnic, but well worth the money. I know that there are similar venues throughout the country, perhaps not quite as colorful as the Texas Renaissance Festival, but they are great places to have a fun day for a reasonable price.
Some other places we have whisked each other away to this fall have included the state and county fairs. The state fair, at least here in Texas, is a bit pricey and while we enjoyed it, we like the little county fairs better. They tend to have relatively inexpensive entrance and parking fees and you can usually park fairly close to an entrance. We enjoy seeing the animals, produce, canned goods and craft items, often produced by 4H kids. There are usually some shows at fairs as well and, of course, lots of fair food. OK, a deep fried Twinkie or chicken-fried bacon isn't on a heart-healthy diet, but it's all balance, right?
Some of our friends consider these kinds of events to be intended for younger people and they don't like to attend them, but my old girl and I feel as though you will never feel better than you do today so there is no time better than now to get out and enjoy life. You don't have to spend a lot of money to do it either.
One of the things that we like about festivals is that they often don't charge an entrance fee, or if they do, it is pretty small. One that we went to recently in Austin was the Gypsy Picnic which celebrated Austin's trailer food trend. The mobile food vendor thing has caught on pretty big in Texas, at least in the Austin area. We aren't talking about “roach coaches” here, but basically entrepreneurs who sell a variety of food from trailers or motor coaches that either move around to where the customers are or hang out in parking lots and other places where they can put out some picnic tables and sell their wares. For the Gypsy Picnic about 30 or 40 vendors set up shop at a local outdoor events venue. Each of them had at least one sample of one their food specialties for $3 so you could try samples from a variety of vendors for a small amount of money. There was no charge for the festival itself and it included free live music all day. My wife and I went to the Gypsy Picnic partly to sample goodies from some food trailers that we had never been to, partly to hear free live music and partly just to watch people, because that's one of the things we enjoy and festivals are a great place to do that. In our area, at least, festivals bring out a cast of colorful characters who are interesting to watch and to talk with. That's half the fun for us. We had a great time at the Gypsy Picnic, ate some good food, heard some live music and met some interesting folks and the whole thing, including parking downtown, probably cost us less than $40.
Recently I whisked my old girl away to the Texas Renaissance Festival near Plantersville, Texas. The Texas Renaissance Festival is sort of an ongoing medieval fair that is held at a permanent festival ground and runs weekends from early October through the end of November. The general theme, as the name implies, is the renaissance period but each weekend has sort of a mini-theme. There is an Oktoberfest weekend, a Pirate Adventure weekend and a Highland Fling weekend to name a few. The festival staff, vendors and performers all dress in medieval or fantasy garb and role-play characters from that era or from the mini-theme of that particular weekend. My wife and I have been to somewhat similar venues where the attraction consists mostly of jousting and a meal and costs about $65 per person. The Texas Renaissance Festival tickets are much less expensive (advance tickets are only $16 per person) and you get much more for the money.
The festival includes the jousting and horseback games you might expect to find but also there are between 15 and 20 stages where shows are constantly playing and all of them that we attended were included in the ticket price. There are musicians, dancers, puppeteers, comedians, a birds of prey show and many more. The festival grounds are huge and include a couple of hundred shops and eating and drinking establishments. These all cost extra, of course, and frankly the prices are pretty high, but the variety is mind-boggling.
As I mentioned above, my wife and I love to people-watch and I can't think of a better place to do it than at the Texas Renaissance Festival. Not only do the staff, vendors and performers dress the part, but many, if not most, of the patrons do as well. We had some interesting and usually tasty food at the festival, heard some live music, saw some shows and lots of characters. This was a little more expensive than the Gypsy Picnic, but well worth the money. I know that there are similar venues throughout the country, perhaps not quite as colorful as the Texas Renaissance Festival, but they are great places to have a fun day for a reasonable price.
Some other places we have whisked each other away to this fall have included the state and county fairs. The state fair, at least here in Texas, is a bit pricey and while we enjoyed it, we like the little county fairs better. They tend to have relatively inexpensive entrance and parking fees and you can usually park fairly close to an entrance. We enjoy seeing the animals, produce, canned goods and craft items, often produced by 4H kids. There are usually some shows at fairs as well and, of course, lots of fair food. OK, a deep fried Twinkie or chicken-fried bacon isn't on a heart-healthy diet, but it's all balance, right?
Some of our friends consider these kinds of events to be intended for younger people and they don't like to attend them, but my old girl and I feel as though you will never feel better than you do today so there is no time better than now to get out and enjoy life. You don't have to spend a lot of money to do it either.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Phone Me
Technology is supposed to make our lives better and simpler, but sometimes it seems like it makes them more complicated. Take phones for instance. It used to be that you got your phone from the phone company. It was always a land line, because that's all they had. About the only thing you had to worry about was whether you had to use a rotary dial phone or one of them new-fangled push button deals. Then somebody got the bright idea of creating a cordless phone. It still used the land line but it had one part attached to the wall and the other part used the land line via a wireless connection from the handset to the part that plugged into the wall. Then they changed the laws and let you buy your phones from Wal~mart or wherever instead of the phone company and all hell broke loose. The first thing we knew we could get totally wireless mobile phones, first just in cars and then to carry around in our pockets. It wasn't long before voice over IP (VOIP) came along and let us talk over our Internet connections and do away with the land line completely. As devices and functions merge together things just keep getting more complex. Now there are so many options that it almost takes an electronic engineer to decide which is the best one to choose. Of course, there is no best choice that works for everyone because the right choice for you depends upon what you want to do with your phone and how much you want to pay to do it.
Let's ignore the need to make calls away from home for a moment and just look at the options you have for home phone service. Probably the first major decision to make is whether to keep that land line or not. If you are currently getting your home phone service over a land line from the phone company you are probably getting inundated with advertising urging you to get additional services over that line. That's because the phone companies are upgrading their networks so that they can deliver not only phone service but also TV and high speed Internet service over the connection to your home. By bundling those services together you save some money and can pay for all of them via a single bill. If you currently get your TV service over cable, you are probably getting similar advertising from your cable provider urging you to get your phone and high speed Internet service from them, all over the cable. Again, you save some money by bundling and pay for all of these services via a single bill. The cable company provides the phone service using technology that is really part of your Internet service. So, like the high speed Internet service, it travels over the cable and doesn't need the land line. With that exception it looks to you just like your traditional phone service. So the phones you are currently using and the phone wiring inside your house should work just fine. It is basically a matter of whether the network of phone wires in your house is attached to the traditional land line or to the cable. There will be relatively minor differences in the details of the service (e.g., whether you get free long distance, call waiting, etc.) but other than that it is pretty much the same. If you don't have cable and still want to get rid of the land line, you can always use your cell phone for all of your calls. There are so many good cell phone plans available today that you should be able to get one that will give you free long distance, an answering service and all of the other things that you can get over a land line or cable.
One factor that you might consider if you are trying to decide whether to go with a bundle from the phone company over a land line or with one from the cable company is whether you will use a home burglar alarm or not. The burglar alarm needs to call the monitoring office if the alarm is tripped. So whatever home phone service you use has to be able to support that function. Land lines certainly do support it, but the burglar alarm can be connected to phone service over the cable as well. You just need to be sure that the quality of service is such that the phone service will be there when the alarm needs to make the call. So, if your land line or cable are frequently down, that would influence your decision. However, there is another option for burglar alarms which requires neither a land line nor a phone connection over the cable. That is a burglar alarm that can make the call via a wireless device that works just like your cell phone. In fact, there are burglar alarms that use wireless communication between the sensors and the base unit. There are no wires involved at all. So from the burglar alarm perspective, you don't need a land line or a cable. You can use your cell phone for all of your calls and still have a working burglar alarm.
Another option for the phone that you use at home is VOIP using your computer and your existing Internet service, whether it is connected over a land line or a cable. You just use your computer's microphone and speakers to talk and hear. One such service is provided by a company called Skype , which enables you to use your computer to make calls to any phone number. In general Skype charges for this service but it lets you make free computer to computer calls to any other Skype user. In addition, Skype lets you make video calls for free to other Skype users. So you are talking computer to computer, in video. Beam me up Scotty, the brave new world is here.
Of course, there is even more complexity to this phone and connection technology decision than what we've discussed so far. For example, let's consider the phones in your house that you use to talk to your friends when you aren't using a cell phone. They're all pushbutton now of course, and if you're like most people they are probably wireless phones that you can take into another room and pretend like you are concentrating on the conversation while you are really watching football on mute with closed captioning. Ah, but are your wireless phones using DECT technology? If they aren't, they should be. DECT technology is a vastly improved home wireless technology that lets you take the remote much farther from the base station than the old wireless remote phone technology allows. Now you can pretend to concentrate on that call from your kids while you are watching the game on your neighbor's gigundous home theater screen. Even better, there is only one base station needed with DECT phones. Any additional remote receivers just have to sit in battery chargers. In case you missed the significance of that, you can now keep a wireless remote phone in rooms that don't have a phone connection in them. The only thing that needs a phone line attached to it is the base station, and you can't talk through it anyway. You do all your talking through the wireless remotes. That's also how you control the base station, including the built-in answering machine. Even cooler, the remotes all have their own identification number so you can use the one you took over to your neighbor's house to call one of the remotes back at your house to ask your wife to bring over a couple of beers so you don't miss any of the game. It doesn't get any better than that.
So much for the phone at your house. Let's talk about cell phones, specifically smart phones, because this is where device convergence is really happening. My simplistic definition is that a smart phone is one that combines traditional phone functions with a variety of other applications, most of which require you to be connected to the Internet or at least the phone network. I'm not talking about offline games or calculator programs or anything like that, although things like that may be available for and/or included with smart phones. Regardless of the phone manufacturer or the phone service provider, most smart phones are running either Apple's Iphone operating system or Google's Android operating system, although Microsoft has recently released an operating system for smart phones as well. At the moment its market share is small and some pundits claim it is too little too late, but they said that about Windows on the PC at one time, so for now the jury is out on that one. So for all practical purposes, if you buy a smart phone today it will probably either be an Iphone or a phone that runs on Android. Apple's Iphone is a lot like other Apple devices, including their personal computers. It has a nice user interface and Apple exercises a great deal of control over the applications available for it. Android has been positioned as an open operating system so there is less control exercised over the applications that run on it. Android phones are gaining market share and several industry pundits have asserted that they will dominate the market in the not too distant future but both the Iphone and Android phones have a large number of applications available today and at this point the choice is pretty much a matter of preference.
So what can you do with a smart phone that you can't do with previous cell phone technology? The answer is lots of stuff. Smart phones combine cell phone technology, wireless Internet access and GPS technology. So, for example, you can use your phone to send and receive email and access the Internet to use Twitter, Facebook or other social network applications. You can watch movies and TV, including sports events, on your smart phone. You can use a GPS application on an Android phone that is integrated with Google Maps. It allows you to use your phone to find out how to get from where you are to where you want to go and, unlike most dedicated GPS devices, you never have to update the maps because you are really using Google's mapping tool, which automatically updates them. There is an Iphone application that will allow you to use the built-in GPS function to find movie theaters which are close to you. Not only can you find their locations, but you can find a list of the movies that are playing and see the trailer for any that you are interested in. How's that for device convergence? In a similar fashion you can use your smart phone to find nearby restaurants, check out their menus on their web sites and then use the phone to call the one you are interested in to make a reservation. These are only a few of the things you can do with a smart phone.
Of course, in order to support all this neat converged function you have to buy a fairly expensive smart phone and sign a contract for a relatively expensive data plan to support it. Depending upon the things you want to do with your phone, however, a smart phone and data plan may the cheapest alternative. For example, it might be cheaper than the combined cost of buying a normal cell phone and plan in combination with buying a dedicated GPS and paying to update the maps periodically.
