Several changes this year including finding A Fabulous Organization

     I am horrible at remembering to put some sort of introduction to these blogs.  I get so focused on what I'm going to write about that I just jump right in.  (So, I've already written the blog but remembered that I didn't put an intro.)  We've had many changes this year - I changed jobs; we moved; we got a cat; I got sick and am not working.  These have completely changed our lifestyle which has resulted in more changes.  These are some of them.

     We love Netflix!!!  Thank you Greg & Meg for telling me about some of the really interesting films y'all got from their lists.  Because of the recommendation, we decided to try the free trial.  We were so excited by the many movies that we could watch.  As we were both working crazy hours at the beginning of our membership, we didn't venture into our options too far due to time.  

    With our crazy life this year, we have searched the Netflix database much further and have found some real gems.  I will try to work on a list of ones we have been blown away by.  One of them is The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED.   As we are both nerds, I am sure most of you are not surprised that we were interested in watching a documentary with such a title.  I had never heard of TED, but the little blurb about the documentary sounded interesting.

    I was amazed by some of the talks given at a particular TED conference!  Some of the most brilliant people and some average people who have brilliant ideas and goals give talks and discuss these ideas with others like them.   These are not the kind of talks that you would hear in a college classroom; they are interesting, informative, entertaining, and some are inspiring.  Most of the speeches are about 20 minutes.  You can hear someone speak about anything you want.  If you are a teacher, some of these would be great for introductions into topics.

I know that I can't begin to convey my enjoyment, but if you ever have a few minutes, look at the website.  You can watch these short talks that conference attendees pay thousands of dollars to hear.  If you aren't sure where to start, look at the TED Prize winners.  The video isn't up yet for the 2009 winners so look at the 2008 or before winners.  They each speak about a wish for the world, animals, humans, etc., and the conference attendees work with the person to make it come true.  I was amazed by the work of 2006 TED Prize winners Dr. Larry Brilliant and Cameron Sinclair.

    Another great recommendation from Meg & Greg was Vonage.  It is a phone service provider that works through the internet.  We now pay about $20 a month for unlimited local and long distance and all of the "normal" phone features.  The biggest hassle is that when you are working on the internet and talking on the phone the conversation goes in and out as though someone was beeping in on the other line.  But really, it's not that hard to not work on the computer at the same time; it is more considerate to give your attention to the person with whom you are speaking.  For this slight "inconvenience" we get so much more for our money.

    That leads me to our newest household change.  Since I am at home most of every day with unlimited local and long distance at my disposal and Andy is at work where calling home is local, we rarely use our cell phones.  Our contract with Sprint ran out in November and Andy has been impatiently waiting for us to be able to use a different provider because he couldn't get any service while at work.

    Because we don't know exactly what is going to happen with my job, we are try to downsize so that we are living on Andy's salary alone.  So, I started researching cell plans that would allow us to be flexible about the number of minutes we used and would cost less.  Most of the 2 year contract plans had too many minutes, wasn't flexible enough, and cost too much.  We remembered that when we were in Greece we had all of these with the cell we bought for the trip.  This got us thinking about pre-paid and pay as you go cell phone plans.  I looked into Virgin Mobile, Boost, Tracfone, and several other options.  While some companies had slightly cheaper minutes, their phones seemed to be much more expensive.  So, we decided to go with Tracfone where you can get fairly cheap minutes (especially with Double Minutes) and inexpensive phones.  The inexpensive phones was quite important as Andy has been known to break things on accident; there is a reason he has been called a bull in a china closet.  So, we felt that it was important that we be able to replace a phone easily should anything happen.  One thing that we were really excited to find out when researching these phone options was that you can transfer your phone number to these phones--How awesome!!  I will say that the biggest hassle has been transfering by hand the phone numbers to our new cells; we couldn't change out SIM cards.

    If you've been following the blog, you can tell that we've been making some changes this year.  I'm sure that many of y'all have as well; we'd love to hear about any great finds whether simply interesting or money saving!