My birthday started out with decorations in the front of the house (by Kyle) and this picture/work of art (colored by Heather).
Kyle brought home some balloons for me (yay for birthday surprises!) and Heather FELL IN LOVE. She played with those balloons for days, long after the helium had gone out of them.
When it came time to open up presents, Heather had to help. Naturally.
One of my gifts was an easy peasy point-and-shoot camera. (And it’s pretty purple.) So you’ll be seeing many more pictures of Heather! Huzzay!
A couple days later, we had friends over for cake. Kyle made a yummy cake with cream cheese frosting. So delicious.
I love that birthdays mean fun and friends! Yippee!
We switched to Ting just about one year ago and it’s time to do some number crunching to see how it’s working out for us.
About Ting
Ting is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which means they run a cell-phone service, but don’t own any of the physical hardware. In Ting’s case, it all runs on Sprint’s network, but Ting is the company you sign up with and pay and is in charge of all your customer needs.
Their approach is different in that they focus on treating you like a human being and not finding new ways to gouge money out of you. It’s quite refreshing. Their customer service is top notch and in that regard I’ve been very pleased. I don’t lament calling them on the rare occasion that I need to.
They allow you to add as many phones to your account as you want, and all phones on your account pool minutes/texts/data so you get a better unit price as the quantity increases (additionally, you pay a $6 fee per line per month to keep it active on the account).
This is the kind of mobile phone plan I’ve been waiting for. It fits our needs much better than any other plan I’ve seen.
Before
We had been on a T-Mobile family plan for about $70 per month with way more minutes than we needed and no texting or data allowance. It was stupidly expensive. When that contract ended we switched to T-Mobile prepaid, which was better (we bought minutes 1000 at a time that lasted about a year, but texting was still stupidly expensive and no data–and we had to buy minutes for each phone separately).
Then Ting came along
Ting charges you by the bucket for minutes/texts/data. Use no data this month, pay nothing for data this month. No limits, no caps, no overage charges. No trickery. I love the billing policy.
So how’s it working out for us?
(All the information I report is total between Jess and I since Ting treats it all as one big pool for billing purposes.)
Usage and Costs over the last year per month:
Minutes
Minutes Cost
Texts
Texts Cost
Data (MB)
Data Cost
Min
21
$3.00
50
$3.00
0
$0
Max
319
$9.00
171
$5.00
145
$13.00
Ave
86
$3.82
104.7
$3.82
84.4
$5.18
Our unit costs look like this (excluding line fee, taxes, regulatory fees):
Per Minute
Per Text
Per MB
Min
$0.028
$0.029
$0.000
Max
$0.143
$0.064
$0.120
Ave
$0.044
$0.036
$0.061
Our average total cost per month was $25.31 (includes $6 per line fee and all taxes and regulatory fees). Our most expensive month was $32.21 while the cheapest month was $19.15.
The Ting approach means you don’t get any subsidy when you buy your phone, but there are also no contracts. We bought very entry-level Android phones (Kyocera Rise) for $152.27 each after sign-up discount. And if you do buy a more expensive phone, you’ll most likely still save money over the life of a 2-year contract.
I will probably buy a nicer phone at some point, but I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on a phone until I knew if I actually wanted a smartphone and if I actually liked Ting.
Ting is currently only 1 of 2 companies I will unhesitatingly recommend people try to do business with if it makes sense for their needs.
As I mentioned, they do run on the Sprint network which some people have issues with. However, Sprint is in the process of a massive overhaul of their network. The long-term goal of their “Network Vision” plan looks really good and I’m really looking forward to seeing how it plays out. It should provide better coverage and signal quality for the entire country (it appears to me that they’re essentially betting the farm on this overhaul and so far it’s looking good).
Update 10/22: If you’re interested in signing up with Ting, use our referral code and you’ll get a $25 credit and we’ll get a $25 credit. Everyone wins! Here’s the link: https://z9g8hk18l.ting.com/
Things you never wanted to learn firsthand: The people who design car-seats have clearly never needed to clean copious amounts of vomit out of them on the side of the highway 50 miles from the closest exit in middle-of-nowhere Nevada. Why are there so many crevices?!
(Sigh) The other side of parenthood. Luckily it was still daylight, traffic was light, and nothing but the seat and Heather’s clothes got contaminated.