A smart phone may provide more function than you need however, so it is still possible to buy a phone with less function and to use it simply for phone calls. If you have multiple phones in the family you might want to buy one smart phone and a minimum data plan to support it and just use normal cell phones for the rest of the family members. You should look closely at the service plan regardless of what kind of phone you use. These days most of them provide free long distance and no roaming charges, so you should find out whether the plan you are considering will support that. Also, if you tend to do a lot of texting, you should make sure that your plan allows you to send and receive the number of text messages you anticipate for a flat rate without paying an exorbitant charge for each text sent or received over some low limit.
So here's the bottom line as I (admittedly not an expert on the subject) see it:
Life was a lot simpler before all of this new technology hit the streets, but we can use it to communicate much better than we could in days gone by, In today's world where families are spread all over the planet, that's a good thing.
Let's ignore the need to make calls away from home for a moment and just look at the options you have for home phone service. Probably the first major decision to make is whether to keep that land line or not. If you are currently getting your home phone service over a land line from the phone company you are probably getting inundated with advertising urging you to get additional services over that line. That's because the phone companies are upgrading their networks so that they can deliver not only phone service but also TV and high speed Internet service over the connection to your home. By bundling those services together you save some money and can pay for all of them via a single bill. If you currently get your TV service over cable, you are probably getting similar advertising from your cable provider urging you to get your phone and high speed Internet service from them, all over the cable. Again, you save some money by bundling and pay for all of these services via a single bill. The cable company provides the phone service using technology that is really part of your Internet service. So, like the high speed Internet service, it travels over the cable and doesn't need the land line. With that exception it looks to you just like your traditional phone service. So the phones you are currently using and the phone wiring inside your house should work just fine. It is basically a matter of whether the network of phone wires in your house is attached to the traditional land line or to the cable. There will be relatively minor differences in the details of the service (e.g., whether you get free long distance, call waiting, etc.) but other than that it is pretty much the same. If you don't have cable and still want to get rid of the land line, you can always use your cell phone for all of your calls. There are so many good cell phone plans available today that you should be able to get one that will give you free long distance, an answering service and all of the other things that you can get over a land line or cable.
One factor that you might consider if you are trying to decide whether to go with a bundle from the phone company over a land line or with one from the cable company is whether you will use a home burglar alarm or not. The burglar alarm needs to call the monitoring office if the alarm is tripped. So whatever home phone service you use has to be able to support that function. Land lines certainly do support it, but the burglar alarm can be connected to phone service over the cable as well. You just need to be sure that the quality of service is such that the phone service will be there when the alarm needs to make the call. So, if your land line or cable are frequently down, that would influence your decision. However, there is another option for burglar alarms which requires neither a land line nor a phone connection over the cable. That is a burglar alarm that can make the call via a wireless device that works just like your cell phone. In fact, there are burglar alarms that use wireless communication between the sensors and the base unit. There are no wires involved at all. So from the burglar alarm perspective, you don't need a land line or a cable. You can use your cell phone for all of your calls and still have a working burglar alarm.
Another option for the phone that you use at home is VOIP using your computer and your existing Internet service, whether it is connected over a land line or a cable. You just use your computer's microphone and speakers to talk and hear. One such service is provided by a company called Skype , which enables you to use your computer to make calls to any phone number. In general Skype charges for this service but it lets you make free computer to computer calls to any other Skype user. In addition, Skype lets you make video calls for free to other Skype users. So you are talking computer to computer, in video. Beam me up Scotty, the brave new world is here.
Of course, there is even more complexity to this phone and connection technology decision than what we've discussed so far. For example, let's consider the phones in your house that you use to talk to your friends when you aren't using a cell phone. They're all pushbutton now of course, and if you're like most people they are probably wireless phones that you can take into another room and pretend like you are concentrating on the conversation while you are really watching football on mute with closed captioning. Ah, but are your wireless phones using DECT technology? If they aren't, they should be. DECT technology is a vastly improved home wireless technology that lets you take the remote much farther from the base station than the old wireless remote phone technology allows. Now you can pretend to concentrate on that call from your kids while you are watching the game on your neighbor's gigundous home theater screen. Even better, there is only one base station needed with DECT phones. Any additional remote receivers just have to sit in battery chargers. In case you missed the significance of that, you can now keep a wireless remote phone in rooms that don't have a phone connection in them. The only thing that needs a phone line attached to it is the base station, and you can't talk through it anyway. You do all your talking through the wireless remotes. That's also how you control the base station, including the built-in answering machine. Even cooler, the remotes all have their own identification number so you can use the one you took over to your neighbor's house to call one of the remotes back at your house to ask your wife to bring over a couple of beers so you don't miss any of the game. It doesn't get any better than that.
So much for the phone at your house. Let's talk about cell phones, specifically smart phones, because this is where device convergence is really happening. My simplistic definition is that a smart phone is one that combines traditional phone functions with a variety of other applications, most of which require you to be connected to the Internet or at least the phone network. I'm not talking about offline games or calculator programs or anything like that, although things like that may be available for and/or included with smart phones. Regardless of the phone manufacturer or the phone service provider, most smart phones are running either Apple's Iphone operating system or Google's Android operating system, although Microsoft has recently released an operating system for smart phones as well. At the moment its market share is small and some pundits claim it is too little too late, but they said that about Windows on the PC at one time, so for now the jury is out on that one. So for all practical purposes, if you buy a smart phone today it will probably either be an Iphone or a phone that runs on Android. Apple's Iphone is a lot like other Apple devices, including their personal computers. It has a nice user interface and Apple exercises a great deal of control over the applications available for it. Android has been positioned as an open operating system so there is less control exercised over the applications that run on it. Android phones are gaining market share and several industry pundits have asserted that they will dominate the market in the not too distant future but both the Iphone and Android phones have a large number of applications available today and at this point the choice is pretty much a matter of preference.
So what can you do with a smart phone that you can't do with previous cell phone technology? The answer is lots of stuff. Smart phones combine cell phone technology, wireless Internet access and GPS technology. So, for example, you can use your phone to send and receive email and access the Internet to use Twitter, Facebook or other social network applications. You can watch movies and TV, including sports events, on your smart phone. You can use a GPS application on an Android phone that is integrated with Google Maps. It allows you to use your phone to find out how to get from where you are to where you want to go and, unlike most dedicated GPS devices, you never have to update the maps because you are really using Google's mapping tool, which automatically updates them. There is an Iphone application that will allow you to use the built-in GPS function to find movie theaters which are close to you. Not only can you find their locations, but you can find a list of the movies that are playing and see the trailer for any that you are interested in. How's that for device convergence? In a similar fashion you can use your smart phone to find nearby restaurants, check out their menus on their web sites and then use the phone to call the one you are interested in to make a reservation. These are only a few of the things you can do with a smart phone.
Of course, in order to support all this neat converged function you have to buy a fairly expensive smart phone and sign a contract for a relatively expensive data plan to support it. Depending upon the things you want to do with your phone, however, a smart phone and data plan may the cheapest alternative. For example, it might be cheaper than the combined cost of buying a normal cell phone and plan in combination with buying a dedicated GPS and paying to update the maps periodically.
A smart phone may provide more function than you need however, so it is still possible to buy a phone with less function and to use it simply for phone calls. If you have multiple phones in the family you might want to buy one smart phone and a minimum data plan to support it and just use normal cell phones for the rest of the family members. You should look closely at the service plan regardless of what kind of phone you use. These days most of them provide free long distance and no roaming charges, so you should find out whether the plan you are considering will support that. Also, if you tend to do a lot of texting, you should make sure that your plan allows you to send and receive the number of text messages you anticipate for a flat rate without paying an exorbitant charge for each text sent or received over some low limit.
So here's the bottom line as I (admittedly not an expert on the subject) see it:
- If you're not already bundling TV, phone and Internet support, it would be a good idea to do that, assuming you use all those things. As far as whether to get those services from the phone company or the cable company, that pretty much is a matter of preference, quality of service and pricing details. The last two will vary from place to place.
- I would not pay for long distance service. You should be able to find a plan for both your home phones and your cell phones that won't charge you for long distance.
- If you are going to replace your home phone(s), get something that is based on the DECT standard. They are far and away better than the old technology, and you can add handsets as you need them.
- Before you spend the big bucks for a smart phone and the data plan to support it, decide what you are going to use it for and factor in the cost of any devices that it might replace to get the real bottom line cost. If you are about to spend $125 on a GPS and $50 per year to keep your maps up to date, maybe it would be to your advantage to get a smart phone and a minimum cost data plan. Or not. Do the math before making the decision.
- Before you sign up for a new cell phone contract, make sure that the plan will support all of the things you are going to want to do with your phone over the life of the contract. Don't sign up for one that charges you a separate fee for every text after the first 25 if you plan to buy a new full keyboard phone 6 months from now so you can text the kids several times a day.
Life was a lot simpler before all of this new technology hit the streets, but we can use it to communicate much better than we could in days gone by, In today's world where families are spread all over the planet, that's a good thing.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Welcome to the Quagmire
This post is about Medicare and the experiences I've had with it. Let me state right here that I'm not an expert on the subject so I encourage you to get the official word on how things are supposed to work at the federal government Medicare website and the CMS website. CMS is the outfit that actually handles the processing of bills under Medicare. What follows here is my view of how Medicare works and what that meant to my wife and me.
I'm older than my wife so I reached the magic Medicare age before she did. That caused some interesting developments that I'm sure most couples who reach our age go through. Here's how it worked out for us.
When I retired one of the benefits I got from the company I had worked for was health insurance for my wife and myself. It wasn't free. In fact I had to pay more for it every year. The cost eventually got so high that the only plan we could afford had such a high deductible that it was sort of like catastrophic illness insurance, but at least we did have some choice of plans. When I reached 65 things changed. Instead of the choices I previously had for health insurance plans to cover both my wife and me, I had no choice but to enroll in Medicare and had several choices of insurance plans for supplemental insurance to cover what Medicare did not cover for me and a completely separate health insurance for my wife.
At this point I should tell you a little bit about Medicare. It's coverage is composed of several different “parts”. Part A covers hospital costs and is free. The majority of folks will also need part B, which covers doctor bills, outpatient costs and some other things that Part A doesn't cover. It's not free. For most people Part B costs around $100 per month. The good news is that the deductible is pretty small and, for the things that Medicare covers (more on that later), it pays 80% and you pay the other 20%. There is also a Medicare Part D, which covers drug costs. There is a separate charge for that too, but with some insurance packages a Medicare Part D equivalent drug plan is included. With some it is not.
Before I enrolled in Medicare I was already paying monthly fees for dental and eye care insurance in addition to a monthly fee for health insurance for my wife and me. After I enrolled in Medicare I still paid the monthly fees for dental and eye care. In addition the government began deducting about $100 out of my social security check to pay for Medicare Part B.
The company from which I retired offered several different types of health insurance plans to cover costs which Medicare does not pay and several plans for health care insurance for the spouses of retirees. From conversations I have had with other retirees they appear to me to be pretty typical for retirees on Medicare who can still get health insurance for themselves and their spouses through the company from which they retired.
I'll get into the types of plans that are typically available below, but to complete my story, the plan that my wife and I were able to afford gave me what I think of as catastrophic illness insurance in that it only pays something when I have laid out a fairly high out of pocket expense. That would be made up of my 20% of Medicare-eligible costs and 100% of any medical costs I incur which the good folks at Medicare don't want to pay for. The insurance I was able to get for my wife amounts to a PPO with a lower deductible than we had before I went on Medicare. For both of us that also includes a Medicare Part D equivalent drug plan. That's the good news. The bad news is that when you add up what we are paying per month for our dental, eye care and health insurance, plus the money that the federal government deducts from my Social Security check to pay for Medicare Part B, it comes out to somewhere between two and a half to three times the monthly payment we were paying before I was forced to get on Medicare. Oh, by the way, Medicare doesn't cover a lot of the preventive medical costs that our previous insurance did, so we are getting less service for our increased cost. To be fair I should point out that Medicare's deductible is a lot lower than the deductible we had before I got on Medicare so, at least for me, we probably pay out less out of pocket money over and above the monthly cost of insurance, but we end up paying out more money in years where we don't have large medical expenses than we would have with our old plan.
