Saturday
My new Android phone arrived around suppertime on Saturday. Jaeger thinks it looks like its wearing armor so I decided to call it Devi in honor of Devi Morris from The Paradox Trilogy¹. As expected, it’s quite thick so the first thing I tested was making sure it would fit comfortably in my jean pockets. It fit great so I went ahead and turned it on.

Android is not iOS. I know this is stating the obvious. However, Google and Apple have fundamentally different approaches to software. iOS believes in the one perfect right way. Android was designed for people who like options and don’t mind tinkering. I’ve used Android phones before, and use many Google products, so I didn’t expect any major challenges. I was mistaken.

Unihertz was remarkably restrained in the apps it preloaded onto the phone. I think it’s the most bare bones phone install I’ve seen. Overall, this is a good thing. However, it left me with some initial app gaps. I decided to prioritize finding apps by looking at what was on the first page on my old iPhone. Weather was the first app I looked for. The number of choices were bewildering and I took way too long finding something I liked.

By this point, night was fast approaching and I realized I needed to get my phone setup for the night. This meant two things: 1) Verifying that Smart Audiobook Player still existed in the Play store and still worked the way I expected and 2) setting up Do Not Disturb for the night. Fortunately, Smart Audiobook Player worked flawlessly. I downloaded the app, swapped the MicroSD card from my old Samsung phone into Devi², and everything just worked. This was a huge relief.

My next step was to configure Do Not Disturb/Bedtime mode. This turned out to be substantially more complicated than I expected. Bedtime is controlled in the “Digital Wellbeing & parental controls” section which isn’t too hard to find with a bit of Googling. I quickly learned that iOS’ version is vastly superior. Among other things, Android doesn’t appear to let me have different sleep schedules based on the day of the week. I sighed, and set it for my regular weekday schedule. Then, I went to the Clock app to figure out what that meant for my Wake Up alarm. I definitely didn’t want to be woken up at 7:00 am on Sunday. Except, the Clock didn’t show any Wake Up alarms. That functionality didn’t seem to exist in the Clock app even though various web pages assured me it did. I eventually decided that I must be seeing an older version of Google’s Clock app but I couldn’t figure out how to update it. I searched in the Google Play store and found another version of Google Clock, downloaded it, and saw the bedtime option³. It appeared that I could set the wake up alarm to just M-F. It’s a little different than I was use to but I figured I’d get use to it.

Then, we discovered that Do Not Disturb wasn’t allowing audio notification for my Starred Contacts. In Android, rather than picking specific people, you add a Star to all contacts who should be allowed to message or call you while Do Not Disturb is one. This I dutiful did but the phone was still blocking audio notification when it was in Do Not Disturb mode for Jaeger’s messages. Fortunately, we learned that he could call me and the phone call would come through. I tried all sorts of settings but couldn’t get it to work so I finally gave up for the night.

Smart Audiobook Player worked beautifully through the night. The only slight hiccup was at one point I accidentally turned on the phone flashlight and I had to open up the phone and maunally turn it off.

Sunday
Sunday I was suppose to pay bills and clean house. One of the first things I did Sunday was download the Dumpling app which I use to order groceries. To my relief, my preferred shopper and previously bought lists transferred fine. Then, I downloaded Libby so I’d have something to listen to while cleaning house. All of this went fine.

I started out by paying bills and it took longer than I expected because, among other things, I realized I had skipped sending Jaeger the August finance report so needed to do August and September at the same time. I also used the time to install all my authentication apps⁴. Sometime while I was paying bills Jaeger went to our local Pottery Planet to upgrade the pots for some of our household plants. He texted me a picture of a strawberry pot except on my side I received a “Message expired or not available”. Regular SMS was coming through fine but all pictures were being blocked for some reason. Interestingly, I could send both SMS and MMS and Jaeger was able to receive pictures from me.

My first thought was it had something to do with Verizon. You see, according to the internet, if I took this phone to a Verizon store and tried to activate it, it would fail. However, numerous reviews assured me that because I already had a SIM card from my iPhone, I could just transfer it to this phone and everything would work fine. Indeed, when I popped in my SIM card Saturday, everything had seemed to work fine. In fact, I didn’t even get the typical text warning from Verizon that my SIM had changed phones.

I spent more than an hour on the MMS problem, both poking around in my phone settings and searching the internet, and eventually learned that it was a widespread problem back in 2021 and the fix is to use a messaging app other than Google Messages. I was dubious but decided it was worth a shot. The first app I tried was Signal, as I felt fairly comfortable using it. However, for unknown reasons, I couldn’t get it to work as a regular text message app. I gave up fairly quickly and found another one, Textra, and tried again. I was successful in setting up Textra as my text app and was a bit surprised to confirm that it had no problem receiving MMS. I thought that maybe the Do Not Disturb problem had also been solved but, alas, no. Emergency contacts still couldn’t text me while I was in Do Not Disturb mode.

