My first several cell phones did not have a QWERTY keyboard, and I did more texting on it than I did talking. It was fine.
Then I got the Sidekick II, and entered the much easier world of QWERTY texting. In the meantime, in the non-QWERTY world, they became helpful. Now that I am back to having a non-QWERTY keypad, I am being much pained by this helpfulness. As usual, it doesn’t help me, because there is something about the way I am wired that means most UI design works for shit for me, the more carefully designed it is, the more it tends to suck for me.
I am trying to make the help back the fuck off, so I can text the way I did before the QWERTY phone, I was fairly fast at that. So far, I am just being hampered by all the help.
Seriously, yesterday friend texted to ask info she needed about cooking something. She clearly wanted the info quickly, and I could not fucking manage to write a reply. I ended up resorting to finding my husband in the store (BevMo) and interrupting his booze shopping to ask him to text me what I wanted to reply, so I could forward it to her. I’m not kidding. That is how I replied to her.
Today, I was waiting for take out dumplings and I texted my husband who was waiting out in the car.
“15 min wait. It might take me that long to type this.”
I was able to get a reply from him and type one response before the food was ready.
Next we went to Paradis where we samples some flavors and then all of us chose the Orange Buttermilk, because it was SO good. I need to look at buttermilk ice cream recipes. I’ve never had it before, but I need to make sure it is not the last. I would have tweeted about it, if I had better texting capabilities, but I did not. I might have mentioned it on facebook if I had a smart phone, but I did not.
So, that is how things are progressing during my experiment.
Sometimes I just leave my house without my phone, and I don’t really care. This is a new development. I used to find it very stressful if I accidentally (rarely) left my phone behind.
A couple of times, it has been truly frustrating to not have my phone so that I could access my email.
Mostly, it has just highlighted for me how useless the phone seems to me without that feature.
However, rather than making me want to run out and get a phone that I can get email on, it mostly makes me think about getting rid of my phone entirely.
So, yes, I was very addicted to my smart phone, but so far any withdrawal symptoms have been minimal, at worst, or possibly just nonexistent.
I bought a Sidekick II in early 2005. It was my first smart phone, and it changed my life. I’d had other phones with web access in the past, but it just wasn’t good enough to be anything more than a curiosity. The Sidekick II was very usable. I could get out and about while managing my business and helping my clients. I was no longer so tied to the computer.
I’m on my 4th Sidekick now, the Sidekick LX 2009. The first one I bought at a discounted rate and signed a contract with T-Mobile, but all the subsequent ones I bought outright, so I’ve long since been out of contract.
T-Mobile/Danger/Microsoft decided to shut down the Danger servers on May 31st 2011. Without the servers, my phone is a dumb phone, with an excellent keyboard.
T-Mobile handled the transition in a piss poor fashion. I had to spend hours on the phone with them, I could detail it all out, but who really cares. It was hideous and offensive. No two people would tell me the same thing. At first I was told that even though I was off contract, I’d be given a discount on a new phone because of the inconvenience of my phone no longer having the features I bought it for. By the end I was told that no way would I get any discount at all, unless I would sign a contract, at which point I’d get exactly the same discount as anyone else buying a phone and signing a contract. Zero compensation for the inconvenience.
I originally planned to leave T-Mobile and go to Virgin, where I could get a plan that suited me well (unlimted data and very limited talk (I hate to talk on the phone) for $25 per month. I’d have to buy a new phone outright, but I wouldn’t be under contract, and it was cheaper than what a new phone with similar features would cost me to stay on T-Mobile. Plus it was cheaper per month than T-Mobile. It, admittedly, has for less minutes, but I basically see the less minutes as a bonus.
I cut back the T-Mobile plan, because we didn’t need two phones with data plans anymore. At that point I realized it only cost us $5 a month to just have a phone that shared the minutes. $5 is less than $25. Of course it is cheaper, it has no data, but…
What if I just went without?
I’ve been living with a smart phone for several years now, and I’m addicted to the damn thing.
I think it is a useful device, but it is possible I am deluding myself over how useful it is. It might simply be a luxury item, or it could very well be a monkey on my back, ruining my ability to think properly, since I store half my brain functions in the cloud, and keeping me from really living in the moment, because I am too damn busy posting about the moment online from my phone.