After all this whining I have to point something else out: My old girl and I are lucky that we are able to get health insurance through the company from which I retired for both her and me. People who are not in that position (that is, those who are on Medicare but are married to someone who is too young to be on it and who are not able to provide health insurance for the younger spouse through a group plan from the company that the older spouse retired from) have to find some other way to provide health insurance for the younger spouse.
One way to get insurance for the younger spouse is for that person to go to work at a company that provides health insurance. Not all companies do that these days, but when I worked part time for awhile at a big box store that shall remain nameless, I met a lot of people who were working there mostly because the company had a health insurance plan. I know people who are doing this because they are in just the situation described above. Unless you do something like that about the only other alternative is to find some affordable health insurance that you can pay for in its entirety, and that is hard to do if you are retired.
Even if you are fortunate enough to have the ability to provide health insurance for your younger spouse through the group insurance plan of the company you retired from, you have several options for insurance that will supplement Medicare. The two basic ways to get Medicare and integrate it with a supplemental insurance plan are Original Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans. I'm not going to go into all the differences here because I'd probably get something wrong and you can get all that info on the Medicare web sites. As I see it, however, the difference is this: In Original Medicare you get Part A for free and pay a hundred bucks or so for Part B. Then, unless you want to cover all of the cost of drugs and the 20% that Medicare doesn't pay for, as well as 100% of the things that Medicare doesn't cover at all, you need to find some kind of supplemental insurance to pay for some or all of those things. In a Medicare Advantage plan (sometimes also called Medicare Part C) you pay a monthly fee to the insurance provider who covers all of the Medicare Part A and B things (and usually also Part D if you elect to pay more for that) and you don't have money deducted from your social security by the government to pay for Part B. There will almost certainly be differences in the doctors you can go to between these alternatives. With Original Medicare you can usually go to any doctor that takes Medicare. The catch is that there will be some (maybe even many) doctors who take Medicare that will only accept it for existing patients. That is, they aren't interested in accepting new Medicare patients. That can be a real problem. The doctors you can go to under a Medicare Advantage plan will be doctors that have signed up with that plan. There may be fewer of them but you probably have a better chance of going to them as a new patient.
So if you or your spouse is about to turn 65 the bottom line as I see it is as follows. It would be a good idea to check to make sure that your spouse can still be covered through the group insurance plan from the company from which you retired. If they are, you can probably expect to pay a higher overall cost for health insurance for the two of you than you are paying now, so it would be a good idea to plan for that. It would also be a good idea to check the Medicare web sites to see what is covered to ensure that you will be able to get the same physicals you have been getting or that other procedures you anticipate getting will be covered. Definitely check into the two alternative ways to get Medicare, pick the one you think works best for your situation and make sure that, if you choose that option, you won't get yourself in a position where you are no longer covered through the group insurance plan of the company you retired from. This is probably not likely but you will get offered a lot of alternatives from many insurance companies and you may be tempted to take one that is not offered through the company from which you retired. That's a big step to take so research it thoroughly before you do that.
Good luck and welcome to the quagmire.
I'm older than my wife so I reached the magic Medicare age before she did. That caused some interesting developments that I'm sure most couples who reach our age go through. Here's how it worked out for us.
When I retired one of the benefits I got from the company I had worked for was health insurance for my wife and myself. It wasn't free. In fact I had to pay more for it every year. The cost eventually got so high that the only plan we could afford had such a high deductible that it was sort of like catastrophic illness insurance, but at least we did have some choice of plans. When I reached 65 things changed. Instead of the choices I previously had for health insurance plans to cover both my wife and me, I had no choice but to enroll in Medicare and had several choices of insurance plans for supplemental insurance to cover what Medicare did not cover for me and a completely separate health insurance for my wife.
At this point I should tell you a little bit about Medicare. It's coverage is composed of several different “parts”. Part A covers hospital costs and is free. The majority of folks will also need part B, which covers doctor bills, outpatient costs and some other things that Part A doesn't cover. It's not free. For most people Part B costs around $100 per month. The good news is that the deductible is pretty small and, for the things that Medicare covers (more on that later), it pays 80% and you pay the other 20%. There is also a Medicare Part D, which covers drug costs. There is a separate charge for that too, but with some insurance packages a Medicare Part D equivalent drug plan is included. With some it is not.
Before I enrolled in Medicare I was already paying monthly fees for dental and eye care insurance in addition to a monthly fee for health insurance for my wife and me. After I enrolled in Medicare I still paid the monthly fees for dental and eye care. In addition the government began deducting about $100 out of my social security check to pay for Medicare Part B.
The company from which I retired offered several different types of health insurance plans to cover costs which Medicare does not pay and several plans for health care insurance for the spouses of retirees. From conversations I have had with other retirees they appear to me to be pretty typical for retirees on Medicare who can still get health insurance for themselves and their spouses through the company from which they retired.
I'll get into the types of plans that are typically available below, but to complete my story, the plan that my wife and I were able to afford gave me what I think of as catastrophic illness insurance in that it only pays something when I have laid out a fairly high out of pocket expense. That would be made up of my 20% of Medicare-eligible costs and 100% of any medical costs I incur which the good folks at Medicare don't want to pay for. The insurance I was able to get for my wife amounts to a PPO with a lower deductible than we had before I went on Medicare. For both of us that also includes a Medicare Part D equivalent drug plan. That's the good news. The bad news is that when you add up what we are paying per month for our dental, eye care and health insurance, plus the money that the federal government deducts from my Social Security check to pay for Medicare Part B, it comes out to somewhere between two and a half to three times the monthly payment we were paying before I was forced to get on Medicare. Oh, by the way, Medicare doesn't cover a lot of the preventive medical costs that our previous insurance did, so we are getting less service for our increased cost. To be fair I should point out that Medicare's deductible is a lot lower than the deductible we had before I got on Medicare so, at least for me, we probably pay out less out of pocket money over and above the monthly cost of insurance, but we end up paying out more money in years where we don't have large medical expenses than we would have with our old plan.
After all this whining I have to point something else out: My old girl and I are lucky that we are able to get health insurance through the company from which I retired for both her and me. People who are not in that position (that is, those who are on Medicare but are married to someone who is too young to be on it and who are not able to provide health insurance for the younger spouse through a group plan from the company that the older spouse retired from) have to find some other way to provide health insurance for the younger spouse.
One way to get insurance for the younger spouse is for that person to go to work at a company that provides health insurance. Not all companies do that these days, but when I worked part time for awhile at a big box store that shall remain nameless, I met a lot of people who were working there mostly because the company had a health insurance plan. I know people who are doing this because they are in just the situation described above. Unless you do something like that about the only other alternative is to find some affordable health insurance that you can pay for in its entirety, and that is hard to do if you are retired.
Even if you are fortunate enough to have the ability to provide health insurance for your younger spouse through the group insurance plan of the company you retired from, you have several options for insurance that will supplement Medicare. The two basic ways to get Medicare and integrate it with a supplemental insurance plan are Original Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans. I'm not going to go into all the differences here because I'd probably get something wrong and you can get all that info on the Medicare web sites. As I see it, however, the difference is this: In Original Medicare you get Part A for free and pay a hundred bucks or so for Part B. Then, unless you want to cover all of the cost of drugs and the 20% that Medicare doesn't pay for, as well as 100% of the things that Medicare doesn't cover at all, you need to find some kind of supplemental insurance to pay for some or all of those things. In a Medicare Advantage plan (sometimes also called Medicare Part C) you pay a monthly fee to the insurance provider who covers all of the Medicare Part A and B things (and usually also Part D if you elect to pay more for that) and you don't have money deducted from your social security by the government to pay for Part B. There will almost certainly be differences in the doctors you can go to between these alternatives. With Original Medicare you can usually go to any doctor that takes Medicare. The catch is that there will be some (maybe even many) doctors who take Medicare that will only accept it for existing patients. That is, they aren't interested in accepting new Medicare patients. That can be a real problem. The doctors you can go to under a Medicare Advantage plan will be doctors that have signed up with that plan. There may be fewer of them but you probably have a better chance of going to them as a new patient.
So if you or your spouse is about to turn 65 the bottom line as I see it is as follows. It would be a good idea to check to make sure that your spouse can still be covered through the group insurance plan from the company from which you retired. If they are, you can probably expect to pay a higher overall cost for health insurance for the two of you than you are paying now, so it would be a good idea to plan for that. It would also be a good idea to check the Medicare web sites to see what is covered to ensure that you will be able to get the same physicals you have been getting or that other procedures you anticipate getting will be covered. Definitely check into the two alternative ways to get Medicare, pick the one you think works best for your situation and make sure that, if you choose that option, you won't get yourself in a position where you are no longer covered through the group insurance plan of the company you retired from. This is probably not likely but you will get offered a lot of alternatives from many insurance companies and you may be tempted to take one that is not offered through the company from which you retired. That's a big step to take so research it thoroughly before you do that.
Good luck and welcome to the quagmire.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Discount This
On the way home from a day trip the other day my old girl and I stopped at a Whataburger for a bio break and a cold drink. When we tried to pay for the drinks the woman behind the counter told us that small drinks were free for seniors. I think my wife was a little miffed that the woman realized how old we are but I was just happy to get the discount.
Lots of places have senior discounts these days. Sometimes they promote them or at least tell you about them up front as happened to us at Whataburger but sometimes you have to ask for them. Many events and tourist attractions have senior discounts too though, again, you may have to ask for them. Recently my wife I went to a fair where they offered half price tickets to seniors. That made the price $6 apiece instead of $12. For us that's a significant savings.
Often times stores, such as Kohl's, have senior discount days. They are usually in the middle of the week when there aren't as many non-retired folks out shopping. You can usually find out about senior days by checking the store's web site or asking a cashier.
A lot of restaurants offer senior discounts, sometimes on particular items and sometimes on the entire menu. Some McDonald's have a reduced price on coffee for seniors and some provide free coffee. Some IHOPs offer a senior citizen discount across the board while others offer a buy-one-get-one (BOGO) deal for seniors. The key here is that many chain restaurants are franchised so the senior deal varies between restaurants of the same chain. That often means that, in order to get that senior discount, you have to ask for it.
Many restaurants, and other businesses too, offer discounts and free meals or other perks if you join their club. These discounts are available for any member of the club regardless of age. The number of restaurants that do this is way too numerous to list here, but a couple of them are The Spicy Pickle and Mimi's Cafe. A word of caution is in order. If you join the club you will have to provide an email address at which you will receive coupons or offers for discounts. That's the good news. The bad news is that in many cases your in box will also get cluttered up with a lot of advertising email that you'd rather not receive. So it is a good idea to establish a sort of junk mail email id on google, yahoo or some other web mail system in order to receive the mail from the clubs you elect to join.
Quite a few businesses give discounts to members of AARP, so if you have an AARP membership it is a good thing to ask if the place you are doing business with gives AARP discounts. To get a list of the businesses that do give AARP discounts just check the AARP website. Another organization whose members get discounts is AAA. Check the web site for details. Of course the AAA discount is available to any member regardless of age. My wife and I have found that most hotel and motel chains offer discounts to both AARP and AAA members. By the way, many of them have senior discounts that don't require membership in AARP or AAA.
There are so many places that offer senior discounts that a slew of web sites have been established to let seniors know about them. Some of these websites require membership. For those that do, I would advise the same caution as I mentioned above. That is, use a junk mail email address when joining them, and certainly be careful that you do not reveal any personal information that you wouldn't want to be sold to some company that might inundate you with email or snail mail offers you just can refuse. Here is a partial list of sites that provide lists of senior discounts. To find more, just google “senior discounts”.
Lots of places have senior discounts these days. Sometimes they promote them or at least tell you about them up front as happened to us at Whataburger but sometimes you have to ask for them. Many events and tourist attractions have senior discounts too though, again, you may have to ask for them. Recently my wife I went to a fair where they offered half price tickets to seniors. That made the price $6 apiece instead of $12. For us that's a significant savings.