It was late afternoon by this point so I decided not to clean house after all and instead focused on getting the majority of my must-have apps installed and configured. I also took the time to figure out how I had accidentally triggered the flashlight in the middle of the night. It turns out the red button on the left is a shortcut key and its set to turn the flashlight on by a long press of the button. I liked the general idea but changed the flashlight to be two quick presses of the button instead on the assumption that would be less likely to do accidentally in the middle of the night.

The Atom L appears to be designed for a rugged outdoorsy type of person. Based on the reviews, I have some doubts of its ruggedness, but that’s still the aesthetic it’s going for. While this phone is surprisingly free of weird pre-loaded apps, it did come with a “Toolbox” folder that included various things such as: Noise test, Compass, UnderWaterCamera, Protractor, etc. It also included a Remote app that is designed to replace AV remotes. I amused myself by setting it up with our TV, Blu ray player, and receiver. Though, I have yet to find an app that I like as a replacement for the Apple TV remote on iOS.

.One of the last things I did Sunday was verify that the phone worked with my car so everything would be ready for driving the kids to school in the morning. This part was amazingly easy. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had to fiddle with my iPhones a bit to make them connect correctly to the car. Android Auto seamlessly set everything up and it just worked which made me very happy. That said, I prefer the Apple CarPlay interface to Android Auto. One of the things I really miss, which doesn’t seem to be available, was the split screen option which let me see both maps and whatever app I was listening to at the same time. I also dislike that Android aggressively will not let me type into the screen, even when I’m sitting in my driveway, and instead requires me to say everything. However, these are design choices that I’ll probably get use to eventually.

For more than a decade I’ve had issues going back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night. This was particularly problematic when Julian was little as he woke up often and my brain would wake up while I was trying to get him to go back to sleep. I tried several different things to keep my brain from thinking but nothing worked consistently until I stumbled across listening to audiobooks.

One essential feature for my audiobook app is a persistent sleep timer. That is, every time I hit play, I want the sleep timer to automatically activate. This allows me to wake up in the middle of the night, tap my earbud to start the audiobook, and then have the audiobook automatically stop at 15 min all without me having to open my eyes. So far, I have only found one audiobook app that will do this: Smart AudioBook Player. Unfortunately, this app is only available on Android, not iOS. So, when I transitioned to an iPhone SE back in 2017, I kept my old Samsung phone as a dedicated nighttime audiobook player.

Other than the audiobook app, I really liked my iPhone SE. It was a good quality phone, with a nice amount of storage, that still fit in the pocket of my jeans. However, as it got older, the battery life got progressively worse and it was starting to show its age. This made me sad as everyone seemed to have given up on the concept of “small” phones. Thus, I was very excited in 2020 when Apple announced the return of the SE model. Both Calvin and I got one. Then, about a year after owning the phone, I accidentally dunked the bottom of the phone into black beans and some clearly got into the charging port. After that, getting it to charge, or connect to our car was possible, but fiddly. Overall, it mostly worked. That is, until about a month ago when charging became progressively harder until it didn’t charge at all one night. Long story short, I decided it was time for a new phone.

As I said, I’ve really liked the SE phones. However, an added complication was that my Samsung phone was also nearing end of life. If I nudged the phone wrong, it would start repetitively power cycling until I nudged it just the right way to make it stop. Given how much I rely on it to sleep at night, this was a big problem. It had been a couple of years since I had last tested iOS audiobooks apps so I went and tried most of the popular ones again: BookPlayer, MP3 Audiobook Player, Bound, Audiobook Player SmartBook, CloudBeats, MP3 Book, and ListenBook Pro. None of them worked the way I needed. So, I decided to combine my two phones back into one by getting a new Android phone.

Unfortunately, Google’s idea of a “small” phone is laughable. My original iPhone SE, which is pretty much perfectly sized, is 123.8 mm high. The SE2 is a bit bigger at 138 mm. Google’s current smallest Pixel is 156 mm. The Asus Zenphone was a bit bigger than optimal but still looked intriguing until I learned it wouldn’t work on Verizon’s network. Which . . . left me with mostly super cheap phones that didn’t have the storage I wanted.

At beginning of August, I stumbled across the Unihertz Atom XL phone. It’s . . . quite something. Among other things, it doubles as a walkie-talkie. I showed it to Jaeger and he seemed incredulous that someone would go to the trouble of making such a product. However, aside from the odd features, it looked like a legit small phone. Mind you, this is small in terms of height, it’s the thickest phone I’ve seen in recent memory, allegedly due to its battery. It sounded intriguing to me but I decided to limp along using my old iPhone SE for a while.

Last week, I decided I did not want to continue living with the bad battery and dodgy map ability of the old phone so I went back to looking at Android options again. Unfortunately, nothing magical appeared so I decided to buy the Unihertz Atom L which is like the XL, just missing the radio. Features I like:

• Runs Android so I could use Smart AudioBook Player
• Fairly short at 134.5 mm tall
• 128 GB of storage with an additional Micro SD slot
• 3.5mm headphone jack!

