It’s a Family Affair

Plenty of stuff to blog about this week, but no time to sit down and write it.

We took several treks to downtown Atlanta, specifically Atlanta Medical Center (aka “the old Georgia Baptist”), where Jam has been recovering from her little mishap last weekend. The final tally was: mild concussion, bruised spine, lots of bruising around her hips, no internal injuries. Fortunately. She’ll be coming home tomorrow. The docs didn’t want her by herself, though… so when I said coming home, I meant that literally. As in, to FAR Manor. Hey, her kids have been here all week. That hasn’t made much of a difference in things; they used to get off the bus here last year and hang out with Daughter Dearest — the only real difference was that I had to get up a little earlier and drop them off at school. No biggie; it was raining 'most all week so I was in the car anyway and the school is right along the way.

As I also mentioned in passing last weekend, Mrs. Fetched got me an iPhone 3G. It's really nice to only have to carry one gadget now: phone, music, camera, and a few games all stuck in this package that just invites you to caress it. If there was a way to connect a keyboard, I could use it for most of what I do with a computer now. As it is, I’m already dealing with 80% of my personal mail on the iPhone… finally, a gadget I can pick up in the morning and check out the state of the universe before getting out of bed. Daughter Dearest “recovered” the iPod touch, which should suit her quite well because her campus has wifi pretty much everywhere.

The glaring omission, IMO, is that it doesn’t pull in the to-do list from iCal. Hunh? Kind of an obvious thing to miss. There are certainly other flaws… the battery lasts just long enough to get through the day, although getting a car charger (like with all our other phones current and past) will help a lot with that. I’ll just need to rig something up for the bike… maybe a little foam cradle in the airbox with a charger cable would do the job. The cool thing is, there’s a lot of public wifi access in this otherwise benighted corner of the world. I’m starting to put together something on Google Maps to mark them, wherever they might be. Seems like something that would be just the thing for Google Maps, but there doesn’t seem to be one at the moment.

Mrs. Fetched still doesn’t have her iPhone up. After it sat on iTunes for over 24 hours without activating, I called AT&T sales and explained the situation (we got a used iPhone from her sister and we’re trying to pull her line over from Verizon). The salesperson transferred us to a support person — which was what I’d hoped for — and she told us we needed a new SIM card (the store person said we didn’t). So I took the phone in Thursday while working at home, and the guy at the store was reluctant to do anything because the account is in Mrs. Fetched’s name. He probably would have done it, had I thought to bring a Verizon bill along, but he needed the account number there and I didn’t have it. Tomorrow, tomorrow, we’ll fix it tomorrow, it’s only a SIM card away…

Daughter Dearest is home for the 3-day weekend, hooray! She about ran Mrs. Fetched ragged just talking about her first week. Something I was glad to hear: “I walk everywhere. It doesn’t make sense to drive.” I think she’s already getting a little toned. There’s a couple of guys who like to hang around her, of course, and she & her roommate get along quite well. The people next door are noisy in the evenings, which seems to be the only fly in the ointment — they have an Xbox and boys are visiting every night until midnight curfew. (Which goes to show, you don’t need a hot body to attract a guy… just an Xbox.)

Mrs. Fetched asked her how her classes are going. “OK… but hard.” She was a bit miffed when one of the music instructors told her to “forget everything you learned in high school, because it’s wrong.” Other than that, she’s doing well with her voice coach and her other music classes. She has to put something together for a recital in a couple of months, and finally convinced someone that 8 years of piano lessons should be enough to skip Piano I. And maybe II. Her Bible instructor was funny; someone asked, “Do we need a Bible for this class?” His response: “Only if you want to pass it.” Um… you think?

And that’s the week in review. FAR Future will appear at its regularly scheduled 7a.m. Monday time; I’m like three episodes ahead, thank God. Short week next week, followed by a week of vacation… I hope the chicken houses will let Mrs. Fetched have some time too.