Often times stores, such as Kohl's, have senior discount days. They are usually in the middle of the week when there aren't as many non-retired folks out shopping. You can usually find out about senior days by checking the store's web site or asking a cashier.
A lot of restaurants offer senior discounts, sometimes on particular items and sometimes on the entire menu. Some McDonald's have a reduced price on coffee for seniors and some provide free coffee. Some IHOPs offer a senior citizen discount across the board while others offer a buy-one-get-one (BOGO) deal for seniors. The key here is that many chain restaurants are franchised so the senior deal varies between restaurants of the same chain. That often means that, in order to get that senior discount, you have to ask for it.
Many restaurants, and other businesses too, offer discounts and free meals or other perks if you join their club. These discounts are available for any member of the club regardless of age. The number of restaurants that do this is way too numerous to list here, but a couple of them are The Spicy Pickle and Mimi's Cafe. A word of caution is in order. If you join the club you will have to provide an email address at which you will receive coupons or offers for discounts. That's the good news. The bad news is that in many cases your in box will also get cluttered up with a lot of advertising email that you'd rather not receive. So it is a good idea to establish a sort of junk mail email id on google, yahoo or some other web mail system in order to receive the mail from the clubs you elect to join.
Quite a few businesses give discounts to members of AARP, so if you have an AARP membership it is a good thing to ask if the place you are doing business with gives AARP discounts. To get a list of the businesses that do give AARP discounts just check the AARP website. Another organization whose members get discounts is AAA. Check the web site for details. Of course the AAA discount is available to any member regardless of age. My wife and I have found that most hotel and motel chains offer discounts to both AARP and AAA members. By the way, many of them have senior discounts that don't require membership in AARP or AAA.
There are so many places that offer senior discounts that a slew of web sites have been established to let seniors know about them. Some of these websites require membership. For those that do, I would advise the same caution as I mentioned above. That is, use a junk mail email address when joining them, and certainly be careful that you do not reveal any personal information that you wouldn't want to be sold to some company that might inundate you with email or snail mail offers you just can refuse. Here is a partial list of sites that provide lists of senior discounts. To find more, just google “senior discounts”.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Movin' On
If you are approaching retirement you might be thinking about moving to another part of the country, or even another part of the world, that seems like it might suit you better than where you live now. If it's a place you've already spent some time in then you probably already know that you could be happy there. If, on the other hand, you're thinking about moving somewhere else because your “kinfolks said 'move away from here' and 'Californy is the place you oughta be'”, then you might want to do a little research before you load up the truck and “move to Beverly”. In The Country Saga I've written about a real life example of what happens if you don't do some serious research before you decide to make a move. So I guess it's only fair that I point out some web-based tools that might help you do some real research and get an idea of whether you really will be happy if you retire somewhere other than where you live now.
If you want to move out of the USA to some other country a really basic place to start gathering info is the CIA's World Fact Book . It will provide you with information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for hundreds of countries. Those last few things seem pretty important to me. After all, it would be good to know whether you should pack a bullet proof vest when you make your move.
If you are just thinking about moving to another city or another state right here in the good old USA, you can get some basic demographic information from the US census bureau's American Fact Finder web site. More comprehensive data can be found at City-Data. The information on this site includes photos, maps, population demographics, housing prices, rents, local headlines and much more. You can get a similar, but different, set of information about states, counties, cities and subdivisions at US Home Town Locator. There are other sites that provide this sort of information but these three cover it pretty well.
Most states have official state web sites that provide a great deal of information intended to help you understand how to obtain a driver's license, how to register your vehicle, how to do business in the state and many more subjects as well. A couple of representative examples can be found at http://ohio.gov/ and http://www.texas.gov/en/Pages/default.aspx. Similar sites exist for most cities (e.g., http://www.dallascityhall.com/ ) and many counties (e.g., http://www.tarrantcounty.com/egov/site/default.asp ).
Once you've decided which part of the country you'd like to move to, you can look for a house or property for sale on Realtor.com. This site allows you to specify the things that you need to find in a home including the price range, number of bedrooms and baths, whether you want a condo or single family home, etc. If you find a house you are interested in, you can get even more information on Zillow.com. Zillow contains information such as a five-year value graph, taxes and assessed value.
If you need information about housing for the elderly in your target area, the US federal government has information on that subject at http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Seniors/Housing.shtml . This site also contains tools such as an elder care locator.
If you plan to work after your move, sites such as Career Builder and Monster can help you find a new job before you take the leap to the new place. You can also check the classified ads on Craig's List to see what jobs are available in the target area.
The bottom line here is that before you decide to retire to the place you've always dreamed about, if can't check it out in person, it would be a real good idea to do as much online research as you can.
If you want to move out of the USA to some other country a really basic place to start gathering info is the CIA's World Fact Book . It will provide you with information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for hundreds of countries. Those last few things seem pretty important to me. After all, it would be good to know whether you should pack a bullet proof vest when you make your move.
If you are just thinking about moving to another city or another state right here in the good old USA, you can get some basic demographic information from the US census bureau's American Fact Finder web site. More comprehensive data can be found at City-Data. The information on this site includes photos, maps, population demographics, housing prices, rents, local headlines and much more. You can get a similar, but different, set of information about states, counties, cities and subdivisions at US Home Town Locator. There are other sites that provide this sort of information but these three cover it pretty well.
Most states have official state web sites that provide a great deal of information intended to help you understand how to obtain a driver's license, how to register your vehicle, how to do business in the state and many more subjects as well. A couple of representative examples can be found at http://ohio.gov/ and http://www.texas.gov/en/Pages/default.aspx. Similar sites exist for most cities (e.g., http://www.dallascityhall.com/ ) and many counties (e.g., http://www.tarrantcounty.com/egov/site/default.asp ).
Once you've decided which part of the country you'd like to move to, you can look for a house or property for sale on Realtor.com. This site allows you to specify the things that you need to find in a home including the price range, number of bedrooms and baths, whether you want a condo or single family home, etc. If you find a house you are interested in, you can get even more information on Zillow.com. Zillow contains information such as a five-year value graph, taxes and assessed value.
If you need information about housing for the elderly in your target area, the US federal government has information on that subject at http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Seniors/Housing.shtml . This site also contains tools such as an elder care locator.
If you plan to work after your move, sites such as Career Builder and Monster can help you find a new job before you take the leap to the new place. You can also check the classified ads on Craig's List to see what jobs are available in the target area.
The bottom line here is that before you decide to retire to the place you've always dreamed about, if can't check it out in person, it would be a real good idea to do as much online research as you can.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Picture Perfect
Awhile back I posted an article about scanning in old hard copy pictures to preserve them. I promised that later on I would post an article about what to do with them after you get them scanned into the computer and backed up. This is it.
The problem that you have here is that now you've got all these picture files, which are probably .jpg files, in Windows folders (or the Mac equivalent, if that's what you use) but they aren't real convenient to view using the default media viewer. For one thing you might want to put captions on the pictures. For another, you might want to view them in multiple ways, e.g., by date or by some category. So it would be nice to be able to put them into a virtual album where you could do that. I use HTML to create web pages and view my pictures that way. I used to do that kind of stuff for a living so it comes easy to me. It would be difficult for the average person to do that though, and way beyond the scope of this blog for me to try to tell you how to do it. So this article will concentrate on tools that make it easy for anyone to create a photo album. I haven't used any of these tools myself and I'm not pushing any particular tool. I'm just going to point out a few that are available.
There are basically two options for creating virtual photo albums. Maybe three if you count those hardware photo albums that let you download pictures from your camera or the computer and store a bunch on a special viewer that you can sit on your desk or carry around with you. We're going to focus on two other options, though: online photo sharing services and photo organizing software.
Photo sharing services allow you to upload the photo files on your computer to a server operated by the photo sharing service. Once the files have been transferred you can then exercise some control over who gets to see the files and in most cases you can organize the photos as like and add captions or comments as well. It is often the case that photo sharing services have two forms: a free form with a limited set of functions or a limited amount of storage, and an advanced form that is available for a fee. These tools make it easy to make photos available to social networking sites like Facebook. In many cases the photo sharing sites can be used to make new hard copies of the photos, often cheaper than you can print them on your own printer. There are a number of sites on the Internet that provide information about photo sharing services as well as comparisons between them. One such site is Top Ten Reviews . There are other photo sharing services that are not listed in this review. For instance, both Walgreens and CVS have photo sharing services which are part of their online photo printing package.
Photo organizing software allows you to organize the photos on your computer into albums that you can view on your computer. Most of the products in this category have additional function that lets you create multi-media albums that combine photos, videos and sound. They usually have some way of sharing the albums, often by making CDs or DVDs. This, of course requires you to have a CD or DVD writer on your computer. Many of these software products also allow you to share photos and/or albums over the Internet. Tools of this sort usually contain function that lets you print calendars and other special projects using your photos. There are many sites on the Internet which provide information about photo organizing software. Top Ten Reviews compares eleven of them at http://photo-organizing-software-review.toptenreviews.com/ .
Whether you use a photo sharing service or photo organizing software to create albums for viewing your photos is really a matter of personal preference. Photo sharing services make it easier to share your albums and photos with friends, family and via social networking services, but they require you to upload the photos, which can be time-consuming. Since photo organizing software doesn't require an upload until you are ready to share an album, it can be quicker to build the album with photo sharing software and it may be possible to create a more complex multi-media album, but it may be more difficult to share the results than it would be with a photo sharing service. In either case, you will end up with an electronic copy of your prized photos that will be protected from the fading and other issues you face with hard copy photos.
The problem that you have here is that now you've got all these picture files, which are probably .jpg files, in Windows folders (or the Mac equivalent, if that's what you use) but they aren't real convenient to view using the default media viewer. For one thing you might want to put captions on the pictures. For another, you might want to view them in multiple ways, e.g., by date or by some category. So it would be nice to be able to put them into a virtual album where you could do that. I use HTML to create web pages and view my pictures that way. I used to do that kind of stuff for a living so it comes easy to me. It would be difficult for the average person to do that though, and way beyond the scope of this blog for me to try to tell you how to do it. So this article will concentrate on tools that make it easy for anyone to create a photo album. I haven't used any of these tools myself and I'm not pushing any particular tool. I'm just going to point out a few that are available.
There are basically two options for creating virtual photo albums. Maybe three if you count those hardware photo albums that let you download pictures from your camera or the computer and store a bunch on a special viewer that you can sit on your desk or carry around with you. We're going to focus on two other options, though: online photo sharing services and photo organizing software.
Photo sharing services allow you to upload the photo files on your computer to a server operated by the photo sharing service. Once the files have been transferred you can then exercise some control over who gets to see the files and in most cases you can organize the photos as like and add captions or comments as well. It is often the case that photo sharing services have two forms: a free form with a limited set of functions or a limited amount of storage, and an advanced form that is available for a fee. These tools make it easy to make photos available to social networking sites like Facebook. In many cases the photo sharing sites can be used to make new hard copies of the photos, often cheaper than you can print them on your own printer. There are a number of sites on the Internet that provide information about photo sharing services as well as comparisons between them. One such site is Top Ten Reviews . There are other photo sharing services that are not listed in this review. For instance, both Walgreens and CVS have photo sharing services which are part of their online photo printing package.
Photo organizing software allows you to organize the photos on your computer into albums that you can view on your computer. Most of the products in this category have additional function that lets you create multi-media albums that combine photos, videos and sound. They usually have some way of sharing the albums, often by making CDs or DVDs. This, of course requires you to have a CD or DVD writer on your computer. Many of these software products also allow you to share photos and/or albums over the Internet. Tools of this sort usually contain function that lets you print calendars and other special projects using your photos. There are many sites on the Internet which provide information about photo organizing software. Top Ten Reviews compares eleven of them at http://photo-organizing-software-review.toptenreviews.com/ .