My biggest concern was it has a slightly older version of Android and, unlike a Pixel, it probably won’t be updated regularly. However, I decided to take a chance and buy it anyway.

Update:
Ok, I didn’t get around to updating the website. However, that’s still the plan, eventually.

Original:
I’m going to be updating the software for this website over the next several days. So, some parts may be temporarily broken for a while.

One reason the stay-at-home experience has been so surreal for me, particularly initially, is I prefer doing many of the things I now have to do. I like working from home because I can control the temperature environment, I can sleep in later, and I have very minimal interaction with people. Right before this happened, I had determined I should be more sociable so I had made a goal to invite people over to our house at least once a month. Now, I don’t have to feel any guilt for not doing so. I don’t like driving in the city and now I’m encouraged to stay in my neighborhood.

However, as time went on I realized the biggest downside for me is that everyone else in the family is staying in my house also. In the past, when I worked from home, I might hear one of the kids but I wouldn’t be responsible for them in any way and could ignore them. Once I started work, I no longer had to worry about any household problem. This is no longer true. Now while I work I also have to make sure Calvin is staying on track with his schooling and when I take a break from work, I try to give our au pair a break from Julian. While I don’t miss having a commute, I do miss the time I had to read coming home.

Weekday Schedule
6:30 – Wake Up
6:40 – Exercise, alternate upper body and abs
7:00 – Shower/Get dressed
7:25 – Unload the dishwasher and eat breakfast
7:45 – Start work
10:00 – Take a 15 min break and try to convince Julian to take a walk around the block with me.
12:15 – Take a 1/2 hr “lunch” break and try to convince Julian to take a longer walk with me
2:15 – Take a 15 min break and try to convince Julian to take a walk around the block with me.
4:15 – Stop working for the day. Often at this point Julian will request I play a game with him but sometimes I can convince him to go outside and help me with the yard.
5:00 – Start making supper.
6:00 – Eat Supper.
6:30 – Clean up kitchen.
7:15 – Misc – sometimes pick up the house, sometimes look at real estate websites down in the Bay Area, sometimes read a book.
8:00 – Usually watch TV with Jaeger and Calvin
9:00 – Read, obsess over the most recent house I love, or some other sort of entertainment.
9:45-10:30 – Go to bed.

The one big change Jaeger and I have made during this stay at home period is I now clean up the dishes and he supervises Julian’s bath and puts him to bed. This is lovely. With both Julian and I home all day sometimes he gets very clingy and is constantly touching me. Even when I’m working he’ll come into the office and want to be around Calvin and I. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t allow it. However, I think he feels very isolated with everyone except him and our au pair working on something so I now let him come in and use the ipad or color while I’m working¹ However, all this constant interaction with Julian is extremely tiring. After a couple of particularly trying days I realized I wasn’t getting enough alone time so I requested to switch jobs with Jaeger and he agreed. I enjoy cleaning up the dishes as I can listen to audiobooks and podcasts. Plus, it’s easier to tidy up non-meal things in the vicinity of the kitchen and/or make something else for the next day without interfering with Jaeger’s cleaning process.

Saturday Schedule
On Saturdays I usually wake up around 8, or when either Julian or Willow start complaining. Julian can now make his own breakfast, which is fantastic. However, we recently started feeding Willow wet food² so now she complains when I don’t feed her quickly enough. Once I get up, I usually make some sort of involved breakfast: Blueberry buckle, crepes, muffins, etc. By then, it’s often time for the Logan family video conference. This often takes 2+ hours. I also often call my mom and sometimes talk to my brother (or, more precisely, Julian and Caleb perform for each other).

I also try to make 1-2 masks each Saturday, usually while watching something on Netflix³. I usually only wear 1-2 masks a week because I usually walk in our neighborhood and just go to the other side of the street, or the middle of the street, when someone is coming towards me. However, Jaeger usually wears one when going out because he likes walking around Gas Works Park which has a lot more people. Also, I suspect we all will be wearing masks more once we start going out in public so I’ve been trying to make fun masks the kids will like wearing. When I ordered fabric I let Julian pick out some options and he chose a colorful dragon print as well as strawberries. I made matching strawberry masks for us. I also made matching Star Wars masks for Calvin, Julian, and their cousin. Their cousin seems pretty enamored with the mask but my kids aren’t super interested and haven’t really left the house recently so they don’t need them.

Often it feels like I just got up but it’s already time for supper. Jaeger is in charge of supper on Saturday’s so I just have to show up. After Julian goes to bed Jaeger, Calvin, and I usually play a board game together.

Sunday Schedule
On Sunday I wake up around 7:30 so I can eat and get to the grocery store right as it opens up at 8:00am. It seems the least crowded at that time and there’s a particular checker on duty who always religiously wears his mask and disinfects his hands between customers. This is the one time I’m usually close enough to people that I put on a mask.

