We're in that difficult time of year. You know the one. It's warm outside. The yard beckons. You really feel like tossing off the dogs of winter and getting your hands dirty. Then it rains. I mean, there's flowers popping up all over, the cherries are in bloom, things are sprouting. I've seen a few bees. It's time to get going, that is if the weather cooperates. I’ve started to think that maybe the weather is not merely unpredictable, it's malevolent. It knows when I want to get something done and goes out of its way to thwart those plans. Mind you some things need looking at more than others. Normally this time of year mowing would take priority. However, our lawn has been taken over by moss. It’s actually choking out the grass, something I didn’t think possible. That’s OK though, we don’t mind a mossy lawn. For one thing moss only grows so high so it doesn’t need mowing, though I’ve done it a time or two to keep the remaining grass (which I guess now qualifies as a weed), under control. 

The last couple of weeks have followed a pattern. Saturday we’ve got errands and such to do, but the forecast was for sun on Sunday. Sunday it always rained and nothing gets done. During the week, showers have been forecast but it was sunny all day. All day that is until I went home. Each day I planned to put in a little time in the yard, but every single day the sun at 2:00 turned into rain at 4:00. One day it literally clouded up and started raining as I drove home. As a result little has gotten done in the yard. That’s not to say we haven’t been busy. Marsha of course has had her work. Now that it’s tax season she’s putting in full days and then some. And then there are the cats. Imoto is settling in but Momiji has become paranoid, sullen and withdrawn. We’ve tried lots of things but nothing will bring her out of her funk. Finally we took her to the vet on Saturday. Physically she seems fine. They did a bunch of blood tests, and we’ll get the results Monday or Tuesday. Right now though, it looks more like an emotional problem rather than a medical one. 

Is there such a thing as kitty Prozac?

We had to leave Momiji at the vet for the tests and had a couple of hours to kill. After a quick lunch by the ocean we went over to the Koodo store in the mall. For those of you south of the border Koodo is a cell phone carrier up here. We like them because there’s no contract. You pay monthly and if they do anything annoying you can cancel any time. They also will let you buy a phone and pay it off over 24 months with no interest, which I like. Anyway, I’ve had this old LG “Dumb Phone” for something like five years. It made calls, but that’s it. Well, it would do texts but the fold out chiclet keyboard was a bugger to use. Marsha and I got two of them when we went over to Koodo after we finally got clear of our original cellular contracts with Rogers. (It wasn’t really an amicable split. We tend to refer to Rogers by the acronym TMGB, The Miserable Greedy Bastards.) I wore my LG phone out carrying it all over the island for work. When Marsha got her iPhone a couple of years ago I inherited her LG (after replacing the battery that is) and it kept going strong. Oh it did develop its quirks but it did what I needed. It made calls. More precisely it received calls. I make very few. I checked my most recent Koodo statement and found that in March, I used 12 minutes of air time. That’s it, 12, out of 150 minutes per month. I really don’t like talking on the phone. If you want to contact me, send an e-mail or Instant Message. Those I check all the time. Admittedly, I also liked the ‘hipster chic’ of not having a modern smart phone. 

Anyway, the old LG was beginning to show its age. Sometimes the speaker seemed garbled unless I held it just right, but it was OK if I was careful. Some of the keys were a bit fussy, but I didn’t use them that much so it was OK. But then in the last couple of weeks I kept finding it had turned itself off in my pocket. This was more of a concern. I tried making sure it was fully charged. That didn’t help. I started carrying it in my bag rather than my pocket. That didn’t help. Finally this week was the last straw. It was off again and I found I had missed a message from one of my Doctors. I can’t have that. If the Oncologist calls, I have to know that I’ll get the call. (By the way, the call wasn’t anything serious.) So on Saturday we headed for the Koodo store. 

Now I had already been thinking of this eventuality and had decided on what I was going to get. I wanted an iPhone 6. If I had to upgrade I was going to go state of the art, a brand new ‘dumb phone’ didn’t have the cachet of the antique LG. We are an all Apple house so iPhone was a gimme. I didn’t need the bigger screen of the 6+ as I carry my iPad around to do real work. And, because I expect to keep the phone for another 5 years I wanted to start with the latest technology. While I could have saved a few bucks and gotten the cheaper 5S that was still available as their loss leader, it wasn’t worth it. I didn’t care about colour, it was going to be in a protective case anyway. The only question about the case was if I’d get it at the Koodo store or FutureShop. Oddly enough, as it turned out the FutureShop chain closed that very morning. The company who owns them shut the whole chain down and will be reopening them in a week or two as Best Buy stores. This meant however, that the Future Shop option was out. Then the clerk offered to put the screen protector on for me, so how could I refuse. I’ve never gotten a screen protector on right. There are always bubbles and the occasional bit of dust. But she spent about five minutes cleaning and swabbing, and carefully laying it on and it is perfect. You literally can’t tell there is a screen protector on unless you know what to look for. Half an hour later we left with my new phone in hand, or pocket as the case may be. Now I’m in the process of getting the new phone set up, on the network, and installing all the Apps I need. It will take some getting used to. For one thing the screen is around four times larger than the old LG. And of course it does about a billion things my old phone didn’t. Maybe I’ll actually use it more. Maybe I’ll become one of those guys in the grocery store that takes a xpicture of the salad dressing and sends it to his wife because he can’t decide which she wanted, (true story).

I hope not.

And lastly, a while back we got a call at work from a production company in LA. They wanted to borrow one of our robots for use in a show. I cleaned up a VT-150 from the rental pool we sent it down there. Well, this week we found out that it will appear in the April 16 episode of Elementary. Not sure what they used it for or how much screen time it will get, only that it was used in “a residential scene”. But we’ll be watching for it.

Doug & Marsha

PIX: We really do have a lot of moss in our yard. Plus, Old vs new phones, a huge difference