So, I didn’t replace my smart phone. I just have a dumb phone. I’m seeing what that means for my life.
For one thing, I find I don’t reach for the damn phone immediately upon waking.
Actually, I sometimes leave it in the car or another room for the whole day, and don’t pay any attention to it.
It’s inconvenient to not have the internet on my phone, but my world hasn’t fallen apart, yet.
We’ll see.
Anyhow, that’s why I am a little less responsive than you might be used to.
During our dark first year in Minnesota, a very good friend of mine died. I was in Minnesota, and he was far away in California, and he died.
I spent a little tiny bit of time in denial. Then I moved on to anger and stayed there for a while. Then I moseyed on in to the deep valley of depression, where I’ve spent large chunks of my life anyway. I just walked in a lot farther than I’d been in quite a while, and I set up housekeeping, with no particular intention of ever walking back out.
I was not wallowing in grief. I was mainly too numb to bother with grief. Flashes of rage aside, mostly I simply put away the fact he is dead in a box in the back of the closet. It isn’t the same as denial. I know he is dead. On a day to day basis, I long ago stopped needing to remind myself I couldn’t call him. It just wasn’t fully integrated into my world either. Like everything else from my old life, my real life, it was just on hold.
Which leaves me in an interesting position now that I am back “home” because I am drinking in all the sights and sounds and smells of my old stomping grounds, and there is always something there to remind me.
Which means the box has come out of the closet and I am needing to deal with the full blown reality that he will never go to any of our favorite restaurants with me again. He’ll never annoy the shit out of me with his bizarre ordering quirks again. We’ll never be sneaking the back way between the valleys to avoid the freeway traffic, spending the whole drive deeply engaged in meaningful and meaningless conversation again.
Yeah. Turns out I’m still really pissed off about him dying.
When we bought our house, it came with a crappy old refrigerator that the old owners didn’t want to bother taking away. It made things cold, which is really all a refrigerator needs, but the door pieces were broken, so things could not really be kept in the door, drawers were cracked, etc. It was difficult to organize things inside, because some parts didn’t hold things well.
We put it out in the garage and got a new refrigerator for inside, and it worked well as a second refrigerator. However, I often feel some stress over the poor energy efficiency of the old unit, so I finally decided to make use of the SCE rebate program to get rid of old refrigerators or freezers.
I filled out the form online, and picked June 3rd as the pick-up date. It was the first available date. When selecting the date, it says “We will call you prior to the date you choose below to confirm your appointment and you will be given a four hour time slot. We will call you within a half hour of our arrival on the day of your pickup.” Then they called and reiterate this information (yes, somebody called to tell me that somebody would call). Then they sent snail mail, to let me know that they would call me the day before pick-up to give me a window, and would call me just prior to pick-up, and that if I did not answer, they would reschedule me.
June 2nd rolled around and I got no call or message letting me know what my 4 hour window would be. I called and left them voice mail asking if the pick-up was still happening on the third, and if so, what the 4 hour window would be.
On June 3rd, the doorbell rang at 7 AM and woke me up. They wanted my refrigerator.
At 9:30 AM they called to reply to my voice mail, wanting to provide me with a 4 hour time window for pick-up.
We finally made it to the motel, with all the humans and cats still alive, and an hour later were ready to go to sleep. Another problem with this motel, besides the fact they had a firm check in deadline, was they had a very early check out deadline too. I signed up for this and agreed to it when I reserved the room, but because of the detour, it was a major pain in the ass. The next morning arrived way too soon.
Still, we hit the road again, and had a very easy 400 and change miles planned, to get us into Vegas. The drive went pretty well, for a pleasant change. Getting back to more familiar vistas was very welcome. I could feel myself getting more comfortable as we got closer.
Really nice to see some desert.
