Houses

Well, I've been a bit quiet on the blog front lately, largely due to the fact that we've finally moved house! Hurrah!

Here's a camera-phone snap of the moving van and sold sign, outside my fantastic new house in Stirchley in Birmingham. As you can probably gather, it's fantastic.

We're pretty much all settled in now, though the spare room is a bit of a swamp of boxes (you can walk across, but your feet tend to get stuck along the way). We even had a few hours of sunshine yesterday afternoon, meaning that we could get out into the garden and tackle the lawn, hedge etc. Fun!

I've also managed to save myself quite a lot of money by taking a bit of a different approach to the telephone in this new place. BT wanted £125 to re-install a phone line (someone had cut the cable), which I wasn't going to pay. This was a prompt to try my hand with VoIP (voice over internet protocol) instead. So, I signed up for cable broadband and bought myself a router with a phone jack on the back. After signing up with VoIPTalk, I can plug in my normal phone to the router and get much cheaper phone calls. In fact, there's pretty much a flat rate for calls to any part of the world. When you consider that Marla is from the US and we talk to people over there quite a bit, this is brilliant.

Rather bizarrely, as the thing is all routed through the internet, it doesn't matter where you claim to be located either. So, we've signed up for two phone numbers (a couple of quid each per month - cheaper than the line rental), one here in rainy Birmingham and the other a local San Diego number! So people in California can now make local calls, which get routed through to our house phone like normal! Amazing, really, and it all just seems to work, so far.

Anyway, furniture all in now - anyone want a washing machine?