Birthday cards

I have mixed feelings about greetings cards: they always seem a bit expensive for what they are. I also have difficulty keeping on top of my life as it is: for instance, I still have lingering issues with backup volumes and I have yet to put away some clean laundry from a few days ago. I used to send my parents a card but they since passed; for years I have sent hardly any birthday cards. Adding to my to-do's visits to shops to select cards is certainly possible but, as I already make too little progress with domestic affairs, it feels unwise to add even more to the list.

I do manage to send Christmas cards. For those it is easy to buy whole boxes of various kinds and they are all due at around the same time which tends to coincide with when I take time off work so I can use a vacation day to sit down and work through them.

However, I do reliably receive a birthday card from aunts and uncles and I do know the birthdays of nieces, nephews, etc. When I travel within range first cousins do kindly make a trip over to say hello. Possibly with my lack of birthday card issuance I am committing a serious faux pas and should do a better job of politely respecting family obligations.

Rearranging television subscriptions

After January our Wii will no longer be supported by Netflix. The BBC iPlayer already dropped it long ago. We get poor reception for broadcast television via antenna and satellite dish but I get some way online with the help of software like Widevine. It seems to be time to review our choices.

Given the opportunity we would probably watch some BBC and Channel 4 shows, Amazon, Netflix, Sky Atlantic, even Fox. The Entertainment Pass for NowTV on a Roku Express looks to be the way to go. Roku's device selection is currently rather smaller than the US enjoys. Amazon in the UK gets some shows that are elsewhere in the US; similarly Sky Atlantic gets some HBO stuff. Starz is the trickier one but I can live without it: I am not about to pay an extra subscription when it is probably only Counterpart (2017) I would care about. I also doubt that we would go as far as Plex for USTVnow when we can still resort to web browsers. A full Sky subscription is probably not good value for money for us and I would not be much happier about the money going to Comcast than I would Murdoch.