Heather was apparently not feeling well, but after giving up most her lunch she seemed to improve dramatically. Unfortunately, now the car has a lovely eau de sick.
Hopefully a thorough washing of the car-seat will fix that.
Had we any safe way of transporting Heather without it, I may have been tempted to leave the car-seat in the desert–it was pretty gross.
The Dickerson family had a reunion this year in Cedar City, UT. We stayed in the dorms at Southern Utah University and just happened to be there during the first stage of the Tour of Utah bicycle race which ended right in town and went past our apartments three times.
Throughout the trip I took over 900 pictures, so I did a lot of culling to get it down the 15 I’m using in this post, so don’t complain about too many pictures.
The reunion ran from August 4 through August 9. The 4th and 5th was just people arriving and wandering about doing whatever.
The Tour of Utah stuff on was the 6th. As the race wound its way through the mountains there was stuff going on downtown including a booth for the Shakespeare Festival with various costumes and props to try on. Heather fit perfectly in the jester’s hat.
The racers got into town in the late afternoon. Here’s the main group of racers coming down the road:
Here’s the crew that stayed up in the apartment watching on:
That evening a group of us went to watch Peter and the Starcatcher. It’s a retelling of the origin of Peter Pan. A little odd at times, but enjoyable.
On Wednesday, the 7th, we went to Frontier Homestead State Park where Heather sat on a horse (statue, obviously). It’s a bunch of old-timey machinery and buildings and stuff to look at.
That evening obligatory family fun & games were held, of course. Here’s Evan in his cowboy getup enjoying Bingo (run by Megan & Chad) after he won some honey-roasted peanuts:
Erin ran The Price is Right complete with Plinko, which Megan and Chad played:
On Thursday we took a horse- (and mule-) back ride through Bryce Canyon (thanks again Mike!). Mike’s mule was appropriately named “Porky” as he took every opportunity to graze at the side of the trail.
From left to right: Megan, Mollie, Jess, Mike, and Tina.Here we are at our rest stop. Left to right: Evan, Tina, Mike, Mollie, Megan, Chad, and Jess.
Jess had a blast. I have a bunch of pictures of her riding with a great big smile on her face.
Riding and taking pictures is easier said than done for someone with very little riding experience. We weren’t allowed to take anything with us except a camera, so I picked my 50-200mm zoom lens with a polarizer and hoped for the best. I probably should have taken the 18-55mm instead as with the 50mm widest angle I wasn’t able to get any grand panoramic shots, however with the 200mm telephoto I was able to get closer-up pictures of everyone else riding.
The biggest issue was trying to look through the viewfinder to take a shot with the horse bouncing around and me trying to hold on. To compensate, many of my pictures were taken Rambo-style just aiming in the general direction and hoping for the best.
Here’s my favorite picture of the few hundred I took while on the ride. I think it’s neat how clear the various layers of rock are across the hoodoos.
The next day was checkout so we all spent the morning trying to get packed up and out the door. After checking out we tried to take some family pictures.
Here’s the Dickerson grandchildren of 2011. Heather, born in October. Charlie, born in December. And Addie, born in August.
After family pictures we had a round of bowling to celebrate Evan’s birthday (with requisite cream-cheese pie).
From there the party broke up and went separate ways. We went up to Provo along with most of the rest for Will’s baptism on Saturday. After the baptism and lunch it was time to head home. Heather was starting to not feel well and didn’t much like adjusting to hotel rooms so we decided to drive straight through and just get home. So we got home at around 4:30am Sunday completely exhausted.
And if you don’t come home in the middle of the night completely exhausted then you’re not doing your family vacations right; at least that’s what my childhood memories suggest anyway.
Jess’ car has a terminal case of busted transmission. The cost of replacing the transmission is more than the car would be worth once installed. So we’re probably not going to do that. It’s kind of too bad since her car only has ~50k miles; but it is 14 years old.
So we’re trying to decide what to do. We had been hoping her car would last until we figure we’ll need a minivan, but it’s a bit too soon for that, so a minivan at this point would just be a waste of gas. So we’re trying to decide if we should go with 1 car for awhile and/or try to buy something used to get a few more years down the road (so to speak).
