Who'd've Thunk It?

One of the bits of business I had to deal with while in Oregon was getting Lisa's trailer's insurance transferred onto the same policy as what covers her vehicles. (For complex reasons having to do with the original financing on the trailer — long since paid off — her parents had been paying the trailer's insurance and we'd never gotten around to moving it.) I just got the first bill since we did the transfer. To my surprise, due to multi-vehicle discounts, the net monthly payment decreased by $2.

What He Said

Driving around with a lit cigarette hanging out the window, and especially discarding lit smokes from your car is not only illegal, but during times of increased fire danger, like right now in California, is insane. darrelx has more to say has more to say from the firing line.

My home town is a small US Forest Service base in the Sierra Nevada. (The base, alas, was closed in a budget-driven consolidation of districts on the Plumas National Forest. Challenge, never exactly a particularly bustling place save possibly during the Gold Rush, is going to seed with the departure of its major employer.) My father was a career USFS officer who was away from home at times for more than a month fighting fires. In an alternative universe, I'm not even here because the fire that trapped his crew on a fire when he was young didn't jump over them as happened here. He was a smoker, but you never saw him tossing butts out the window — he knew exactly what could happen.

Unlocked Phones

Okay, so it seems like it's not too expensive to buy a SIM card and time in Australia giving me a local Australian mobile phone number for the two weeks I'm there if I have an unlocked phone that will work on the mobile phone system down under (GSM, right?). But where can I buy an unlocked phone of this sort in the Bay Area?

All of the places around here with which I'm familiar appear to be "company stores" that sell phones for the US system and locked into their plan. I don't need a US cell phone, as I have one already. I don't even need a US SIM card. I just need an "empty" phone that I can use in Australia by buying a SIM card there.

Yes, I see lots of offers online. I suppose if I'd given more thought to this a few weeks ago, I might have bought something online. As it stands now, if I'm going to buy something online, I'm going to have to pay for overnight shipping so it's here on Friday or at the very least Monday by noon. I hate having to spend as much for shipping as for the phone itself.