After I get home and put away groceries, if Jaeger is still asleep I’ll go back to bed for an early morning nap. Otherwise I’ll start on my weekend chore list. I try to pay bills and balance the credit card weekly because it’s much faster than if I wait a month between. Our roses require constant attention so there’s always weeding, deadheading, spraying, or some other yard activity that would like to be done. I usually try to tidy up the house for the week ahead. If I didn’t get a morning nap, I’ll often take an afternoon nap. Then it’s time for supper (Jaeger usually orders pizza) and preparing for going back to work.

While I was pregnant with Calvin I considered becoming a stay-at-home mom. I don’t remember what my reasoning was, but it was probably something along the lines of “we can afford it, it’s good for the kids, so why not.” At the time, Jaeger was very supportive of this, his own mom stayed home with the kids and it seemed normal to him. However, my mom thought it was a bad idea for my personality and she talked me out of it. She told me that she felt like her brain was rotting the two years she spent home after my younger brother was born. After thinking about it more, I realized I didn’t have to make this decision before Calvin was born. If working and having a kid was too much, I could always quit later. Instead, I negotiated going down to 20 hours a week and working from home¹. Continuing to work was definitely the right decision. I’m sure my postpartum depression would have been even worse if I hadn’t been able to mentally escape at work.

A little over a year before Julian was born I went up to 32 hours a week. Our library system was preparing for a major ILS migration and I, and my manager, felt like it would be best if I had more time to devote to the migration. I thought it would be hard going from 20 to 32 hours a week. It wasn’t, it was easier. I felt less rushed during my work day and felt I could take longer to make better decisions.

Jaeger and I decided to have another child. I looked at our personal schedule, we were planning to move overseas in the next couple of years, and the implementation timeline at work and came up with a target date range for conception. If I still wasn’t pregnant at the end of our target window we would reconsider whether it made sense to keep trying to get pregnant. I was lucky and Julian decided to be conceived right on schedule.

Meanwhile, our work implementation kept plodding mostly forward. Because Calvin threatened to be born preterm I wanted the ILS implementation over before Julian hit viability so I could drop everything if he ended up in the NICU for months. This provided very strong motivation for me to keep the project on track. I’m quite sure our vendor got tired of me telling them that I managed to conceive on schedule so they should be able to deliver the product on schedule. Julian was born at 41 weeks. In retrospect, I didn’t realize how much post-migration clean-up there would be so I was very fortunate that Julian agreed to wait till he was full-term.

I had told my manager I intended to take 3 months of maternity leave. At about 4 weeks postpartum things were going so well (i.e. nicely boring) that I was tempted to come back early. However, I didn’t have childcare lined up for going back early and then Julian went through a hard period so I did end up staying mostly offline from work the whole 3 months².

In July, about a month after I came back from maternity leave, Qualcomm announced they would be doing layoffs. They told their investors before they told their employees. Very tacky. No doubt there were some regulatory issues around the announcement but surely there could have been a way to coordinate that better. In any case, Qualcomm announced layoffs but said they wouldn’t publish the layoff list till late September. Our plan had been to move to Taiwan after Julian turned 1 and Calvin finished school for the year. If Jaeger got laid off it would potentially either force us to go through the savings we had for the international move or move early. Neither situation was ideal but we were fortunate that all we had to worry about was opportunity, not where the money for food and mortgage was going to come from.

Possibly coincidentally, a Google recruiter choose the day Qualcomm announced layoffs to send their semi-annual email asking Jaeger if he would be interested in interviewing with Google. Jaeger didn’t want to work for Google, he wanted to move internationally. However, he decided that interviewing at Google would be an interesting interlude while waiting to see who Qualcomm laid off.

Long story a little shorter, Qualcomm did lay him off and Google offered Jaeger a job in their San Francisco office. We had visited San Francisco several times and had been impressed with how diverse the city is. I talked to my manager, who talked to HR, and they thought if we moved I could still telecommute and work for the district. After a lot more waffling, Jaeger decided to take the job with Google and push back our international plans for another couple of years.

Life got complicated. In February Jaeger left for San Francisco while I stayed behind with the kids and our au pair so Calvin could finish school. Right about this time I learned that I may not be able to keep my job after all. After looking into it more, HR decided there would be complications with me working from home in San Francisco because I would be classed as a California employee. I’m a little vague what all the implications would have been but among other things they would have had to withhold California taxes for me. This was not something they were willing to do. At one point, I was told that this would probably have been easier if I had moved overseas instead of to another state. My manager was quite upset and spent months trying to find a way around it. However, she was not able to find a cost-effective option that HR felt would legally cover them. It was too late to back out from Google so I was going to be out of a job once I moved to San Francisco.

