Clearly I am on a roll in shiny things

Another couple of entries and I’ll have written more in the last week than I did the entire previous year. Well, slight exaggeration, but still I’m pleased that I didn’t write one entry and then vanish for another three months.

Baker B has yet to be overwhelmed with the delights of owning a smart phone. He’s called his mom on it once and called me on it once. Otherwise he is… gasp!! ignoring it. We’re going to Charleston for a few days over Christmas (yippie!!) so I’ll take the opportunity to gently point out some helpful things he can do on it. Like use the calendar. Check the weather. Read blogs. Check Facebook. I really don’t expect he’ll ever use it much - Baker B loves his desktop computer and just about lives on it, but he hates my laptop and isn’t likely to warm up to a 5” (or whatever it is) screen and teeny keyboard of a phone. He does like the idea of using it for a camera, though.

I think I have to treat it like he’s a cat and the phone is something strange and exotic that I’ve brought inside the house. He’s leery of it now but given some time he’ll appreciate its advantages.

That analogy reminds me of the weekend after Thanksgiving, when we went to my dad’s house and then to Baker B’s mom’s house, and came home from the last stop lugging a very realistic looking iron cat that the MIL gave us. It really does look a LOT like a real cat - I saw it sitting on the MIL’s kitchen counter as I passed the room a couple of times, and every time I’d think, “OMG there’s a cat on the counter!!!” before I’d realize (yet again) it wasn’t real. So we bring it back to our house and set it on the floor… and Cayce creeps up to it, arches her back, puffs out her tail, hisses viciously at it, and runs and hides under the couch.

We’re like, “......ummmmm.....WTF, Cayce?? it’s METAL!!! How do you think this is REAL??”

It LOOKS real, but… Cayce IS a cat. Can a real cat not tell the difference between another real cat and a metal cat?? An admittedly very realistic metal cat, but … a metal cat. (Actually, I’ve recently seen a very amusing YouTube video of a real cat freaking out over a much less realistic looking cat than this one so… maybe not.) Eddie totally ignored it. And he’s usually the scaredy cat.

We finally decided maybe it was the smell - we smelled like my dad’s house (which includes his cat, Maddy, who they know and aren’t real crazy about because she bullies them) and like Baker B’s mom’s house and maybe she was confused by the smells plus the weird realistic looking metal-smelling cat. That we thumped on its head several times so she’d hear it sounding all metaly, but that didn’t work either. Also we actually have brought home real cats from my dad’s house several times this past year - Maddy once, Simon a couple of times - so maybe her paranoia is valid. She did finally get used to it - I put it on a bookshelf but took it down a few times and showed it to her and she was pretty uninterested by then.

It reminded me of this adorable kitty in a shop window in Bath summer before last, with his little pretend friend (well, except it’s the total opposite).

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(I can’t figure out how to upload a picture from Flickr without that weird extra script below - the Prosebox FAQ says to post from Flickr by clicking the HTML link and then clicking it again, not using the embedded HTML, but embedded is the only choice I can find. Flicker seems to change its sharing process every few months and this one is different than it was last time I was here - or time before last, I couldn’t get it to work last time either - and apparently it’s changed since the PB FAQ was written.)

Well, now I’m out of time so can’t share the story of how I ended up going back to Verizon yesterday and bumping my new phone up to one with 64 GB of memory instead of the original 16. Which is what I had, and I was always running out of space because apparently I am an app-hoarder. And apparently I take a lot of pictures on it despite having a good SLR. I had to pay the restocking fee but that’s what I get for not thinking about asking what a memory upgrade would cost first time around (not much at all per month–like $5). And now I can continue to collect apps! So much for not telling that story.