Whether you use a photo sharing service or photo organizing software to create albums for viewing your photos is really a matter of personal preference. Photo sharing services make it easier to share your albums and photos with friends, family and via social networking services, but they require you to upload the photos, which can be time-consuming. Since photo organizing software doesn't require an upload until you are ready to share an album, it can be quicker to build the album with photo sharing software and it may be possible to create a more complex multi-media album, but it may be more difficult to share the results than it would be with a photo sharing service. In either case, you will end up with an electronic copy of your prized photos that will be protected from the fading and other issues you face with hard copy photos.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Goin' Mobile
One of the things my old girl and I like to do is travel. When retirement was just something way off in the future we had visions of traveling around the world seeing strange and exotic places. After we retired and ran into reality we scaled back those dreams a bit. We still get to see strange and exotic places, but they are more like the spur capital of the US rather than the wilds of Kenya. Well, OK, most of the time it is more like the spur capital of Texas because we usually do day trips, but we have fun anyway. (BTW, in case you're interested, the spur capital of Texas is Gatesville, where lives the Coryell Museum and Historical Center, which houses the Mitchell Collection of antique and offbeat spurs.)
The overwhelming majority of our trips are one-tank day trips. The main reason is that they are cheap entertainment. For the cost of a tank of gas and one or two meals of road food we can spend all day doing and seeing the things we enjoy. Usually we will try to take in a garden or museum and do some shopping.
If the museum thing seems seems a bit hoity toity, that's just an illusion because I'm not talking about the Metropolitan Museum of Art or anything like that. We have a pretty eclectic taste in museums. Some of the museums we have enjoyed visiting include: the aforementioned Coryell Museum and Historical Center, the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum (which, BTW, has nothing at all to do with the baseball team), the Dr. Pepper Museum , the Alamo , Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum in Niagara Falls, and the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia. Obviously some of these are more than a day trip away from our Texas digs, but they may be only a day or so away from you.
We take a pretty broad view of what constitutes a museum so we have seen things like ice cream and chocolate factories, gem mines, paleontological digs, Anasazi villages, Revolutionary War forts, Civil War plantations, and houses of historical figures, like the House of Seven Gables in Salem Massachusetts, the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California and Kit Carson's house in Taos, New Mexico.
Gardens are another thing that we like to see on our day trips but, again, we have a liberal definition of gardens. For us it can be a formal botanical garden like the ones in Fort Worth or San Antonio, more diverse gardens such as Cheekwood in Nashville and Kingwood Center in Mansfield, Ohio or arboretums and nature trails such as the Dawes Arboretum in Newark, Ohio. Anyplace with a nicely planted area or trails through native trees and plants counts as a garden for us.
My wife's favorite travel activity is shopping. We tend to spend time in little towns with one-off stores and antique shops, which often seem to be little more than flea markets. We do a lot more shopping than we do buying because, as my wife has pointed out, if we were to buy many more things we would have to add a room to hold them. We still like shopping though. I especially like antique stores because they are sort of like museums. I am interested in old tools from before the turn of the last century and I can often find them in small town antique stores. We don't usually spend a lot of money in these places because we just don't buy big ticket items; but on most trips we find some little thing that we can't live without, at least until the next garage sale.
A lot of the time when we go on a day trip we have only a vague idea of where we want to go. We'll head out to some place that sounds interesting, but if that doesn't pan out, we will just change our plans and go someplace else. For this reason we have always carried a good map with us as well as a AAA travel book and often one of those books you can pick up at Cracker Barrel that lists what is at each interstate highway on and off ramp. Of course these days we also carry a GPS. Either that or a smart phone with a GPS app is pretty much an essential these days. In fact, if you have a smart phone with a GPS app and Internet access, you probably don't even need a hard copy map or travel books. We're so used to carrying them, though, that we still make sure we have them with us.
One of the things we have learned about day trips is that, if you think ahead a bit, they can easily turn into overnighters. So when we leave on a day trip that we think might be far enough afield that we won't feel like driving all the way home at the end of the day, we usually pack a small suitcase with enough clothes and toiletries to get us through a second day. Something else that is helpful if your trip is suddenly extended overnight is one or more hotel chain customer loyalty cards. Most chains have them and they have proven useful when we needed to get a room without a reservation and most of the hotels and motels in the area were full. Motel and hotel clerks will often try extra hard to find you a room if you are a member of the club.
Another thing we did to make it easier to turn a day trip into an overnighter on the spur of the moment is to stop delivery of the newspaper. We get most of the news we need either from the TV or the Internet and a newspaper lying in the drive all day is a good sign to burglars that no one is home. So you might think about stopping the paper unless it is delivered to a mailbox or somewhere else that would not allow a thief to see that you're not home. We also have a monitored burglar alarm which we set most of the time that we are gone for more than a few minutes. Obviously someone could disable an alarm or do a smash and grab and be off with your prize possessions before the police can respond, but anything you can do to make the neighbors' houses look like easier targets than yours is a good thing.
I'll have some more to say about longer trips in a future post. Right now I have to post this thing and upload the pictures that we took on our last jaunt.
The overwhelming majority of our trips are one-tank day trips. The main reason is that they are cheap entertainment. For the cost of a tank of gas and one or two meals of road food we can spend all day doing and seeing the things we enjoy. Usually we will try to take in a garden or museum and do some shopping.
If the museum thing seems seems a bit hoity toity, that's just an illusion because I'm not talking about the Metropolitan Museum of Art or anything like that. We have a pretty eclectic taste in museums. Some of the museums we have enjoyed visiting include: the aforementioned Coryell Museum and Historical Center, the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum (which, BTW, has nothing at all to do with the baseball team), the Dr. Pepper Museum , the Alamo , Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum in Niagara Falls, and the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia. Obviously some of these are more than a day trip away from our Texas digs, but they may be only a day or so away from you.
We take a pretty broad view of what constitutes a museum so we have seen things like ice cream and chocolate factories, gem mines, paleontological digs, Anasazi villages, Revolutionary War forts, Civil War plantations, and houses of historical figures, like the House of Seven Gables in Salem Massachusetts, the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California and Kit Carson's house in Taos, New Mexico.
Gardens are another thing that we like to see on our day trips but, again, we have a liberal definition of gardens. For us it can be a formal botanical garden like the ones in Fort Worth or San Antonio, more diverse gardens such as Cheekwood in Nashville and Kingwood Center in Mansfield, Ohio or arboretums and nature trails such as the Dawes Arboretum in Newark, Ohio. Anyplace with a nicely planted area or trails through native trees and plants counts as a garden for us.
My wife's favorite travel activity is shopping. We tend to spend time in little towns with one-off stores and antique shops, which often seem to be little more than flea markets. We do a lot more shopping than we do buying because, as my wife has pointed out, if we were to buy many more things we would have to add a room to hold them. We still like shopping though. I especially like antique stores because they are sort of like museums. I am interested in old tools from before the turn of the last century and I can often find them in small town antique stores. We don't usually spend a lot of money in these places because we just don't buy big ticket items; but on most trips we find some little thing that we can't live without, at least until the next garage sale.
A lot of the time when we go on a day trip we have only a vague idea of where we want to go. We'll head out to some place that sounds interesting, but if that doesn't pan out, we will just change our plans and go someplace else. For this reason we have always carried a good map with us as well as a AAA travel book and often one of those books you can pick up at Cracker Barrel that lists what is at each interstate highway on and off ramp. Of course these days we also carry a GPS. Either that or a smart phone with a GPS app is pretty much an essential these days. In fact, if you have a smart phone with a GPS app and Internet access, you probably don't even need a hard copy map or travel books. We're so used to carrying them, though, that we still make sure we have them with us.
One of the things we have learned about day trips is that, if you think ahead a bit, they can easily turn into overnighters. So when we leave on a day trip that we think might be far enough afield that we won't feel like driving all the way home at the end of the day, we usually pack a small suitcase with enough clothes and toiletries to get us through a second day. Something else that is helpful if your trip is suddenly extended overnight is one or more hotel chain customer loyalty cards. Most chains have them and they have proven useful when we needed to get a room without a reservation and most of the hotels and motels in the area were full. Motel and hotel clerks will often try extra hard to find you a room if you are a member of the club.
Another thing we did to make it easier to turn a day trip into an overnighter on the spur of the moment is to stop delivery of the newspaper. We get most of the news we need either from the TV or the Internet and a newspaper lying in the drive all day is a good sign to burglars that no one is home. So you might think about stopping the paper unless it is delivered to a mailbox or somewhere else that would not allow a thief to see that you're not home. We also have a monitored burglar alarm which we set most of the time that we are gone for more than a few minutes. Obviously someone could disable an alarm or do a smash and grab and be off with your prize possessions before the police can respond, but anything you can do to make the neighbors' houses look like easier targets than yours is a good thing.
I'll have some more to say about longer trips in a future post. Right now I have to post this thing and upload the pictures that we took on our last jaunt.
Monday, September 20, 2010
For Free
There's a Joni Mitchell song about a clarinetist on a street corner who was "playin' real good for free". There are two things I like about that: live music and free stuff. As my old girl and I have recently discovered, the combination of the two can add up to lots of fun.
This summer has been a hot one in our neck of the suburbs and my wife and I were casting about one day for something to do to relieve the tedium of the summer doldrums that didn't cost an arm and a leg and would keep us in the air conditioning, or at least the shade. She was reading a local paper at the time and noticed an ad for a coffee shop a couple of miles down the road that has free live music on weekend evenings. Now, like a lot of retirees we don't usually go out on the weekends because that's the only time the folks who are still working have to get out and about and things tend to be more crowded than they are during the week when it's just us hoary old retired folks doddering around. We were kind of bored, though, so we thought we'd stop by the coffee shop to check out the music.
We were pleasantly surprised to find that the coffee shop had a couple of really good solo performers that evening. Both of them were singer-songwriters who played acoustic guitar and sang their own songs as well as covers of sort of folk and indie music. The space was so small that there wasn't a bad seat in the house. Everyone was within about five to 25 feet of the singers. So for the price of a cold coffee drink, in my wife's case, and a smoothie, in my case, we spent a pleasant hour and a half listening to live music.
We enjoyed the experience so much that we decided to start searching for other free live music venues in our area. We live close to a fairly large city that has lots of live music but we didn't want to drive into the city in the evening and besides that most of the live music venues in the city have a cover charge. It turned out, however, that there are lots of places to hear live music for free if you just look around for them and, in our case, most of them were pretty close to home. So about once a week for the last couple of months we have gone to a different place to hear free live music.
We've been to several coffee shops and have discovered that most of them tend to book solo acts or small groups that usually play jazz, blues, 1930's or 40's swing or what I think of as indie music. Generally all you have to do is buy a cup of coffee or a smoothie or something and you can sit there for a couple of hours listening to the music. The coffee houses we have gone to are pretty small so you can hear the music well and you get a chance to interact with the performers. I should probably mention here that a lot of these performers are playing for exposure and tips, so there is usually a tip jar nearby and we always make sure to drop a couple of bucks in it.
Another place we have found to listen to free live music is in small towns. There is a town near us that has some folks who get together on the square on Saturday evenings to jam, mostly doing country music but also some old rock and roll. There's no charge to sit on the courthouse steps and listen, although most people tip the musicians. We were sitting on the steps one evening this summer listening to the jam session and got into a conversation with an old boy sitting beside us. It turned out that he was vacationing alone and had been traveling around our area for the last week. He was on his way home when he saw the courthouse dome from the interstate and decided to stop by for a look. The jam session that was in progress was a happy surprise for him. He told us that he had been playing guitar and even writing his own songs for years and he wished he could join in. We encouraged him to do that but he was kind of reluctant to ask the musicians, whom he didn't know, if he could jam with them. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view), my old girl is a lot less inhibited than that. She told the group on the square that the old boy sitting with us played guitar and would love to sit in on a few numbers. The musicians had a spare guitar so they asked our new found friend to come on down for a little picking and singing. He did just that and ended up jamming with them for over an hour, even singing and playing one of his own songs. Before he left to head home he came over and shook hands with us and thanked my wife for intervening for him with the singers on the square. He told us that that night was the highlight of his vacation. It just goes to show that you never know what you will find when you're looking for some inexpensive fun.
