progress

can you tell from this photo what two new things we own?  

actually it's not really a fair question.  you probably guessed the clock, and that's right.  but you may have been thrown off, not only by the tea pot, which is not new, it just happened to be there when i took a picture of the clock, but also by the fact that you remembered that greg has had a new phone for a week or two now and his takes much better low-light pictures than mine.  but... the answer to the question is:

the clock

and the phone that took the picture-- my phone. my new phone.

i could have lived indefinitely without a new phone, despite the fact that the camera was showing its age, but over the weekend a couple crucial buttons stopped working which made the phone nearly impossible to operate.  so i took it off life support and went to the phone store and got a new phone.  the cheapest they had, which also happened to be the same phone as before, only a couple models evolved.

after getting this phone, i've come to the conclusion that i don't like getting new phones.  i don't want to spend any time at all learning how to use it.  i don't understand why it's not a clean slate.  this phone already had pictures on it going back to 2012.  if those pictures were on my previous phone, i didn't know it.  it also comes with about a thousand 'apps' loaded onto it, 99% of which i will never use or know the point of, but if it's anything like my last phone, when i try to remove them during some long train ride, it will tell me that they are all crucial to the entire system and i better just leave them alone.  it also beeps at me for seemingly no reason and no matter how many notifications i turn off, it keeps beeping.  i wish phones could just be phones... with good cameras attached.

well, the clock's nice though!  i also could have lived indefinitely without one of those (as long as my watch keeps working) but greg really wanted one, so now we have a very large reminder that time is a-ticking.