We made it to the La Quinta Inn & Suites Las Vegas Airport South. Unfortunately, and hour after arriving, we were still not settled into our rooms. As a serious chronic pain sufferer, the move and road trip had been taking a toll. Our rooms were kind of midway from all exits, and not at all convenient. In the 140 room, 3 story inn, they had exactly 3 luggage carts. All of them had been taken and squirreled away inside guest rooms. The staff tried to ignore my repeated requests for help locating the carts. I found out from a long term guest that this is constant problem, and yet, they had not instituted any kind of check out process for the carts. I walked all the floors, but the carts were not to be found in any public areas. After a lot of my annoying presence the staff made a half-assed attempt at finding the carts and also failed. We finally moved into our rooms by using the rolling office chairs to load our stuff up and take it into the rooms. I know that the staff thought we should just get off our asses and carry shit to our rooms, but we really had a very large amount of stuff that wasn’t a good idea to leave outside in the parking lot at that location, and we were really not in any condition to carry it in piece by piece.
By the time we managed to be in our rooms, it was getting pretty late. I needed to hit a grocery store because Indy had not been very pleased with the on the road meals I’d been preparing for her, and her general state of stress wasn’t doing well for her health. Also, the cats were not doing spectacularly. I wanted to get them all something special food wise to entice them to eating a really good sized meal. Then I arranged for the kid and my mother to eat dinner in their room and watch the dogs, while the husband and I went out and enjoyed Vegas a little. My first several restaurant choices were closing, so we ended up just driving down the strip to look for something. We decided to stop at The Cosmopolitan since their flash sign indicated a lot of late night dining options, and we’d never been to that hotel. The hotel has a very popular night club, and the hotel was crawling with young hip people and people who wanted to pretend to be young and hip. We went to The Henry for dinner and people watching. (Is it really a dress if it is so short you crotch is visible?) The meal was enjoyable. Husband had a Midtown Manhattan (Bacon Infused Makers Mark Cinnamon and Fig Infused Sweet Vermouth, Angostura, Fee’s Aztec Chocolate Bitters) which was very tasty, and prime rib. I had a Mambo Italiano (Garlic Roasted Vodka, House Made Bloody Mary Mix, Basil) which was also very good, and an excellent burger. We shared the
Millionaire’s Deviled Eggs (lump crab & truffle stuffing, thousand island dressing & caviar) to start. The next time I’m in Vegas, I think I’ll go try Holsteins. The menu made me drool, but it was way too noisy and crowded for me to venture into on a Saturday night.
The next day we got a late start. We were pretty wrecked from our trip so far, and the time zone changes had not been in our favor for getting on the road early. We headed out of town and soon were reminded why it is important to leave really early on Sunday morning. The traffic from Vegas to L.A. on Sundays is pretty nasty, often further hosed due to accidents or road work.
We dragged our butts into our house later than we expected when we first packed up the car, but we made it. It was really good to be home. We unloaded the crap from our car, and wandered over to a friend’s house for dinner. It was so good to spend some time with them, although in hindsight, probably a mistake. By the time we made it home we were exhausted, and then discovered that the movers had put our bed together wrong, so we couldn’t sleep on it without finding tools to fix it. We were way too tired to find the tools. So, our first night home we couldn’t sleep properly.
The cats were thrilled to be out of the damn car for good, at it was clear that they knew exactly where they were. They settled in immediately, although they were (and remain) annoyed by all the boxes in the way. Indy also recognized the place, I was wondering about that, since she was already had CCD before we left, but we did move into the house when she was “all here”. She even remembered that she isn’t allowed into the kitchen and dining room. Watson, of course, had no such memory of rules against entering the kitchen, which is the land where all good things come from. After a couple of corrections, he was going great.
Ahh, home, sweet home… for about 10 seconds, and then the overwhelming To Do list of getting our shit in order here comes crashing down on my shoulders. Lots and lots of stress, but really, it is good to be home.
Seriously, the damn breakfast room attendant was too busy chatting with another employee to keep the food stocked and when she wasn’t doing that, she was watching the TV, which was on way too loud.
Anyhow, the husband and I chatted and debated between drive two harder days, or three easier days. We opted for the 3 easier days, so I picked a stopping point in 460 miles. We got on the road with a plan of being at the Robbers Roost Motel by about 8:30 PM.
We stopped in Idaho Springs for a late lunch at Smokin Yard’s BBQ. This was good. Surprisingly good. This was, I’d enjoy eating there for dinner good, and random stop mid-roadtrip it was totally amazing.
While we were sitting next to the window stuffing our faces full of barbecued beast, we noticed all this white stuff blowing sideways past the window. Ash? What? Snow?! Yes, snow. When we finished up and got back outside, it had stopped. We took the dogs down by the river behind the restaurant, and gave them some time to stretch their legs.