As soon as I realized there was uncertainty about my job I started looking for interesting jobs I could do from San Francisco. I knew I was too specialized but I hadn’t done anything about it because I was secretly hoping to be able to keep my job forever while wandering the world. Unfortunately, my specialization was now coming back to haunt me.

I applied for several jobs but most of them didn’t feel like a good fit and I was fortunate to be able to be picky. Then I saw that Mountain View Public Library had a job opening that sounded very similar to what I currently did. The timing was a little awkward. The huge ILS user conference, handily in San Francisco, was in just a week or two and the job already had dates set for when they would interview candidates which was 2 weeks after the user conference. Obviously they only expected local candidates to apply. A week before the interview date I was called and invited to come for an interview. Fortunately, Jaeger was able to rearrange things to stay in Colorado while I went to California for a couple of days.

The first interview involved three people who had a preset list of questions they had to ask. It was a pretty easy interview. However, I thought it was odd that none of the people who interviewed me worked for Mountain View Public Library, or even the City of Mountain View. Instead, they were librarians from surrounding libraries. I assume this was to try to prevent any appearance of bias. However, from my perspective this was not helpful as they did not know the answers to any of my questions. So, the process allowed them to shortlist me but did not give me enough info to shortlist them. I was invited back for a second interview, this with the actual librarians at Mountain View. Everyone I talked to was very nice and seemed like fun people to work with.

A couple of weeks after the second interview I received an email from HR saying Mountain View was still interested in me but they needed to verify my degrees and pass a background check before the process could continue. This sounded pretty straight forward, though I did think the background check a little weird. As requested, I filled out my school information and then dutifully took the background check form down to the Boulder police station to get fingerprinted. Then I mailed the form back. This was the beginning of The Long Wait.

The first problem was they couldn’t get confirmation of my MLS. I never learned what the problem was but I blame someone either misspelling my name or not knowing what to do with hyphenation. In the end, Mountain View accepted a scan of my transcript. The next hurdle was my background check. I had sent back the fingerprint form via 1st class mail. I have never had any problems with the USPS. In fact, sometimes they managed to deliver mail to me when almost everything on the address was wrong. However, two weeks had passed since I had sent off the fingerprints and Mountain View still hadn’t received it. Mountain View sent me another copy of the form and requested I send it back with a tracking number this time. So I went for a second time for fingerprinting and emailed Mountain View that it should arrive on Saturday. As luck would have it, my original fingerprint form arrived with an apology note from the USPS attached the next day. Mountain View submitted the fingerprint form and we started waiting and waiting and waiting some more.

My last day working for High Plains Library District was May 20. Leaving HPLD was harder than leaving anything else in Colorado. I had been working there for almost twelve years and worked with a bunch of fantastic people.

My last week in Colorado was spent running around doing useful stuff. On May 30 I flew out to San Francisco with the kids and our au pair. Jaeger stayed behind to oversee the rest of the moving process. Our furniture showed up a week later. Jaeger’s mom was helping out with childcare and also helped tremendously with the unpacking. I spent the next several weeks unpacking and trying to fit everything into our smaller rental house.

Every so often I would get an update from Mountain View saying they were still waiting for the background check to come back.

Before I left my High Plains manager had expressed interest in hiring me for specific jobs on a contract basis. Since nothing was happening on the Mountain View front, I decided to explore setting myself up as an independent contractor. San Francisco requires small businesses, including independent contractors, to get a business license. The problem with the business license was that the “business address” was publicly searchable. My address is probably pretty easy to find but I didn’t think I should just give it to the public. So I spent some time getting an alternate address for business purposes. Eventually I got everything lined up and High Plains had me work on a couple of small projects.

Since I still hadn’t heard back from Mountain View I started exploring other job options. There weren’t any interesting librarian jobs in my area. I started considering what types of jobs I could do outside of librarianship and applied to a couple of options. By this point the unpacking was mostly done and even with job searching and contract work I wasn’t as busy as normal. This turned out to be unhealthy for me and eventually I realized I was getting depressed.

Once I realized I had a problem I decided I should prioritize exercise more and also find some personal development projects. I had been contemplating learning Ruby, Perl, PHP, or Python for many years. All of these are used within the library world but there isn’t one used significantly more than the others. Basically, everyone uses their favorite language which means we don’t work well with each other. As a result, I had never figured out which language would be most useful. However, when I was job searching one of the interesting sounding areas was data analytics. Many of these job postings had Python as either a required or desired qualification. I had just come up with a plan for learning Python when I got a call back from Mountain View.

Whoever Mountain View submitted my background check to did not like how Boulder had filled out the fingerprint form so they were rejecting it, 59 days after it was first submitted. Since I was now in California Mountain View asked if I could come down and get fingerprinted by their police department. I agreed and went down the next Monday. They thanked me for my patience and said results should be back within 10 days but they would request it be fast-tracked. I nodded politely but was dubious. Much to my surprise I got a call the next day with a verbal offer. After a week or so of negotiations I accepted the job. Somewhat ironically, the day after I accepted the job I was contacted for a interview with one of the other companies I had applied for.

