I recently got married, and this week I have been exploring new insurance options that have opened up. The first thing that I discovered was that merely telling my insurance agent that I was married entitled me to (nearly) a $100 reduction in my insurance premium, which I will receive in the form of a refund within the next week. Tomorrow, we will be calling up my wife’s insurance agent to get a reduction in her rates as well.

We want to consolidate our auto insurance onto one policy in order to save even more money. I have not run the exact numbers, but on top of the $400 we should save each year just for telling our current auto insurance policy holders that we are married we should be able to save at least a few hundred dollars more per year by being on the same policy. If we add it to our homeowners policy, we can also get a good 20% off of that, as well. The only real problem I see with doing that is that the homeowners discount won’t really make up the difference between my current insurance policy and the one that our homeowners can offer for automobile.

I’ll share more details once we have all of our quotes and decide who we are going to go with. That should probably happen this weekend some time. As for how my $100 refund means saving $400 per year, that $100 is on a 6 month policy. So, I will be saving about $194 and change over the course of a year. I do not know how much of a discount my wife would get, but if it is around the same amount then that gets us up near the $400 per year without even changing our policies.

High speed internet is important in my line of work, but for most of the year we do not bother with cable television. It is too expensive and it would not get watched often enough to make it worth having. Cable television is one of those things that just costs way too much, especially with our current cable provider. They are going through bankruptcy and are in the process of switching over to Time Warner, so I hope that it will be a little cheaper once that process is completed, but it has not been completed yet.

Our current cable company sends us deals on a pretty regular basis in an attempt to upsell us. The funny thing is that most of their postcards that they mail out are postmarked 2 to 3 days after the deal expires, so you can never actually make use of them.

I called up this morning, however, and ordered an installation. We will have 3 months of digital cable coming to us with a free installation, and then hopefully Time Warner will have completely taken over and will have a new 3 month deal that we can sign up for. If not, then we will go down to just basic cable. We do not really need anything but local network channels anyway. No matter what, at the end of February or in January, we will cancel the cable television service again and stick to cable internet.

Coincidentally enough, the first day that they could schedule the installation was on September 7^th around lunch time. This works out rather well, as Miami is playing Pittsburgh at 8:30 that evening.

Well, our small ant problem that turned into a somewhat larger ant problem is for the most part solved. I never got around to use the gel that you squeeze into the cracks; the 6 bait traps outside and the 18 bait traps inside appear to have worked just fine. I came home at lunch time the day after I set the bait out, and there were still plenty of ants everywhere. That evening, though, you did not see as many. Now, we see quite a few but they are for the most part dead. Every once in a while I see a random ant here and there that is still alive. That is not so bad though. I would rather have to kill one ant every couple of days than have to kill three dozen ants every time I go into the basement.

I mentioned previously how we did not want to use Macy’s for our bridal registry. We wound up using Bed, Bath and Beyond and Home Depot instead. We have had nothing but positive experiences with Bed, Bath and Beyond.

When we went back to set up a registry, we had a short wait before somebody was available to help us Bed, Bath and Beyond. However, she let us know she’d be a few minutes and that she’d be right back, and once there she was very helpful and made sure that we had a good experience.
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Having recently gotten married, we registered at a couple of different stores. The idea behind a wedding registry is to have a place where it is easy for you to let guests of your wedding know what you would like in the event that they want to purchase a gift for you. Since the custom around here is to get a gift for somebody just for being invited to the wedding, it seemed like a good idea for the wife and I to do.

A big advantage to a wedding registry is that when people use that to purchase gifts for you, you do not get things that you already have or that other people are also getting for you. It also allows you to ask for things that you would like to have but that you probably would not bother to purchase for yourself, such as fine china.

Originally, we wanted to use Macy’s for our bridal registry because they have a large selection in the dinner ware department that you can go into the store to see. The service that we received, however, was atrocious. We decided that our business was better spent elsewhere.
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We have been having ants in the house all summer, but never more than a few at a time. Trying to get unpacked and moved into a new house, plan a wedding, and plan for cutting our income in half seemed more important than getting ant traps set up. Thus, it has not happened until now. Now, though, it is finally time and finally necessary.

Over the last day or two, my wife and I have killed dozens of ants. In fact, I just heard her stomp on another one in the other room. My guess is that when we had our rehearsal dinner, some sort of food got left out to attract them in, and now that we are back from the honeymoon we are finding the results. I have not found anything yet, though.
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I have been reading around about how high folks electricity bills have been this summer. Between the rising oil prices, increased delivery charges, and increased consumption based on the heat waves that have rolled across the country it seems that folks are paying anywhere between $100 and $600 for electricity during the month. My last electricity bill was for $29, and the month before that did not have a significantly higher electricity bill.
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My kitten has been very lonely since we moved, as she had quite a few friends to yell down to from our windows when we lived in the city. Since we moved into our house, she has had the random squirrel to yell at, and she has been trying to make friends with the chipmunks in the back yard, but there have not been any other cats for her to talk to. She is an indoor cat, so she can not go out and look for them.

Last night, another cat finally ventured into our yard. He hung out beneath my truck and watched my cat do her very best to entice him closer to the window. He was just happy to watch her, though. She was very upset with me for not going out and making her friend come closer, or come back after he got bored and left.

I have seen the cat a few times as I drove down the road, but I am not sure if it is a stray or a neighborhood cat.

As much fun as I had on my honeymoon in Quebec over the past week, I am glad to be home. Sleeping in my own bed, with a 9 pound bundle of fur laying against my legs, wending my way around the mess from all of the wedding presents…it is great to be home. I just wish that I could spend a few more days at home without having to go straight back to work.

My kitten does not usually bother herself over the ants in the house, but heaven forbid a fly get in! She loves to chase them. When we lived in the apartment, she used to chase them and play with them. After the second or third time she had swiped one out of the air with her paw, she would tear off its wings so that she could push it around on the floor.

These days, she just scoops the flies out of the air with her paws, throws the fly in her mouth, and eats it. Maybe the flies taste much better out here than they did down town; less polution, perhaps.

A fly got in the house following me when I came home for lunch today, and it was buzzing around the kitchen. Freja chased it into the dining room and got a few good jumps in before she managed to catch it. She’s been pretty happy ever since.