a La Carte your life

 Home Improvement, Joe  No Responses »
Jun 052008
 

First off, i totally agree with this statement:

Here’s how you can use the A La Carte Method for yourself. Cancel all the discretionary subscriptions you can: your magazines, annual Rhapsody plan, cable — even your gym. (It would be totally ridiculous to cancel your Internet, though. I’d cry like a little girl if I couldn’t get online from my house.)   – emphasis mine

Now on to the meat.  Ramti Sethi @ I Will Teach You To Be Rich has a look at the psychology of subscriptions and how its much better in most cases to buy things a La Carte as you use them.

The A La Carte Method: Use Psychology Against Yourself to Save Money

We are going to give this a whirl.   There are enough choices now to download shows from iTunes and Amazon unBoxed that i think its possible, combined with the network shows we can get in HD via the Over the Air antenna that we can save money on the $65.00 per month Directv bill.

Comcast is no cheaper and the cost just goes up to add the capability to receive HD signals through the satellite.    So we are going to try the internet.

To be fair, i can’t live without a Tivo (so dramatic!) so we are getting a TivoHD to record the network shows we do watch.    Its a shame that Directv decided to orphan Tivo when moving to HD.   This radical thinking may have never come up.

 Posted by at 10:39 am

Declutter

 Home Improvement, Joe, Sarah  No Responses »
Apr 262008
 

Okay .. so I’m a bit of a paper hoarder.   Sarah has worked on beating this tendency out of me.   Its been having an effect.

We’ve been working at it a long while.  With the help of the Fujitsu Scansnap S300 I’ve made a ton of progress.  This scanner allows me to scan anything that I’d like to save, file it electronically and toss the paper copy.  This has made a huge difference.   No more stacks of receipts, utilities bills, etc.   Now they are scanned, recorded and tossed.  Awesome.

Today we took 4 totes of paper to the community paper shred day event.  Lots o’clutter.  Decluttered.

Sarah is happy

 

 Posted by at 7:23 pm

Rocks and dirt are heavy (April 9)

 Home Improvement  No Responses »
Apr 182005
 

Sometime during the week of April 4, i got the bright idea to build a raised garden bed to help with our veggie production.  Somewhere in that crazy scheme was also floated the idea of less grass in the backyard to mow.  Having inadequate wheels for the job i arranged to borrow my brothers F350 and a barely adequate wheelbarrow.   40 bags of top soil and 20 bags of Pea Gravel later (40lbs per bag * 60 bags = 2400 lbs!), Sarah and I could not believe how sore we were and how much work we had done.  We created a raised garden bed that measured 4’ x 10’ using 2×10 with 3 different areas and filled it up with the top soil.   Here are some shots of the results of the garden project:

101_1712 101_1713 101_1714 101_1716 101_1718 101_1760 101_1761

The rock bed is a pretty simple design, a 10’ x 10’ square, that matches the size of our patio.  The idea is to give us a little more room to get around without having to pour concrete or build a deck (and there is that advantage of not having to mow!).   Here’s some shots of the rock bed project:

101_1707 101_1710 101_1719 101_1720 101_1721

 

 Posted by at 8:44 am

Water Softener

 Home Improvement  No Responses »
Apr 172005
 

First thing that happened was upgrading the water system in the house (Sat, April 2). Being a computer programmer and less an handy guy I asked Dad to come over and help with the installation. When we bought the house we had the rough-in included for this upgrade so that made it very easy to do. I bought a water softener at Menards (this one).  That was easy enough.  I’m certainly good at buying things and bringing them home    The next part, the part i needed Dad’s expertise, was hooking the new softener to the already installed piping.  There was a bit of a height difference so we had to do some bends to get it all to come out.  A bit of soldering, and some weird pipe glue later we had soft water!    Here’s a shot of the final product:

101_1751The Morton Water Softener Unit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

101_1752Getting the water where you need it.  The one on the right is the master water on/off switch.   The incoming water into the softener is the middle pipe coming out of the wall and you can’t really see it but the out for the softened water is the left pipe going into the wall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

101_1753Here is a better shot of the piping in and out of the wall.  The rough-in we had done when we had the house built had nice easy valves to control the water flow.  One valve each, the incoming, outgoing and a connection between that effectively bypasses the softener.   We have to do this now (bypass the softener) if we are using the outside water.  A leak in the pipe going to the outside spicket at build time was fixed by making the outside spicket use the house internal water.  That wasn’t a big deal until we installed the softener.  Salt water isn’t good for plants.  For now we have to bypass the softener when watering.  In the future Dad and I will put in another spicket that is connected to the pipe coming out the top (the blue handle).  This will eliminate this annoyance.

 

 

 

Inside the softnerHere’s a shot of the inside of the softener.  Looks like we need more salt!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sarah says she doesn’t notice the difference in the ‘feel’ of the water in the shower but i sure do.  It feels softer .. oddly enough.  We have noticed the difference with the amount of soap that needs to be used for things like the dishwasher and laundry.

 Posted by at 3:38 pm
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