We bought our Ring Doorbell about four years ago. It’s never had the promised “six month” battery life, which didn’t surprise me at all, but over the years, it’s gotten shorter and shorter. I had to charge it today, less than a month after the last time. That’s annoying, but it won’t be a real problem until we start to travel again (I don’t want the battery to die while we’re traveling) – so I need to replace it before that happens.

The obvious replacement is another Ring Doorbell; the 2020 model is only $100, but it, too, has a non-replaceable battery. The Ring Doorbell 3 has a removable battery, but it costs $200, which is quite a premium for convenience and possibly longer life.

I could also try to move my existing Ring to the side of the door where my old doorbell is and power it that way – it feels like the video would be of people’s sides rather than their face, but maybe that would be OK. And maybe it would connect faster – as it is, I rarely can connect to the doorbell before the person ringing it gives up!

Are any of you using other video doorbells that you like?

We do most of our charitable giving every year in December – and today was “Giving Tuesday” and several of the charities we support had one-day-only matching campaigns, so we sat down this afternoon to make some donations.

It took a couple of hours, between the emails and paper mails that we’d been waiting to handle – by the time we were finished, we were achy from sitting so long! The next step is submitting eligible contributions to the IBM Matching Grants program; at least they got rid of the paper forms a few years ago!

But today wasn’t just about donations. A few days ago I bought an All-Clad skillet; it arrived on Saturday, but I didn’t get around to opening the box until this morning.

I’ve already used it twice, making Pan Seared Lingcod for lunch and Pasta with Burst Cherry Tomatoes for dinner. It cooks differently than our Anolon pan – it seemed to get hotter (the cherry tomatoes cooked in 5 minutes instead of 10, which threw off my timing for the rest of the recipe, though some of that might have to do with using a bigger burner than usual). And I’ll have to get used to heating the pan before putting the oil in it, which also will change the timings for the rest of the recipe.

So far, so good!