Of course sitting out on the courthouse square in the summer time is a little warm, even in the evening. For those that prefer their free live music indoors there are several restaurants and bars in our area that provide that. You do have to buy something to eat or drink, but there is no cover charge. Those places range from one with an indoor performance area and a pretty big outdoor stage to one with a little postage stamp sized boot scootin' area in the corner of the restaurant. We've enjoyed listening to live music in several of these places. They tend to have electric music that is mostly country and old rock and roll cover bands but they are fun to listen to if you can hear over the whooping and hollering.
Another place where we have listened to live music is at a local farmers market. It is only open on Saturday mornings so we were surprised to find that there are live music acts playing there every week. We've spent a couple of Saturday mornings there, shopping for local organically grown produce, drinking microbiotically-enhanced fruit drinks and eating homemade tamales and empanadas while listening to pretty much the same kind of acts we see in coffee houses.
Finally, now that fall is here, one of our favorite places to hear live music is at halftime at local highschool football games. I guess it's not really free, because they charge $8 per ticket for highschool football games in our area, but we get to see a football game and listen to live music as well, all while drinking Dr. Pepper and eating Frito pie. It doesn't get any better than that.
This summer has been a hot one in our neck of the suburbs and my wife and I were casting about one day for something to do to relieve the tedium of the summer doldrums that didn't cost an arm and a leg and would keep us in the air conditioning, or at least the shade. She was reading a local paper at the time and noticed an ad for a coffee shop a couple of miles down the road that has free live music on weekend evenings. Now, like a lot of retirees we don't usually go out on the weekends because that's the only time the folks who are still working have to get out and about and things tend to be more crowded than they are during the week when it's just us hoary old retired folks doddering around. We were kind of bored, though, so we thought we'd stop by the coffee shop to check out the music.
We were pleasantly surprised to find that the coffee shop had a couple of really good solo performers that evening. Both of them were singer-songwriters who played acoustic guitar and sang their own songs as well as covers of sort of folk and indie music. The space was so small that there wasn't a bad seat in the house. Everyone was within about five to 25 feet of the singers. So for the price of a cold coffee drink, in my wife's case, and a smoothie, in my case, we spent a pleasant hour and a half listening to live music.
We enjoyed the experience so much that we decided to start searching for other free live music venues in our area. We live close to a fairly large city that has lots of live music but we didn't want to drive into the city in the evening and besides that most of the live music venues in the city have a cover charge. It turned out, however, that there are lots of places to hear live music for free if you just look around for them and, in our case, most of them were pretty close to home. So about once a week for the last couple of months we have gone to a different place to hear free live music.
We've been to several coffee shops and have discovered that most of them tend to book solo acts or small groups that usually play jazz, blues, 1930's or 40's swing or what I think of as indie music. Generally all you have to do is buy a cup of coffee or a smoothie or something and you can sit there for a couple of hours listening to the music. The coffee houses we have gone to are pretty small so you can hear the music well and you get a chance to interact with the performers. I should probably mention here that a lot of these performers are playing for exposure and tips, so there is usually a tip jar nearby and we always make sure to drop a couple of bucks in it.
Another place we have found to listen to free live music is in small towns. There is a town near us that has some folks who get together on the square on Saturday evenings to jam, mostly doing country music but also some old rock and roll. There's no charge to sit on the courthouse steps and listen, although most people tip the musicians. We were sitting on the steps one evening this summer listening to the jam session and got into a conversation with an old boy sitting beside us. It turned out that he was vacationing alone and had been traveling around our area for the last week. He was on his way home when he saw the courthouse dome from the interstate and decided to stop by for a look. The jam session that was in progress was a happy surprise for him. He told us that he had been playing guitar and even writing his own songs for years and he wished he could join in. We encouraged him to do that but he was kind of reluctant to ask the musicians, whom he didn't know, if he could jam with them. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view), my old girl is a lot less inhibited than that. She told the group on the square that the old boy sitting with us played guitar and would love to sit in on a few numbers. The musicians had a spare guitar so they asked our new found friend to come on down for a little picking and singing. He did just that and ended up jamming with them for over an hour, even singing and playing one of his own songs. Before he left to head home he came over and shook hands with us and thanked my wife for intervening for him with the singers on the square. He told us that that night was the highlight of his vacation. It just goes to show that you never know what you will find when you're looking for some inexpensive fun.
Of course sitting out on the courthouse square in the summer time is a little warm, even in the evening. For those that prefer their free live music indoors there are several restaurants and bars in our area that provide that. You do have to buy something to eat or drink, but there is no cover charge. Those places range from one with an indoor performance area and a pretty big outdoor stage to one with a little postage stamp sized boot scootin' area in the corner of the restaurant. We've enjoyed listening to live music in several of these places. They tend to have electric music that is mostly country and old rock and roll cover bands but they are fun to listen to if you can hear over the whooping and hollering.
Another place where we have listened to live music is at a local farmers market. It is only open on Saturday mornings so we were surprised to find that there are live music acts playing there every week. We've spent a couple of Saturday mornings there, shopping for local organically grown produce, drinking microbiotically-enhanced fruit drinks and eating homemade tamales and empanadas while listening to pretty much the same kind of acts we see in coffee houses.
Finally, now that fall is here, one of our favorite places to hear live music is at halftime at local highschool football games. I guess it's not really free, because they charge $8 per ticket for highschool football games in our area, but we get to see a football game and listen to live music as well, all while drinking Dr. Pepper and eating Frito pie. It doesn't get any better than that.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
A Few of my Favorite Things
As my wife and I have gotten older we've come to appreciate tools that are designed for us older folks who don't have the grip we used to have or just feel like we could use a little more convenience. We've accumulated some tools in the last several years that we really like because they make life a little easier on us. So I'm going to tell you about a few of them here. Most of them are pretty inexpensive, although one was a splurge for us. I should say up front that we have no affiliation with any of these companies and my comments here are just based on personal experience and opinion. There's no implication here that you will like these products and, for all I know, you might have found a better or cheaper alternative. That said, here are some products that my wife and I have found to be particularly useful.
Firm Grip All Purpose Work Gloves
I like these gloves, which I bought at Home Depot , although you might be able to find them at other home or garden stores. I use them for gardening as well as working on projects around the house and yard. They have some padding in the area where you might bang a knuckle or otherwise need it and they have a really good gripping surface. Although they fit snugly, the fabric of which they are made seems to breathe well and they are comfortable to wear. I haven't had them long enough to speak to their durability, but they have held up well so far.
OXO Good Grips Jar Opener
I have to admit that I like every OXO product that I have ever bought, but this jar opener is one of my favorites. Over the years I have bought a variety of jar openers and, while most of them seemed to help, this Good Grips jar opener is the simplest design and most effective that I have used. It fits a wide variety of bottle caps and jar lids, is easy to use and easy to clean up.
Chef'n PalmPeeler
This is one of those “why didn't somebody think of this before now?” products. It is a vegetable peeler that fits in the palm of your hand. To peel something you just fit it on your finger like a ring and move your palm over the veggie you are trying to peel. The movement is natural and peeling is easy. It is also easy to clean. Chef'n also makes a zester and a corn stripper with the same basic design, although we haven't tried them yet.
Zyliss Pizza Wheel
This is another one of those products that seems so natural to use that you can't imagine why it took somebody so long to come up with it. It is a pizza cutter with a soft plastic housing that serves as the handle. The cutting wheel is totally encased in the housing except for a small arc at the business end. When you use this pizza cutter you press straight down on the axle of the wheel, which gives you tremendous leverage. When you're done cutting pizza you just swing the housing open, pull out the cutting wheel and wash them both.
Keurig One-Cup Coffee Maker
This is the splurge I was talking about above. You can definitely buy a good coffee maker for less money. However, we got ours on one of those sales at Kohl's where they cut the price way down and then send you a 30 percent off coupon that applies to sales items. So we paid a lot less than the “normal” sticker price. We also discovered that it pays to shop around for this item because quite a few stores carry them and the prices do vary between stores. You can also buy them online of course.
Yeah I know, there are bajillions of coffee makers out there and I think my old girl and I have tried most of them. They all seemed to have drawbacks, though. Most of them take longer to brew the coffee than we are willing to wait in the morning. We have had coffee makers that keep a well of water hot so that they brew more or less instantly and, yes, we understand that that is not the most environmentally friendly thing to have because it has to use energy to keep the water hot. We also understand that some people think that makes the water taste funny. For us, however, the primary requirement was that we have that first cup of coffee in the morning quickly before murder and mayhem ensued.
We had a couple of problems with the coffee maker that made coffee very quickly though. One was that it only seemed to work well when we made a fairly large pot of coffee and some mornings we didn't want to drink that much. The other problem was that some mornings I want to drink tea, and the coffee maker didn't work for that so I had to get my hot water for tea in other ways, none of which worked well for me. Microwaving the water seemed to me to make it taste funny and while heating water in a conventional tea kettle worked fine, it takes a little while.
The Keurig coffee maker has solved those problems and then some. It does keep water hot constantly so that it brews coffee almost instantly. In addition, it brews the coffee from little pods that are designed to brew just one cup. You can set the size of cup that is brewed to one of five different sizes. We have found that you can use the pods twice, so we get two cups out of each pod. There are lots of pods available so if, e.g., my wife wants to drink vanilla decaf and I want to drink regular French roast, we can do that without any waste. In addition, there are pods of tea of various kinds so my wife can have her coffee and I can have my tea and we can both have them nearly immediately in the morning.
But there's more. This little gem makes iced tea instantly. You just fill a big glass with ice cubes, pop in your favorite tea pod, and press the “iced tea” button and there it is, instantly brewed and instantly ice cold. More yet: You can get a little coffee container that fits where the pods go. Then you can put your favorite coffee, tea or whatever in the container and brew your drink with that. Finally, if you just want some hot water to put into a cup with your favorite tea bag (or instant coffee if you are that perverted) you can do that too.
All of these gadgets make life a little easier and most of them won't cost you an arm and a leg (unless you use the peeler or cutter with absolute abandon anyway) so they are a few of our favorite things.
Firm Grip All Purpose Work Gloves
I like these gloves, which I bought at Home Depot , although you might be able to find them at other home or garden stores. I use them for gardening as well as working on projects around the house and yard. They have some padding in the area where you might bang a knuckle or otherwise need it and they have a really good gripping surface. Although they fit snugly, the fabric of which they are made seems to breathe well and they are comfortable to wear. I haven't had them long enough to speak to their durability, but they have held up well so far.
OXO Good Grips Jar Opener
I have to admit that I like every OXO product that I have ever bought, but this jar opener is one of my favorites. Over the years I have bought a variety of jar openers and, while most of them seemed to help, this Good Grips jar opener is the simplest design and most effective that I have used. It fits a wide variety of bottle caps and jar lids, is easy to use and easy to clean up.
Chef'n PalmPeeler
This is one of those “why didn't somebody think of this before now?” products. It is a vegetable peeler that fits in the palm of your hand. To peel something you just fit it on your finger like a ring and move your palm over the veggie you are trying to peel. The movement is natural and peeling is easy. It is also easy to clean. Chef'n also makes a zester and a corn stripper with the same basic design, although we haven't tried them yet.
Zyliss Pizza Wheel
This is another one of those products that seems so natural to use that you can't imagine why it took somebody so long to come up with it. It is a pizza cutter with a soft plastic housing that serves as the handle. The cutting wheel is totally encased in the housing except for a small arc at the business end. When you use this pizza cutter you press straight down on the axle of the wheel, which gives you tremendous leverage. When you're done cutting pizza you just swing the housing open, pull out the cutting wheel and wash them both.
