straight from delivery to recycling

so today . . . i realized that the plastic bag our new telephone directory was delivered in was more valuable than the telephone directory itself. i am not kidding.

there are sooooo many things wrong with this picture!

first of all, who even uses a telephone directory anymore? you have to KNOW how alphabetical order works in order to find anything. and even if you know your abc's (as anyone over the age of five should,) where does the name mcdonald's fit? does it go after the words that begin with mb and before the words that begin with md? (hey, we live in l.a.--trust me, it could happen!) or does it go at the very beginning of the m's? or would i find it right after the mac's? and if i'm using the yellow pages, would it be under restaurants? or fast food? or hamburgers? or shortcuts to a heart attack?? and if you are looking for psychiatrists, remember that the word starts with a silent p--don't go looking for it in the s's. unless you are looking for surgeons. but wouldn't they be listed with the doctors? you see??

and it is time-consuming. a lot of page flipping goes on to find what you are looking for. do you want doctors or physicians? cars or automobiles? dentists or masters of torture? lakers or devil's spawn--no wait, that was a different blog . . . and then, if you don't know exactly how to spell what you are looking for, there is even more page turning--is the correct spelling jewelery or jewelry? because if you are using the phone book, you had better know! it will not ask you did you mean jewelry? like google does.

we all have the technology in our pockets to find whatever we are looking for, and either order it to be delivered right to our house or find a map that tells us how to get to it. even elementary school kids have cell phones with internet access and are probably much more adept at using the apps than i am. all of this makes our need for an actual telephone directory kind of obsolete--unless you just want to show how strong you are by ripping it in half (which, according the the myth busters i just watched, is not all that hard. although, i haven't tried it yet.)

but what i really want to know is this--why is our telephone directory delivered in a plastic bag? when was the last time it rained here? ok, the ground was damp in the morning a couple of weeks ago, but that was the result of night time rain. when was the last time it rained during the day? hmmm?? and since the phone books are delivered during the daylight hours, the plastic bags seem a bit unnecessary--unless they are worried about fading or dust. it just seems to me that if the plastic bags are the environmental evil they are purported to be, putting one on every telephone book delivered to every household in the l.a. metropolitan area might not be the best idea.

especially since they are now illegal in the state of california . . .

a techie savant moment

so today . . . i have been experimenting with twitter.

as with most things social media related, diandra got me started.

last summer when she and i were visiting my parents, she helped to convince my mom to switch to sprint and buy a palm pre. we spent the rest of the week acclimating her to the new phone. well, technically diandra did the acclimating--for two reasons. first, she already had a palm pre, so she knew how it worked and what it could do. second, i did not. my palm pre did not appear until christmas . . .

but my treo would still do quite a lot. so she got both of us set up with twitter accounts. i used mine while we were on vacation, and diandra was around to help me. then i came home, never to tweet again.

until today.

i've been thinking about it for a few days though. lately, i've been having these random, kind of funny thoughts. but they are short. however, i am pretty good at embellishing, so maybe some of them could have been expanded into blogs--but by the time i sat down to blog them, i couldn't remember what they were . . .

the brain--it is a terrible thing to waste.

i was telling rollie this, and he said, "maybe you should just make a note in your phone. that way when you got ready to blog, you could remember what you were going to write." i thought that was a pretty good idea, so i pulled out my phone and prepared to make a note--only to realize i already had a file on my phone for these random ideas. i had just forgotten.

the brain--you know.

my next thought was that instead of writing it down, i should just record it vocally. my phone will do that, won't it? hmmmm? i am pretty sure it will--i'm just not quite sure how to do it . . . so i shelved the whole idea and decided that if i couldn't remember a thought from the time i had it until i blogged, it probably wasn't worthy of my attention anyway!

and then today while i was sitting at my desk, my fish kept staring at me. i've been worried about my fish on the weekends. every monday i expect that he will be dead from lack of food. i have repeatedly been assured that he will be fine, but still i think he will be belly-up on monday morning. the school secretary feeds him a little extra on friday night, and apparently he will also nibble on the plant roots that share his water, but the weekend seems like such a long time to be without food . . .

yesterday he kept looking at me. i finally fed him a tiny bit more. today he kept looking at me. i thought, "what if he is starving to death? what if i kill my fish because i don't want to feed him enough?" (which is purely selfish, because i just don't want to have to clean his habitat--but that is a story for another blog . . . ) and then i thought "i should tweet this!"

i don't know why i thought about tweeting. maybe i thought someone would read it and give me some insight into fishy thinking. diandra is probably the only one who follows me on twitter though, and she would probably die of shock if i actually tweeted something. but i decided to risk it. i was actually hoping it would show up on facebook. other people's tweets show up on facebook. (why didn't i just post it on facebook, you ask? because i wanted to include a picture to prove the fish was staring at me, and i couldn't figure out how to get the picture onto facebook from my phone. there! are you happy now?!?) i guess i was hoping it might just magically appear, and i needed some answers, so i gave it a try . . .

