Rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling

Verizon e-mailed to say that as part of improving my cell phone service, they're going to be making my cell phone service worse. I got my phone, and my phone plan, in 2008 and haven't changed since. This pay-as-you-go plan is just about perfect from my point of view: if I want to use my phone, it's $2.00, out of my account, for as much talking time as I like that day. But they haven't had these pay-as-you-go plans for a long while now and they're done with grandfathering me in.

So instead they're switching me to a plan where I'm charged $5.00 a month, and get twenty whole minutes of talk time. After that, it's pay-per-minute. Now, I don't talk much on the phone but it is basically an hour's chat with my parents every week. (Usually my 2008-era phone's run out of battery by then.) The rational thing is for me to call my parents on the land line instead, especially since for some reason my phone won't call my father's phone or vice-versa.

The result is going to be their getting less money out of me, since normally they'd be getting, like, ten to twenty bucks a month out of me and now can look forward to five. If this doesn't get me going to a different provider altogether, in case there's someone cheaper. I suppose there's no providers with a great service plan like I'd had. Although if someone knows a phone company with that sort of pay-per-use plan please drop a mention.

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Little more walking around downtown last weekend, before the rains came.

A slightly broader view of the back of what's left of the Strand/Michigan Theater, and the oceans of parking lot surrounding it.

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And here's the front! Still looks all theatrical but it's just offices. To the right is For Crepe's Sake, which makes what the name implies, although we only ever get a crepe from them when we're downtown for Silver Bells In The City and not always then.

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And here's the Social Sloth Cafe and Bakery which I've enver set foot in, but which has a cute enough name.

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The intersection of government and commerce: the state capitol building alongside the Boji Tower, formerly the Michigan National Bank Building, formerly formerly the Olds Tower.

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The Boji Tower's a 23-storey building, the biggest building in town. Early plans in its construction were that the clock would chime ``In My Merry Oldsmobile'' on the quarter-hour, a plan dropped when everyone agreed this would drive the population mad.

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Trivia: In 1806 President Jefferson suspended all minting of silver; the ban lasted for 28 years. Source: History of Money, Glyn Davies.

Currently Reading: Popeye Volume One, Bobby London. It gets so very 80s. References to, like, Ivan Boesky, or a not-even-slightly-uncomfortable-bit where they go to a Middle East nation where 85% of the population has been kidnapped by terrorists (in a vegetarians-versus-meateaters civil war). Also, like, name-dropping David Letterman or Twisted Sister or somebody as a punch line. I'm kind of tempted to create a Popeye-o-Matic device that feeds up random lines for its bizarreness.