Keurig One-Cup Coffee Maker
This is the splurge I was talking about above. You can definitely buy a good coffee maker for less money. However, we got ours on one of those sales at Kohl's where they cut the price way down and then send you a 30 percent off coupon that applies to sales items. So we paid a lot less than the “normal” sticker price. We also discovered that it pays to shop around for this item because quite a few stores carry them and the prices do vary between stores. You can also buy them online of course.
Yeah I know, there are bajillions of coffee makers out there and I think my old girl and I have tried most of them. They all seemed to have drawbacks, though. Most of them take longer to brew the coffee than we are willing to wait in the morning. We have had coffee makers that keep a well of water hot so that they brew more or less instantly and, yes, we understand that that is not the most environmentally friendly thing to have because it has to use energy to keep the water hot. We also understand that some people think that makes the water taste funny. For us, however, the primary requirement was that we have that first cup of coffee in the morning quickly before murder and mayhem ensued.
We had a couple of problems with the coffee maker that made coffee very quickly though. One was that it only seemed to work well when we made a fairly large pot of coffee and some mornings we didn't want to drink that much. The other problem was that some mornings I want to drink tea, and the coffee maker didn't work for that so I had to get my hot water for tea in other ways, none of which worked well for me. Microwaving the water seemed to me to make it taste funny and while heating water in a conventional tea kettle worked fine, it takes a little while.
The Keurig coffee maker has solved those problems and then some. It does keep water hot constantly so that it brews coffee almost instantly. In addition, it brews the coffee from little pods that are designed to brew just one cup. You can set the size of cup that is brewed to one of five different sizes. We have found that you can use the pods twice, so we get two cups out of each pod. There are lots of pods available so if, e.g., my wife wants to drink vanilla decaf and I want to drink regular French roast, we can do that without any waste. In addition, there are pods of tea of various kinds so my wife can have her coffee and I can have my tea and we can both have them nearly immediately in the morning.
But there's more. This little gem makes iced tea instantly. You just fill a big glass with ice cubes, pop in your favorite tea pod, and press the “iced tea” button and there it is, instantly brewed and instantly ice cold. More yet: You can get a little coffee container that fits where the pods go. Then you can put your favorite coffee, tea or whatever in the container and brew your drink with that. Finally, if you just want some hot water to put into a cup with your favorite tea bag (or instant coffee if you are that perverted) you can do that too.
All of these gadgets make life a little easier and most of them won't cost you an arm and a leg (unless you use the peeler or cutter with absolute abandon anyway) so they are a few of our favorite things.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Whisk Me Away
My old girl came up with a new twist on the restaurant game a few weeks ago. She told me one morning that she was going to “whisk me away” to a mystery restaurant for lunch. I wasn't allowed to ask questions about it or to know anything about it until we got there. So we jumped in the car about lunch time and she drove kind a circuitous route to a Mediterranean restaurant that we had passed many times over the years. Whenever we drove by there I would say “We need to try that place one of these days”, but we never did until I got whisked away to it.
After a delicious lunch of dolmas, falafel and other middle eastern goodies, my wife informed me that it was now my turn to pick a restaurant to whisk her away to for lunch some day soon. I sort of felt like the pressure was on for me to find a restaurant that we hadn't been to before and that my wife would like. At the time she was trying to stick to a diet that was high in veggies and fish and low in red meat, so I had to pick something that would provide a fair number of meatless or fish dishes. Also, I kind of wanted to make a short day trip out of it because we had bought a new GPS and I wanted to test it on the way to and from the restaurant. So I decided to go to a town about sixty miles from here that we've been to many times before because it has a lot of shops that have the sort of stuff that my wife likes to shop for. It's a small town but I had done an Internet search and discovered that there was a new restaurant there that had just the sort of menu that would line up well with my wife's diet.
The next week I told her that I was going to whisk her away to a restaurant that was a bit of a drive from here and that I was going to use the opportunity to test the new GPS. My wife is a much better driver than passenger on these day trips. If she's driving and I'm navigating, I just check out the scenery and watch the map and/or GPS to let her know if there is anything unusual coming up. If I'm driving and she's the passenger, she redoes her makeup, rearranges everything in her purse, cleans and rearranges everything she can reach in the car, calls all of her friends and then tells me that she's bored and wants to know how long it will be before we reach our destination. So I decided that it would be better if she drove to the restaurant. I put the address in the GPS and told her to follow it to the magical mystery bistro.
Even though the restaurant is only about sixty miles from our house, there is no direct route there, and some of the roads are back country trails. So it took nearly an hour and a half to get there. All the way there my wife kept trying to guess where we were going, but I wouldn't tell her. When we were within about ten miles of the restaurant we were driving on a road that pretty much only goes to the little town where the restaurant lives, so my wife guessed correctly that we were going to that town. We have eaten at most of the restaurants there, so she asked me if each of them was the mystery restaurant but again, I didn't spill the beans, or the hummus, which is probably a better analog considering the restaurant's menu. Finally, when we were about three miles from the restaurant, my wife guessed where we were going. I still didn't confirm it for her, but she hit the nail on the head. When we pulled into the parking lot my wife started laughing. I asked what was so funny and she told me that that restaurant is the one that she had picked to whisk me away to when it was her turn again. We had a terrific lunch at the mystery restaurant and then did some shopping and even bought a few things. Then we headed home.
I did another twist on the "whisk me away" restaurant game this past week when our son flew in for a visit from out of state. My wife and daughter and I picked him up at the airport about noon. Since we hadn't eaten lunch yet, I whisked all of them away to a restaurant where none of us had ever eaten before. It was a funky little place with a lot of local flavor. We all enjoyed both the ambiance and the food.
This week it is my wife's turn to be the whisker and my turn to be the whiskee (or maybe whiskey, which definitely suits me better). I can't wait to see where we go.
After a delicious lunch of dolmas, falafel and other middle eastern goodies, my wife informed me that it was now my turn to pick a restaurant to whisk her away to for lunch some day soon. I sort of felt like the pressure was on for me to find a restaurant that we hadn't been to before and that my wife would like. At the time she was trying to stick to a diet that was high in veggies and fish and low in red meat, so I had to pick something that would provide a fair number of meatless or fish dishes. Also, I kind of wanted to make a short day trip out of it because we had bought a new GPS and I wanted to test it on the way to and from the restaurant. So I decided to go to a town about sixty miles from here that we've been to many times before because it has a lot of shops that have the sort of stuff that my wife likes to shop for. It's a small town but I had done an Internet search and discovered that there was a new restaurant there that had just the sort of menu that would line up well with my wife's diet.
The next week I told her that I was going to whisk her away to a restaurant that was a bit of a drive from here and that I was going to use the opportunity to test the new GPS. My wife is a much better driver than passenger on these day trips. If she's driving and I'm navigating, I just check out the scenery and watch the map and/or GPS to let her know if there is anything unusual coming up. If I'm driving and she's the passenger, she redoes her makeup, rearranges everything in her purse, cleans and rearranges everything she can reach in the car, calls all of her friends and then tells me that she's bored and wants to know how long it will be before we reach our destination. So I decided that it would be better if she drove to the restaurant. I put the address in the GPS and told her to follow it to the magical mystery bistro.
Even though the restaurant is only about sixty miles from our house, there is no direct route there, and some of the roads are back country trails. So it took nearly an hour and a half to get there. All the way there my wife kept trying to guess where we were going, but I wouldn't tell her. When we were within about ten miles of the restaurant we were driving on a road that pretty much only goes to the little town where the restaurant lives, so my wife guessed correctly that we were going to that town. We have eaten at most of the restaurants there, so she asked me if each of them was the mystery restaurant but again, I didn't spill the beans, or the hummus, which is probably a better analog considering the restaurant's menu. Finally, when we were about three miles from the restaurant, my wife guessed where we were going. I still didn't confirm it for her, but she hit the nail on the head. When we pulled into the parking lot my wife started laughing. I asked what was so funny and she told me that that restaurant is the one that she had picked to whisk me away to when it was her turn again. We had a terrific lunch at the mystery restaurant and then did some shopping and even bought a few things. Then we headed home.
I did another twist on the "whisk me away" restaurant game this past week when our son flew in for a visit from out of state. My wife and daughter and I picked him up at the airport about noon. Since we hadn't eaten lunch yet, I whisked all of them away to a restaurant where none of us had ever eaten before. It was a funky little place with a lot of local flavor. We all enjoyed both the ambiance and the food.
This week it is my wife's turn to be the whisker and my turn to be the whiskee (or maybe whiskey, which definitely suits me better). I can't wait to see where we go.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Capturing Those Old Pictures
My wife and I were shopping in one of those antique store/flea market places the other day when I ran across a couple of old photo albums full of somebody's history. There were formal shots of people dressed in the fashion of bygone days and a few candid shots too, mostly of kids. I see these things in antique stores all the time and it always makes me sad because those photos represent somebody's heritage.
We have lots of albums filled with pictures of friends and family from our younger days. We also have pictures we have inherited from our parents and more distant ancestors. Some of them are tintypes that have been handed down for many years and more than a few of them have begun to deteriorate. I worried about what to do with all of these photos for a long time and finally decided that the best thing I could do with them was to scan them into the computer and turn them into digital media. Having worked for a long time in the high tech industry I know that the format of any media, picture files included, will change over time; but I'm sure that there will always be a period when cheap means of conversion will be available to turn the old format into the current one. I also know that pictures stored in digital form won't deteriorate any further and those that deteriorated before they were scanned can be digitally restored.
It is a lot easier and cheaper than you might think to scan old pictures, and other paper documents for that matter,and it makes a great thing to do on rainy days or during those days when it is too cold to be outside in the north or too hot to be outside in the south. You can use any Windows PC or Mac to process the pictures. It doesn't need to be a new, big, fast or expensive computer as long as it can handle the hook up to a scanner and has some form of media to store the pictures on. You can always store them on the computer's hard file, of course, but hard files can malfunction and in that case the pictures you have stored on them may be irretrievable. It is also possible that you may have a fire or your computer may be stolen and, if the pictures were only stored on the hard file, they would be lost forever. In addition, if you use antivirus software to scan your hard file for viruses, you will find that an accumulation of picture files on the hard file will make the time to scan it for viruses increase substantially over time. So, while it is fine to store the picture files on your computer's hard file, assuming you are willing to live with a longer virus scan time, it is imperative to also store them on some kind of removable media like CDs or DVDs. If you are really worried about losing the media that contains the pictures to theft, fire or some other tragedy, you can make multiple copies on CDs or DVDs and store each copy in a separate place. For example, you might ask a friend to store one copy for you so that, if your own copy is lost or damaged, you can simply retrieve the copy you have left with your friend.
I use a Windows PC to process photos. My machine has a built-in CD drive, so that's what I use to store the pictures. To do the actual scanning you need either a scanner or a combination printer/scanner/copier. It can be either new or used. While a used one might be cheaper, if you look around you might find a good deal on a new one. I bought a Canon PIXMA combination printer/scanner/copier at Wal~mart for $40. I liked buying a new machine because it came with all the software I needed to scan the photos. Most of the software that comes with scanners will allow you to tell the machine whether you are scanning black and white or color photos so that the computer can process them properly and produce the smallest practical picture file. Often the software will allow you to crop the photos, which will result in smaller files. This is handy if the photos have large borders or if they are in frames and can't be removed. The software that came with my scanner also allows me to scan large photos in pieces and then knit them back together after the photos are in the computer.
I have thousands of photos that I want to scan so I know I will be at this project for a long time. I started with some very old pictures and am working my way toward more recent ones.
In another post I'll talk about ways to view the scanned photos. You can always use the Windows media viewer or the Mac equivalent, of course, but it is more convenient to view them as a digital album, or at least a web page. In later posts I will also talk about ways to convert other artifacts to a more modern format. For example, I have converted all the old VHS video tapes that document past vacations and family gatherings to DVDs. In a future post I'll tell you how I did that.