. . . and i not only tweeted, i tweeted WITH A PICTURE! yes indeed! i figured out how to tweet a picture. i was pretty darn proud of myself! i rarely accomplish any electronic or internet milestone without the help of someone more tech savvy than me. but today i did!

as i thought about it throughout the day (because i did, you know--i thought about it all day and about how smart i was and about what else i could possibly do . . . ) i decided that a tweet is just a tiny blog in 140 characters. the truth is, some thoughts just aren't big enough for a blog, but that doesn't mean that they might not be amusing or entertaining. so i am going to be tweeting more often. i think.

and since you may not all have twitter accounts, i spent some time figuring out how to post my tweets onto my blog. so you don't even have to sign up on twitter to follow me--you can just catch up when you read the blog! isn't that clever? at least, it will be clever if it works like i think it will.

now if i can just figure out how to get my tweets to post on facebook . . .

ah, technology . . .

so today . . . i am home sick.

i hate being home sick. every morning when my alarm goes off, i think to myself, "i wish i didn't have to go to school today." but i never think, "i wish i was sick so i didn't have to go to school today." because being home sick creates conflict between my body and my brain.

not that this is unfamiliar territory. my body and my brain disagree all the time. my brain says eat vegetables. they are good for you! my body says ice cream, brownies, croissants! my brain says get out there and exercise! my body says but i'm already sitting here with the computer in my lap! and when i am home from school, sick, my brain says yippee! a whole unexpected day at home! think of all the things we can get done!! but my body says, sleep, crash on the couch, sleep some more . . .

it makes for a stressful day. because although i know my body is making the right choice, my brain won't leave me alone. ok, it says, i know you don't think you have the energy to do anything, but maybe you could just . . . and it's list of small things i could be doing is never ending! so while my body usually wins, and i do spend my day on the couch, it has to spend what little energy it has fighting off my brain to stay there.

the compromise they reached today was that i would sit on the couch and read some magazines. i have a stack of magazines that i haven't had time to read. and they just keep coming and coming and coming. i could just throw them away. i didn't order any of them--well, not specifically. i got them as bonuses when i ordered certain items from shopping tv. i meant to return the cards that would cancel the subscriptions and kick back a few bucks to me. but did i get it done in the allotted time? of course not! so all these magazines come to my house every month, and i feel obligated to read them. because you just never know . . . if i were to throw them out unread, i am certain that the information i might need someday to save my life would be in one of them. so yes, i read them out of fear . . .

but in all the reading i did, i discovered something very interesting. at the end of some of the articles there would be these little telephone icons. and it appeared to me that if you took a picture of that icon (which are called "tags") with your cell phone, then it would connect to a web page that would give you more information--more recipes, more health tips, etc. cool, i thought. so i tried it. i took a picture of the tag. i looked at the screen on my phone for a few minutes, but nothing happened. ok, i must have done something wrong, so i tried it again. still nothing. so i flipped through the magazine trying to find directions as to how to make this wonderful new technology work, but there was no explanation. finally i read the fine print and saw that you had to go to a web page and download a tag reader first. ooooh. ok. so i turned on my computer and went to the web page. but it said it couldn't identify my phone, which meant it didn't know which tag reader to download. after another ten minutes of clicking around the site, i realized that i needed to go to the web page from my phone. ooooh. ok. so i connected to the web page from my phone, only to find out that the operating system used on my phone is too new to have it's own tag reader. so i downloaded the generic "it will work with most phones" tag reader, went back to the magazine, took another picture, and it still didn't work. i was starting to get frustrated. apparently i cannot access this new technology with my new technology just yet.

but i love the idea of it! with so many people using their cell phones to access web content, this is perfect! instead of having to remember urls (not to mention typing them in accurately on a phone's teeny tiny keyboard,) you just point your phone at one of these tags, click a button, and it takes you right to a website. i am pretty sure there must be a way diandra can use this in her business--i just haven't figured it out yet. and according to the website, anyone can make tags of their own. maybe i can even make one for my blog. oh, the possibilities! i am a fan already . . .

. . . even though it won't work on my phone. yet.