Watson checking out the river near our BBQ lunch stop.
Then we loaded our stuffed selves back into the cars and began driving.
Within a couple of miles we were driving in a little bit of snow. A few more miles rolled by and we were driving in a full on snow storm.
This was not part of the plan.
Then, the plan exploded like Alderaan. You didn’t need to have any damn midi-chlorians to sense my spike in frustration levels. They closed the highway we were on, with no estimate of when they would reopen it. Our choices were to look for a room where we were, that would take two cats and two dogs, and eat the cost of the two rooms booked in Utah, or to take a long detour.
We took the long detour. It only added an extra 100 miles to our drive, but it was 100 difficult miles through two lane winding roads. Our rate of progress was much slower. Plus, the place we were booked to stay had a cut-off time for check in, and we were racing the clock, very slowly, while trying to avoid hitting large herds of deer and elk.
We finally made it back to Interstate 70 from our painfully scenic detour, and we were exhausted. Seriously, I had reached that state where I needed my passenger to talk to me about what was ahead on the road, because sometimes I could see two roads, and they weren’t going the same direction. I needed a bit of help following the one that was in the same reality that our vehicle was traveling in. Then it started snowing again. Hard. Snowing with big gusts of wind. The snow was mainly blowing straight into the windshield, but then the wind would send it swirling. It was like driving through a Star Tours hyperdrive special effect, and it was making me nauseous. It was at that moment that the cats decided they had truly had enough of each other, the car, and everything. They began screaming and hissing and trying to kill each other, right behind my head.
So, a lot has been happening, and none of that has been blogging.
I moved. I don’t live in Minnesota any longer. We moved back to Los Angeles.
It has been pure hell, but all in all, it is a very good thing. I am glad we made the decision that we did. I’m glad we moved. It’s just that moving sucks.
We knew for a while. My husband gave a month’s notice at work, but they didn’t want him to share the news right away, and while they can’t enforce that, we decided to give them some breathing room, and we kept it quiet for a reasonable amount of time. By the time it became more public, I was simply too busy to blog about it.
Leaving Minnesota was difficult. It was emotionally difficult and physically difficult. I wanted to move back to California, but in the two and a half years we spent in Minnesota, we’d made some good friends. I’d also put a lot of time and heart into working with ACT V. Friends that I made, I can keep. That is what the internet is for. It’s very difficult to continue fostering for an organization I was very happy to be volunteering for, from 2000 miles away.
To start things off, when we took the cars in for an oil change and a quick checkup, the mechanic discovered stuff wrong with one of them. Stuff that should be fixed before the road trip, and stuff that cost a bunch of dollars, because it always costs a bunch of dollars when the mechanic says “Well, we found…”
This got us on our road trip later than originally planned.
That, and our own insanity, but that’s another issue.
Seriously, we left our rental house at 11:30 PM. I know, I know, logically it seems like it would make more sense to just sleep there one more night, but it we just needed to go, or we’d find more reasons to linger the next morning.
So, we left our former home a total mess (because we knew that a wonderful friend had our back on dealing with the MN end), and we drove by the house of one of the ACT V people to deposit a final donation of blankets and detergent on their doorstep (much to the suspicion of some neighbors that saw us).
Then we headed out of town…
In a snow storm.
I’m not kidding. It snowed on us on the way out of Minnesota. We pushed ourselves to the point of exhaustion and got our butts to Iowa, so that we had left the state. There we stayed at Microtel Inn in Clear Lake that didn’t charge us any extra fees for the pets, and had a very nice and accommodating staff. Unfortunately it was also snowing and hailing on us in Clear Lake as we tried to unload the cars and get our butts into the room. In order to have enough space in the cars (because we needed room for 4 people, 2 traumatized cats, 1 large kitty litter, 1 cranky old dog, 1 puppy, food for all the critters, and a disturbing amount of wine, not for road trip consumption), we’d purchased a giant duffel bag to keep luggage in.
It turns out it takes about an hour to get 4 people, 2 dogs, 2 cats, and all the stuff the 8 of them need for one stupid night, settled into a motel room.
