In my last post, I was whining about the snow. Due to my general bad attitude, we didn’t tube or ski or do anything active that Saturday. Instead, with an unexpectedly free afternoon and a gift card in-hand, we went to Cafe Tesoros for a family lunch. One of the burdens of being a member of my family is that when we go anywhere fun, they have to wait for me to take review pictures or ask the staff unnecessary questions and such. The most onerous burden of all is holding back and not immediately digging into food because “Mom needs a picture!” first. I understand that it’s irritating. So with no particular obligation to review lunch, I was going to keep the camera tucked away. But then look how cute my Camarones al Ajillo looks, with the plantains standing up at attention! I couldn’t resist.
The entire family enjoyed the guacamole. M has been a fan for years, from way back when she was little and guacamole looked too scary and squishy to her, but she’d beg for little diced pieces of avocado, which were an entirely different matter. J is a recent convert to guacamole. She’s surprisingly willing to try new foods these days. A while back, I pointed out that two of her favorite foods in the world (Buffalo Chicken Dip and cheeseball) were things that she either didn’t want to try or things she didn’t like the first time. Now she’s wised up, and if the adults are enthusiastic, she’s all in.
J ordered Colombian Empanadas, M had a quesadilla, Cute W ordered the Cubano, and everyone was happy. I would have cooked the shrimp a little bit less, but this made the rest of my family laugh, because I err on the side of under-cooking and everyone else feels more comfortable if whatever they’re eating is, as they call it, “cooked dead.” The empanadas were particularly the perfect size for J’s lunch, and she also had a yummy mango smoothie. After lunch we split a couple of dessert crepes: you can’t go wrong with crepes. Now I’m looking forward to warmer weather so that Cute W and I can go for Tapas and Wine and walk home.
In other news, I got a new phone! It’s pretty exciting. If you’ve been reading a while, you know that I’m about as much as a Luddite as someone who blogs can be, so my previous phone was my first “smartphone” as opposed to a track phone. Except apparently it just wasn’t very smart. I’m not sure why. I could never really check email or get onto the internet with it, and anytime I tried to add an app, there wouldn’t be enough memory. I’d be on a blogger trip and someone else would take a photograph and Tweet about it and I’d scribble little notes to myself on paper. But the absolute worst part was messaging. First, the phone didn’t support group messaging, so I’d end up with streams of conversation like this:
Mom 1:
I can drive to practice tonight.
Super!
Okay
Alright. X, you fine to drive?
Mom 2:
Great, thanks. I can drive home.
Oh, wait, we have an app’t. . . let me check
Nope we’re not going.
Mom 3:
I can drive if she can’t
Yep, got it.
What time are you picking up?
And then I’d have to piece together the conversation, which was annoying enough, but it would also take me forever, because in order to read the messages, I’d click on “Mom 1” and my phone would say “loading. . . loading. . . loading” while I’d hold the phone and shake it and think about how my hair is getting greyer and my skin is losing elasticity and I’ve still only traveled to two continents so far. Or I’d wonder if someone had asked me if I could drive, which I could, but first I had to figure out if everyone had already figured it out. Or, I’d answer the group text, but it would only go to the individual person, and then everyone would text each other, “What did Katie say?” because this was quicker than trying to text me. It had started to feel like I was not a functioning adult.
I still don’t understand why the old phone was so very bad, but the new phone is a vast improvement. It’s an HTC Desire 816, and suddenly I’m capable of checking multiple email accounts on the same phone (you guys! I could totally teach Hillary how to do that!), and I can text with ease (although not with two-handed rapidity of a high school girl, come on), and when I’m waiting in line I can do the sorts of things I should have been doing all along, like re-tweeting KidsOutAndAbout contributing organizations and such. The one funny thing is that this phone is large. It’s like, unmanageably large. I am a small-ish person with short-ish fingers and I almost can’t hold it. M thinks it’s hilarious: she always says, “Oh my gosh, mom, it’s like you’re holding a brick!” But, as someone who only fantasizes about having a phone, she’s a snobby iPhone connoisseur. But, generally speaking, I’m super-excited. It’s like I’ve caught up to at least 2012. And I can use the phone for useless things as well.
For example, I was sitting in traffic the other day, and I took this photograph for you. You might recognize that the station is the one that used to be a pop station, then was briefly an all-Christmas-all-the-time station and now has settled into some sort of old pop station. It plays many songs that were hits when I was an adolescent, and many of them were already bad back in the 80s, but then occasionally you’ll run into an old pop song that you haven’t heard in forever. I’ve heard both Erasure and Yaz on this station, so it gets to keep the Preset status that it lost while it was playing Bing Crosby. But do you see the song title?
Clearly someone very young was doing data entry, because no one who was alive and aware in 1981 would make that mistake! And there’s a certain pride in knowing that I am old enough to know every single lyric from Billy Joel’s Glass Houses