I’ve been working at the Mountain View Public Library for two weeks and am pretty happy. So far all my coworkers have been really nice and my manager is wonderfully organized. I am really impressed with the amount of effort and thought she put into getting me up to speed. The biggest downside at the moment is my commute. It takes a little less than 1 hour to drive down and a little more than 1 hour to drive back. I don’t mind the driving, it’s actually really nice to spend 2 hours every day by myself³. However, it does make child care much more complicated⁴ and all things being equal there’s other stuff I would prefer to be able to do during that time period. I have contemplated taking BART and then Caltrain so I could work on other stuff while commuting. However, I just can’t fit that extra 40 minutes it would take everyday into my schedule.

Overall, I have been very lucky with how everything turned out. I felt a little adrift not getting an offer before the background check was complete but it was nice to have time to unpack the house. I have also learned that I really like the structure and mental stimulation of a full time job. In addition, I need to work more on procuring skills outside my current specialty. I either need to get experience supervising others and go up the managerial path or focus on improving and expanding my tech skills. For now, I’m not sure what path my career will take but I am happy to once again be working in an environment I love.

I have discovered that while Julian is fascinated by computers and phones, he leaves me in relative peace when I write via paper and pen. Unfortunately, this means I must be able to read my writing when transcribing. Handwriting was one of the few subjects I never got good grades for. However, potentially this will allow me to update my blog more often.

Around the time Julian was born I joined the Boulder Rock’n Moms group. It’s a great resource for mom’s in the Boulder area and I wish I had found it sooner. As soon as I knew we were moving, I went looking for the San Francisco equivalent which turns out to be GGMG. Their criteria for joining is more stringent, you have to have a San Francisco address, but as soon as Jaeger got his temporary apartment I signed up.

One of the threads recently in the GGMG forum was a mom who hated shopping but needed new clothes. She was looking for suggestions of what to do. Several suggestions were provided by others including Stich Fix and Le Tote. I had heard of Stitch Fix in the past and had been fascinated by the concept. However, I tend to be very cheap and mainly buy my clothes at the thrift store: the prices are good and often I prefer the colors versus whatever is popular in a particular season. The idea of spending $40+ for one shirt seems exorbitant. I had never heard of Le Tote before, not being particularly fashion conscious, but the idea of “renting” clothes sounded fascinating. You pay a certain amount each month and they ship via priority mail three articles of clothing and two accessories in each tote. They provide a priority envelope to ship back the clothes and send out another tote as soon as the first one is returned.

I signed up and filled out all the sizing info. They asked for general clothing sizes and then got more specific regarding shape and specific body measurements. To help figure out your style you can preview clothes they have and add the ones you like to your “closet”. In addition, you can choose the type of things you don’t want. For instance, I vetoed all earrings and gray and pink clothes.

The first tote I received had:

• A green lacy dress shirt that was a fantastic color for me and fit reasonable well
• A black and white dress shirt that was too big and I wasn’t fond of the colors
• A off-white cardigan that was ok
• A necklace that was an awkward length
• A bracelet that I liked the looks of but never ended up wearing

From the other reviews I read, I think I was pretty lucky for a first tote. Most other people seemed to have more misses. I ended up wearing the green shirt and cardigan and then returned the items. I rated what I received on style and fit. I wish the style rating was a bit more granular. For instance, I might like the color but hate the cut of a shirt or vice versa.

I dropped my first tote in the mail Wednesday and received an email that my next tote had been prepared. This time I was given the option to substitute out things I didn’t want. This was good because they had selected two off-white shirts, a terrible color for someone with a baby. I did like the cut of one of them so I decided to be brave and only substitute out one of the off-white shirts. I think I also made some jewelry substitutions. After I confirmed my tote they mailed it out and I received it on Monday.

I think the addictive part of Le Tote is it’s a bit like Christmas every week. It’s fun opening up a new package of clothes every week. My second tote included:

• A thin long-sleeve off-white shirt which required an under-shirt but luckily I had one that worked. It fit well and I like it more than I expected
• A green sweater – I liked the color though would have preferred it to be a bit tighter
• A blue long-sleeve shirt which I haven’t worn yet. However, it’s a bit tighter than I prefer. I’m going to try it tomorrow but I’m a little dubious
• A necklace which is a good length but it has several chains that have a tendency to get tangled. Plus, it’s sparkly so Julian wants to grab it
• A gold bangle which I like a lot more than I expected. It turns out to complement my wedding ring very well. Also, it keeps Julian occupied while I’m changing his diaper so he doesn’t end up squirming everywhere

The only problem I’ve encountered so far with the Le Tote scheme is I usually don’t wear accessories. I do so even less often with Julian’s tendency to grab anything sparkly. I’d be very happy if Le Tote provided the option to substitute out two accessories for one more piece of clothing.

