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.

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

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:

The Morton Water Softener Unit

Getting 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.

Here 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.

Here’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.