New phone number at bottom of today's post.

Yesterday was an annoying day.
First, Jim's cell phone quit working. We'd been anticipating that it eventually would, and it did.
Since we were in the car when it happened, we decided to head on out to to the Verizon store. We have an air card with Verizon, they bill me for it monthly. I wanted to put the new phone on the same contract. I couldn't remember the air card number, so I used the phone in the Verizon store and talked to the nice young man at customer service, gave him my ssn and he gave me the aircard number. The store sales guy typed it in to the computer to bring up my account, it wouldn't take it. We called customer service back 5 minutes later to double check the air card number; they could not find me in their system. Verizon billing could not find me in their system. As far as they are concerned, I did not exist. So, we did not get a phone.
We go home. We turn on the TV. The green power light comes on, blinks 3 times, and the TV turns itself off. It worked that morning. Now it does not. So, we call Customer Support. They want a serial number, we find it. They want a receipt. We tell them, no receipt, the TV came installed in the RV. This does not compute. Why is there no receipt? It came in the RV. What's an RV? Finally a diagnostic is offered, unplug it for 30 minutes, if the behavior persists, it's broken. Thank you, thank you very much.

That was yesterday. Today was instructive. We found the contract for the air card and took it with us to a stand alone Verizon store, not a mall store nor mall kiosk, but the Verizon store one sees in strip malls. There was a completely different pricing structure both for the phone and for the cell phone plan in the stand alone. We were stunned, nay shocked. It's not enough to compare service providers, one must compare between stand alones, mall stores and mall kiosks for the best pricing. Who knew?
The TV has not healed itself, Keystone will let us de-install it and bring it to the dealer, so at least we do not have to hitch up the RV and drag it down to Beaudry.

This is the new TV watching paradigm. We brought the 19 inch with us, so at least I was able to watch the season premier of Burn Notice. Michael took his shirt off in the episode, whoo-HOO!


This is one of the many venues going up for the Gem and Mineral Show in February. It's a trade show, and is the largest of its kind on the planet. The temporary buildings are just huge.


We did laundry this afternoon. This was on display while folding. It was a really good double, and even the violet stripe was visible.



As promised, here is our new cell phone number: 520.822.4592.