Overall, I’ve found the totes to be fun and I’ll probably continue, at least for a bit.

UPDATE:
Because I am not shy about sharing my opinion, when I have an opinion, I wrote Le Tote and told them I liked the idea but accessories didn’t work for my lifestyle. Apparently they do have a “clothing only” box. I do not remember seeing this as an option at sign-up so you might need to specifically ask for it (or who knows, I could have just missed it). It contains 4 pieces of clothing and no accessories. My current tote has already shipped but I’ll be switched to the clothing only box for the next tote.

Kindle Fire Pros:
Parental controls (flawed but the best I’ve found)

Kindle Fire Cons:
Everything else

Back in February Calvin dropped our iPad2 one time too many times and it finally died. I am impressed by how long it lasted and, in general, have been fairly satisfied the iPad2. The one glaring exception to this is Apple’s parental controls. Because of this, I decided it was time to try out another tablet and see if it worked any better. I briefly considered a Windows tablet and discarded it fairly quickly. Their parental controls are significantly better than Apples but the apps just aren’t there. Android was the next obvious choice which I seriously considered for a while but eventually decided to try out the Amazon Fire Kids Edition¹.

Parental controls were the main reason I decided to give the Amazon Fire a try. That, in combination with the very low price and generous replacement policy (for the kids edition), made it worth gambling on a new software ecosystem². I debated going with the basic tablet instead of getting the kids edition specifically. The advantage of the Kids edition is it comes with a protective cover, a 2-year no questions asked replacement, and a year subscription to Amazon Freetime.

The Fire arrived a little over a week ago. I plugged it in and waited about an hour for all the downloading, updating, and configuring to finish. Once it was read, I added a 64 GB MicroSD card and then jumped right to setting up a profile for Calvin.

Parental Control:
In general, the parental controls do what I want. There’s a Bedtime start and stop feature as well as time limits for three categories: books, videos, apps. There are two major downsides with Amazon’s implementation: it’s definition of “books” and lack of Audible support.

The biggest downside to Amazon’s time limit categories is they’re tightly tied to the Amazon ecosystem. So, when it says “books” it means Kindle books. There isn’t a way to designate the Overdrive or OneClickDigital apps as “book” apps. The same is true with videos. In retrospect I was disappointed but not surprised. The tablet is obviously meant as an entry-level drug to further enmesh people into Amazon’s store. However, Calvin spends at least 75% of his time listening to audiobooks so it was very important I find a way to provide unlimited audiobook listening without allowing unlimited app usage. My first solution was to disable Freetime and remove all apps except Overdrive. However, later I realized a better work around existed: I created a second profile for Calvin. The first profile only has Overdrive and OneClickDigital and allows unlimited use outside of bedtime hours. The second profile has Freetime enabled and only allows 1 hour of usage. Neither profile is locked so Calvin is free to switch back and forth as long as he hasn’t run out of time in the Freetime profile. So far this kludgy workaround does what I need.

I was very disappointed to learn that Audible books cannot be added to a Kid profile. I am strongly in the camp that audiobooks count as reading. In addition, the Kindle app I have on my phone has an absolutely fantastic feature where it highlights the individual words as the audiobook is read. I was flabbergasted that this isn’t an option in the Kids profile.

The other fascinating bug I’ve found is Overdrive audiobooks do not turn off at bedtime. Calvin is locked out of the profile and can’t stop the audiobook or switch to another one but the existing audiobook keeps playing. The easiest way to stop this is to choose to login as another user. While this isn’t ideal, I think it’s something I can live with.

Freetime
Meh. The apps don’t meet the standard I would normally use but realistically they’re fine, particularly if used for only an hour a day. However, I won’t renew the subscription after the first year.

My Content
No videos on the SD Card can be added to the child accounts. In order to let Calvin watch non-Amazon movies we own I have to switch him to my profile. Also, as mentioned above, he has to be switched to my profile to listen to any Audible books or use the read-along feature.

Storage Space and WiFi requirement
There are so many problems with storage that I don’t know where to start. I knew 8 GB was not enough space to do anything with. I naively assumed I could deal with this by having most things on the MicroSD card. I do have “Install Supported Apps on Your SD Card” as well as “Store Photos and Personal Videos on Your SD Card” but it’s not enough.
When you run out of storage Wifi is disabled. However, deleting any apps in the parentally controlled accounts, including apps downloaded by the child using Freetime, requires Wifi. In addition, in order to modify “add content” to a child’s profile it can’t be in airplane mode.

There’s also a huge number of required apps that I can’t delete and 1) take up storage space and 2) clutter up my display.

In Summary
I prefer iPads. The Kindle is meeting basic requirements and we can usually force it to work but it’s a huge pain to deal with. Not finding Calvin playing apps in the middle of the night is a big plus but the Kindle is enough of a pain that in the future I’ll probably just go back to using the iPad.

