You Have Got to be Kidding Me

Every cellphone I have ever had since 2003 has been a hand-me down from MacTroll. It wasn't until about a year ago that I got his iPhone 3GS. And I've dutifully carried it, quite happily until suddenly when we were in Florida I noticed a lot of vibrating going on when I'd put the phone on mute... except there weren't any e-mails, calls or texts coming through. The thing was just vibrating, randomly all the time, whenever the button rubbed up against something or bounced a certain way in my bag or pocket.

I never put a cover on the phone, mostly because I ran so much with it using the Nike Plus app. And it wouldn't fit in my $6 arm band case with a cover on it. I guess I always figured since MacTroll had already talked for 12 years of time on it by the time I inherit any of phones, and the battery life on them usually suck by then, that a little dent in a phone here and there wouldn't really matter. I mean, when you inherit a 2 year old phone, it's not like it's your baby.

Except now I have a new iPhone 4S, and this scares and annoys the living crap out of me. First of all, I have a habit of having too many things in my hands and putting phones, keys, etc., down in places that I forget about and have to come back to later. Secondly, it's new. No one has talked on it, which means, kind of like a new car, I'm going to be the person who puts the first dent in it. And last, in order to make the damn thing work, I've already had to do 3 hours of updating to it from my machine only to find out tonight that in order to make my e-mail work with the effing iCloud, I have to update my laptop to Lion. 

MacTroll told me to update on the kitchen machine. The problem is, I don't have any of my addresses on the machine down there. They're all on my laptop. So here I am running a Lion update from the Mac App store (why are there two stores: one on my machine and one in iTunes)? This update is telling me it will take about 3 hours to run... so that makes it a total of 6 hours to make the new phone do what the old phone did.

That's jacked up.

In addition, I learned tonight that it won't work withe volume component on my headphones from Adidas. But it will work with the remote play and pause. WTF is that? Plus, I feel like I should have some kind of protective case on it, because it's new and I'm a klutz. Except then I have to remove the damn case every time I want to go for a run and wear an arm band, which, let's face it is around 3-4 days a week. (Except don't ask me about today's run, it was terrible. I felt like I had rocks in my shoes, so I quit and ran errands instead while X-man was at Rec Zone.)

Anyway, I'm annoyed with the Fruit. And at my sense of annoyance, my spouse stopped texting me. Mostly because he doesn't have a new phone yet (they're on order for his team), so I'm pretty sure he wants me to shut up complaining about it. It already drove him nuts that the phone arrived last Tuesday, and I didn't have time to get the damn thing activated with him until Friday. My priorities apparently do not match his.

And in a final event of failure, there is a boy sleeping in the "Loosey" room in the basement tonight. KTDID came over and helped me hang some pictures and a clock down there, and X-man decided that with the new decorations, it was someplace he needed to sleep. So, he's down there with my lighted cube table on as a night light, the stair hall light on and the bathroom light on.

Sigh. So much for my girls only rule. 

In another completely different conversation, my class is talking about holidays this week. We broke them down into five areas. They were Christian Christmas, Chanukkah, Kwanzaa, Commercial Christmas and Winter Solstice. We talked about how people celebrate different holidays today, and I talked about the celebration of Christmas as the birthday of Jesus. About the Angel's word that Jesus was there to help guide people. I told them about the manger and the wise men. I asked who went to Church to celebrate Christmas, as nearly everyone in the class's parents had indicated they celebrated Christian Christmas. 

And the class was silent. So, I excused them to go play. We were going to make foot and handprint angels later on, but we had to get our parent gifts finished first and that took a while, and then they were a bit stir crazy, so it was better to do movement games like Simon Says with them.

Tomorrow is Chanukkah, and I'm excited because we're going to do the dreidel game and eat challah bread and watch some Elmo's World talk about the Jews defeating the Greeks and -- um -- I'm not Jewish, but for some reason, it feels like a much more exciting lesson than today, and the Tuesday/Thursday class will get to work on their gifts for their parents.

I guess you can't be teacher of the week every day, but for some reason my heart just wasn't in today's lesson.