We have lots of albums filled with pictures of friends and family from our younger days. We also have pictures we have inherited from our parents and more distant ancestors. Some of them are tintypes that have been handed down for many years and more than a few of them have begun to deteriorate. I worried about what to do with all of these photos for a long time and finally decided that the best thing I could do with them was to scan them into the computer and turn them into digital media. Having worked for a long time in the high tech industry I know that the format of any media, picture files included, will change over time; but I'm sure that there will always be a period when cheap means of conversion will be available to turn the old format into the current one. I also know that pictures stored in digital form won't deteriorate any further and those that deteriorated before they were scanned can be digitally restored.
It is a lot easier and cheaper than you might think to scan old pictures, and other paper documents for that matter,and it makes a great thing to do on rainy days or during those days when it is too cold to be outside in the north or too hot to be outside in the south. You can use any Windows PC or Mac to process the pictures. It doesn't need to be a new, big, fast or expensive computer as long as it can handle the hook up to a scanner and has some form of media to store the pictures on. You can always store them on the computer's hard file, of course, but hard files can malfunction and in that case the pictures you have stored on them may be irretrievable. It is also possible that you may have a fire or your computer may be stolen and, if the pictures were only stored on the hard file, they would be lost forever. In addition, if you use antivirus software to scan your hard file for viruses, you will find that an accumulation of picture files on the hard file will make the time to scan it for viruses increase substantially over time. So, while it is fine to store the picture files on your computer's hard file, assuming you are willing to live with a longer virus scan time, it is imperative to also store them on some kind of removable media like CDs or DVDs. If you are really worried about losing the media that contains the pictures to theft, fire or some other tragedy, you can make multiple copies on CDs or DVDs and store each copy in a separate place. For example, you might ask a friend to store one copy for you so that, if your own copy is lost or damaged, you can simply retrieve the copy you have left with your friend.
I use a Windows PC to process photos. My machine has a built-in CD drive, so that's what I use to store the pictures. To do the actual scanning you need either a scanner or a combination printer/scanner/copier. It can be either new or used. While a used one might be cheaper, if you look around you might find a good deal on a new one. I bought a Canon PIXMA combination printer/scanner/copier at Wal~mart for $40. I liked buying a new machine because it came with all the software I needed to scan the photos. Most of the software that comes with scanners will allow you to tell the machine whether you are scanning black and white or color photos so that the computer can process them properly and produce the smallest practical picture file. Often the software will allow you to crop the photos, which will result in smaller files. This is handy if the photos have large borders or if they are in frames and can't be removed. The software that came with my scanner also allows me to scan large photos in pieces and then knit them back together after the photos are in the computer.
I have thousands of photos that I want to scan so I know I will be at this project for a long time. I started with some very old pictures and am working my way toward more recent ones.
In another post I'll talk about ways to view the scanned photos. You can always use the Windows media viewer or the Mac equivalent, of course, but it is more convenient to view them as a digital album, or at least a web page. In later posts I will also talk about ways to convert other artifacts to a more modern format. For example, I have converted all the old VHS video tapes that document past vacations and family gatherings to DVDs. In a future post I'll tell you how I did that.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Reading on the Cheap
I like to read. What I don't like is paying beaucoup bucks to buy books. I really like hardbacks but they are just way too expensive. So I used to just buy paperbacks but the price of those has gotten pretty expensive these days as well.
The logical solution to this problem is the local library, right? Well, that kind of depends on where you live. My wife and I used to live in an unincorporated area of the county outside of any city limits. So, since the county didn't have a library system, our only alternative was to join a city library; but since we weren't city residents we had to pay what seemed at the time to be a fairly steep fee for a non-resident family membership.
We thought that we had overcome that problem when we moved inside the city limits of a small town. Since we were now residents we got free memberships to the city library. The problem with that was that our town, which is growing rapidly, still has a single small library that doesn't have a lot of books or other media. Since the library's inventory hasn't caught up with the increased population it is often the case that books that we'd like to borrow are either not part of the library's inventory or they are out and there is a waiting list for them. Fortunately most libraries are part of an interlibrary loan system. That works differently depending upon where you live. In some states you get access to the catalogs of other libraries in the system and you can request an interlibrary loan of the book or other media you are interested in. Then you have to wait until it gets delivered to your local library or branch so that you can pick it up. We live in Texas, which has a consortium for more less traditional interlibrary loans such as I just described but also has something called TexShare, which uses a little bit different model. In our state anyone who is a member of a participating library can get a TexShare card. If you present that card at a library which is a member of the system (and most of them are) you can get a local library card for that library at no cost to you. Then you can use that library just like any other card holder. So my wife and I used our local (no cost) library card to get TexShare cards and then used those to get local library cards at libraries in other towns with bigger catalogs than our local library at no cost to us. Now we can borrow from any of those libraries. We just have to keep track of which library we have borrowed the books from and when they are due.
Being a library member can save money even when you think you might want to buy a new book. For example, my wife and I recently attended a seminar which was based on a book. The person conducting that seminar mentioned that the book was available online at most of the usual places. We thought we might want to have a copy but, just to make sure, we drove from the seminar to a library and borrowed a copy of the book. After reading through it we decided that we didn't really need it after all. That saved us about $25.
Some of the libraries we belong to have other features that save money. E.g., one of them has a magazine recycling program where members can bring in their relatively new, but used magazines, and put them in a rack where any other member is free to take them home at no charge. We often take home magazines that are of interest to us and then re-donate them so that someone else can use them too.
So belonging to one or more libraries solves the problem of getting cheap access to reading material. The only problems I have with that are that I like to buy books so that I don't have to worry about when they are due back at the library. In addition, I like to buy reference books and just keep them handy. (Yes, even in these days of bajillions of bytes of data available at my fingertips from the Internet I still like to have some reference material in hard copy form. I know that's anachronistic, but that's how I am.) Way back in the golden days of yore I satisfied my craving for cheap book prices by buying them at a local bookstore that sells them for half of the cover price. They also give you a small credit for turning in used books so that offset the cost somewhat. I'm pretty cheap, though, and half price on a $30 book was still more than I wanted to pay. So I was thrilled when a bookstore opened that had new books for 75% off. That just seemed to be too good to be true. Apparently that was the case, however, because that store only lasted about six months and then I was back to paying half price.
About that time I started buying books from online retailers. They usually had lower new book prices, but since I was used to paying no more than half price for gently used books, and getting immediate gratification rather than waiting a week for cheapo cheapo snail mail delivery, I kept on the lookout for something that suited me better.
I heard from a friend that Goodwill stores had used books for a reasonable price, so I started buying them there, but they still charge more than I'd like to pay, so I continued to search for other sources of cheap books.
These days I buy most of my books from the used book stores in the libraries that my wife and I frequent. One of our favorites, which has a fairly large used book store that often has titles that are only a year old or so, charges $3.00 for a hard back and half that for a soft cover. That's pretty cheap but they usually have a monthly special which is almost always a BOGO for some category of books or media that is currently overstocked. So, e.g., you might get two hard back fiction books for $3.00 or a BOGO for any non-fiction book or media. That amounts to about $50 worth of hard covers, often last years titles, for $3.00. That's what I'm talking about! I haunt that book store a couple of times a week.
We have found an even better deal at an independent thrift store in our area. They sell hard covers for $1.50 unless they are very new titles from really popular authors, in which case they charge $3.00.
Since we can buy books so inexpensively these days my wife and I always seem to have ten or twelve books on the “To Be Read” shelf. Of course we end up with boxes of books that we've read and don't plan to keep. Some of them get passed along to friends who want to read them. The rest get donated back to the local thrift store because we feel that, with a cost of only $1.50 per book, more people will get to enjoy them if we donate them there. Everybody wins. The thrift store and library used book stores get to make some money and we get to read lots of good books on the cheap.
The logical solution to this problem is the local library, right? Well, that kind of depends on where you live. My wife and I used to live in an unincorporated area of the county outside of any city limits. So, since the county didn't have a library system, our only alternative was to join a city library; but since we weren't city residents we had to pay what seemed at the time to be a fairly steep fee for a non-resident family membership.
We thought that we had overcome that problem when we moved inside the city limits of a small town. Since we were now residents we got free memberships to the city library. The problem with that was that our town, which is growing rapidly, still has a single small library that doesn't have a lot of books or other media. Since the library's inventory hasn't caught up with the increased population it is often the case that books that we'd like to borrow are either not part of the library's inventory or they are out and there is a waiting list for them. Fortunately most libraries are part of an interlibrary loan system. That works differently depending upon where you live. In some states you get access to the catalogs of other libraries in the system and you can request an interlibrary loan of the book or other media you are interested in. Then you have to wait until it gets delivered to your local library or branch so that you can pick it up. We live in Texas, which has a consortium for more less traditional interlibrary loans such as I just described but also has something called TexShare, which uses a little bit different model. In our state anyone who is a member of a participating library can get a TexShare card. If you present that card at a library which is a member of the system (and most of them are) you can get a local library card for that library at no cost to you. Then you can use that library just like any other card holder. So my wife and I used our local (no cost) library card to get TexShare cards and then used those to get local library cards at libraries in other towns with bigger catalogs than our local library at no cost to us. Now we can borrow from any of those libraries. We just have to keep track of which library we have borrowed the books from and when they are due.
Being a library member can save money even when you think you might want to buy a new book. For example, my wife and I recently attended a seminar which was based on a book. The person conducting that seminar mentioned that the book was available online at most of the usual places. We thought we might want to have a copy but, just to make sure, we drove from the seminar to a library and borrowed a copy of the book. After reading through it we decided that we didn't really need it after all. That saved us about $25.
Some of the libraries we belong to have other features that save money. E.g., one of them has a magazine recycling program where members can bring in their relatively new, but used magazines, and put them in a rack where any other member is free to take them home at no charge. We often take home magazines that are of interest to us and then re-donate them so that someone else can use them too.
So belonging to one or more libraries solves the problem of getting cheap access to reading material. The only problems I have with that are that I like to buy books so that I don't have to worry about when they are due back at the library. In addition, I like to buy reference books and just keep them handy. (Yes, even in these days of bajillions of bytes of data available at my fingertips from the Internet I still like to have some reference material in hard copy form. I know that's anachronistic, but that's how I am.) Way back in the golden days of yore I satisfied my craving for cheap book prices by buying them at a local bookstore that sells them for half of the cover price. They also give you a small credit for turning in used books so that offset the cost somewhat. I'm pretty cheap, though, and half price on a $30 book was still more than I wanted to pay. So I was thrilled when a bookstore opened that had new books for 75% off. That just seemed to be too good to be true. Apparently that was the case, however, because that store only lasted about six months and then I was back to paying half price.
About that time I started buying books from online retailers. They usually had lower new book prices, but since I was used to paying no more than half price for gently used books, and getting immediate gratification rather than waiting a week for cheapo cheapo snail mail delivery, I kept on the lookout for something that suited me better.
I heard from a friend that Goodwill stores had used books for a reasonable price, so I started buying them there, but they still charge more than I'd like to pay, so I continued to search for other sources of cheap books.
These days I buy most of my books from the used book stores in the libraries that my wife and I frequent. One of our favorites, which has a fairly large used book store that often has titles that are only a year old or so, charges $3.00 for a hard back and half that for a soft cover. That's pretty cheap but they usually have a monthly special which is almost always a BOGO for some category of books or media that is currently overstocked. So, e.g., you might get two hard back fiction books for $3.00 or a BOGO for any non-fiction book or media. That amounts to about $50 worth of hard covers, often last years titles, for $3.00. That's what I'm talking about! I haunt that book store a couple of times a week.
We have found an even better deal at an independent thrift store in our area. They sell hard covers for $1.50 unless they are very new titles from really popular authors, in which case they charge $3.00.
Since we can buy books so inexpensively these days my wife and I always seem to have ten or twelve books on the “To Be Read” shelf. Of course we end up with boxes of books that we've read and don't plan to keep. Some of them get passed along to friends who want to read them. The rest get donated back to the local thrift store because we feel that, with a cost of only $1.50 per book, more people will get to enjoy them if we donate them there. Everybody wins. The thrift store and library used book stores get to make some money and we get to read lots of good books on the cheap.
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