Karin's Adventures

This month our 2-year contract with Comcast for their "Triple Play" (internet, home phone, TV with all the extras) ended and the price was going up a lot. We are in no way able to pay that much for services that we consider nice to have, but not essential.

Reducing the TV part of the package back to just basic cable, which still contains about 50 different channels, was relatively easy, but it didn't give us much of a savings - just taking the total price back down to about the same that we had been paying for the past two years.

Doing a little research, though, revealed an awesome way to save a considerable amount of money without losing any benefits: replace Comcast's home phone service with OOMA.

Now I have this pretty little black box with fancy blue lights on it sitting on my desk. We pay $3.73 a month (which is all taxes) and get the finest voice-over-IP available. CallerID, answering machine, free calls to the entire US. 

The January 2013 issue of "Senior Life" contains an article about me, starting on page 4, which I had been interviewed for last month.

I wasn't sure, whether or not to participate, because of the target audience of this magazine.

Am I really a "senior" now?

http://www.the-papers.com/OnlineIssue.aspx?pub=seniorlife...

I had passed my last class in November of 2012, but it took until today for my diploma to be ready for pick-up. So now, finally, over 37 years after I graduated from high-school, I finished my Bachelor's degree. This is it, I'm done with school. No, I don't attempt to go any further. There will be no Master's or PhD in my future. I feel smart enough the way it is now.

New Year's Eve is a holiday laden with traditions. The ones I try to live are a mixture of what my family used to do, or what people do in Germany, or stuff that I just picked up from somewhere I don't even remember. 

I need to eat herring salad, drink prosecco, watch "Dinner for One" just before midnight, then light some fire-crackers at midnight, and then melt lead first thing in the new year.

My piece of random lead art for 2013 looks like an eagle to me.

What do you think? 

Indiana Tech's annual Holiday Dinner took us out to a part of town where we usually don't go. So, since we were already in the area, we decided to take a detour on the way home and drive by one very elaborate Christmas decoration that this family set up for everybody to watch and listen. The entire house lights up to the rhythm of "All I want for Christmas is You". If you watch closely, you can see Santa Claus working inside, behind one of the windows.