Did I mention the snowing and hailing? Oh, well also there was horrible biting, bitter, nasty, COLD wind. It was late April. We were dressed (and packed) for early spring. My husband got himself a minor case of frost bite on his fingers unloading the car that first night. Good times.
The next morning I set out our plan for the day by finding a motel that would take the pets and plotting our route. I’d been planning originally on aiming for 500 miles a day, but decided that day to stretch and reserve us a room just over 600 miles away, because of our late start and our race to get to California before we got charged extra by the movers for not being able to meet them on time to get our ginormous amount of stuff back.
So, we were aiming for Sterling, CO and Best Western Sundowner, which charged us an extra $20 to let our pets stay there ($12 for one animal, $20 for two or more), but had a larger room for the price than our other options, and after the first night, I knew we’d do better with a little extra space.
We got on the road planning to be in our room by about 10:30 PM. Unfortunately, it was an extremely windy day, and we hadn’t really perfected our strapping the giant duffel bag to the top of the car technique yet. It took all day to get that technique down. In total, about 3 hours was spent in various parking lots, rest areas (BTW, Iowa has the nicest rest areas I have ever seen.), and wide shoulders, working on that technique. This meant we got to the motel about 1:30 AM.
Watson at one of the rest area stops in Iowa.
Remember the one hour to get everybody settled in the room thing? It takes even longer when you are on the second floor of a Best Western that doesn’t have an elevator. WTF? Also, their free wireless internet sucked frozen possum testicles, or as I like to call them, possnutsicles. I needed internet in order to send a very detailed email to a friend, including floorplans of our house that I’d edited to map out the placement of all of our furniture. The movers had made amazingly good (not good for us) time getting the load to CA, and the path of least resistance for dealing with that, was to have a friend manage the unloading of the stuff. Between the battling with the internet, the super slow connection, and the occasionally drifting off between keystrokes, I finally hit send and got to sleep at 5:30 AM. Then up early to battle the internet again in order to find the right stopping place for the night. By the time we were ready to head out, I was 31 flavors of cranky.
Now we’ll pause for a message from our sponsors. Actually, we’ll pause so I can sleep. You’ll have to wait for another day to find out more about our road trip.
Today was good. Indy continued on her road to recovery, so the weight on my shoulders from yesterday, eased. It was kind of a rough night, and I will probably be spending a second night downstairs, but, really, things are MUCH better. Still, rough night equals not enough sleep, which is just no fun.
Watson’s playdate got canceled, but I was able to get somebody else to bring a good natured Golden over for a romp on the deck. She was a little too good natured, and she didn’t do enough reprimanding of Watson being a booger, but still it was a fun evening, and included sharing a bottle of wine with her owner. Plus, the Golden got Indy extra alert and best of all created a bunch of wagging, which had been missing since surgery.
Red fox sighting today! So cute. I’ve seen foxes a couple of times before in the area, but today was the first daylight one. Actually, my mother saw a fox while walking Watson today, and then we all saw one from the back deck. I don’t know if it was the same fox, but it seems likely. It’s about the right time for kits. I wonder if there is a den nearby, filled with cuteness.
Lamb burgers with feta cheese for dinner. Lamb is good food. Perhaps I could lure a fox with some of it.
I also have some fresh strawberries in the house and have been experimenting making whipped cream with liqueurs. Last night was Disaronno and tonight was Grand Marnier. This also led me to thinking I was to try making a Limoncello ice cream this summer.
Thunderstorm tonight, time to find out how Watson feels about thunder. Hopefully he’ll be as easy going about it as all my other dogs have been.
I’m sleeping downstairs because Indy can’t reasonably make it upstairs tonight. I don’t want her to be alone, so I’ll stay down next to her. She did well, overall, but is having quite a difficult time as she is recovering from the surgery. The vet thinks that it is due to the aftereffects of the Morphine and Valium on her system. I don’t like it. It stresses me out. I want her to be okay NOW.
She is getting better.
She has absolutely ZERO patience for Watson right now, so we are keeping them apart. This makes Watson a bit sad. Poor little guy.
Really, I’m just feeling stressed and sad. She has been part of the family for more than 15 years, and while I know it won’t last forever, I really need the downfall to not be because of a procedure I chose to let them do.
But, hey, she struggled over to sleep by my feet. She likes being near to me, and I like having her near.
