From the ashes of great tragedy!

More like semi-serious inconvenience.

We took an almost direct hit of lightning a week ago Friday. It fried a lot of things in our house. We are well on our way back to normal. The only thing left is replacing the battery management systems in the batteries of our solar set up.

As we've gotten back on line we've made some changes. We live rurally and a lot of modern things come to our area later than most other places so this list might seem silly to most people.

1. Upgraded our internet service.

For years we've had satellite internet which is barely high speed. Latency makes wifi calling almost impossible and we have bandwidth constraints that don't allow for streaming.

We switched providers to a local company that is cheaper, faster and allows for streaming. And wifi calling works like it should.

2. Canceling our landline...finally.

Our landline service is so bad, it goes out every time it rains or snows. Seriously.

We don't really have cell signal here but there's enough signal that I think a booster would work to have has a back up. Need to work on that.

3. Still have Directv...for now

It's convenient, I can get the MLB Extra Innings package and for the second year in a row, we are getting free Sunday NFL Ticket.

4. But we're going to add streaming

I know we can replace Directv completely with streaming but we need to figure all that out. We're not sure which ones to get other than MLB.TV LOL. I am under the impression that Google TV or Hulu are useful base services and then we might add on a few like Netflix or Paramount or whatever. Doing this will be much cheaper than what we spend on Directv.

I would be grateful for any input on this.