I was listening to the radio recently and someone, I don’t remember who, said it was good to talk about who you gave money to. I don’t remember exactly why but it was something along the lines of promoting awareness of the charities to others. I know I should say something about each organization but it’s time for Calvin’s bedtime story so here’s the list without additional comment:

ADRA

American Public Media

Boulder Country Day

Church

Doctors without Borders

Food Bank of the Rockies

High Plains Library District

Humane Society of Boulder Valley

KUNC

SharingDots

University of Illinois – LEEP Scholarship

Walla Walla University

As an aside, while Jaeger and I mostly put our salaries into the big household pot, charity is one area we keep separate. This allows us each to prioritize the things that are important to us even if the other person may not agree. The list above is what I’ve given to this year, Jaeger’s list is different.

Sunday I started preparing for our semi-annual pilgrimage to Lincoln to visit friends. Preparing in this case means requesting movies for Calvin that I transfer to the iPad, loading new iPad games, considering if I should do another audiobook/picture mashup, etc. Once again, I was running into the iPad’s space limitations. Last November I researched and found a kludge to be able to access more movies than the iPad can natively handle. This works but is really, really kludgy. Also, it requires my intervention to get things transferred over to the iPad because the process is too complicated for Calvin to do at the moment.

A month or two back I got a Windows 8 phone (Nokia Lumia 521) which I’ve liked. As a bonus, it has a microSD slot so I could put the microSD card with Calvin’s visual audiobooks on it and he could play them without me first having to transfer them to the iPad. However, I was pretty uncomfortable handing him a live phone without fairly close supervision.

I started contemplating once again whether buying another tablet would make sense. I did very briefly have a $10 dollar tablet but, not surprisingly, it died fairly soon (though I’m pretty sure I got my $10 out of it). Out of curiosity, I went to Apple’s website to see what sort of refurbished iPads they were selling. It turns out they had several very good deals for iPad 2s.

I was strongly tempted to get another iPad. There’s many things I like about them. They’re durable, have a pretty good battery life, and a fantastic variety of apps for kids¹. However, they still have quite a few flaws that sit there and bother me. The biggest things that annoy me are the lack of expandability and ability to make it do what I want it to². Of the two, expadability was the biggest show-stopper for me. I just don’t want to spend the money required to get a reasonable amount of space on an iPad.

Android . . . well, I just can’t get excited about Android. I had an early-gen Android work phone, it was ok. Jaeger has a Nexus 7 which he seems to like fairly well. However, I just can’t shake the feeling that they’re a less sleek, disorganized iOS wannabe. I know this isn’t fair and in many cases Android is open enough to let me do whatever my crazy brain takes a fancy to³.

I mentioned above I recently acquired a Windows 8 phone I liked. I had seen the Surface ads so I decided to wander over to NewEgg and see what sort of Windows 8 options there were. One of the first options was an Asus Transformer Book T100, specifically the T100TA-C1-GR. It seemed fairly reasonably priced and the more I poked around, the more it appealed to me. Several professional reviews I ran across seemed general positive with a couple downsides. The Amazon user reviews were also fairly positive and included hints on how to work around some of the bugs mentioned. There were several things I liked about this: 1) The tablet size was decent ⁴ 2) It docked very nicely with a decent physical keyboard with touchpad (even if the touchpad was reported to be dodgy) 3) It has a decent amount of hard drive space and is expandable. True, after the windows install the 64 GB magically reduces to around 32 GB. However, it is a microSD slot which is golden 4) Good battery 5) Full Windows. This means that I can theoretically use this for work emergencies instead of lugging my 8 lb laptop around⁵ 6) While I expected the apps for kids to be abysmal, it would still work well as a movie player for Calvin.

So, after obsessing over reviews, I decided to go ahead and buy it. I was really hoping to get it before Friday so I’d have another screen option for Calvin. However, that fast of guaranteed shipping is expensive so I started looking around for local options. Best Buy didn’t have anything. However, on a whim, I looked it up on Office Depot and had astonished to see they had one in stock in Boulder. What was even weirder is they had a $50 “instant savings” that cut the price enough so once I included sales tax, it basically matched the non-sales tax but slow-boat shipping amount I would have paid online. My one concern was the model number was slightly different, a C2 instead of a C1. After scouring the specs the only obvious difference I saw was that it had a slightly newer processor than the C1. Hoping for the best, I placed my order while Jaeger said derogatory things about buying a tablet with a processor from That Other Company.

I picked up the tablet on my lunch break on Monday and plugged it in and impatiently waited. The Amazon reviewers were all very definite that you really needed to follow the instructions for charging 8 hrs otherwise Really Bad Things Happen. About 4 hrs in I broke down and turned it on, though kept it plugged in. It’s slow to boot up from a cold start. It is a full Window 8 install after all. Also, I have very mixed feelings about Windows requiring a Live account to sign in these days. It’s very Apple-like but they’re not Apple⁶.

Once everything got booted and setup I started customizing my tiles. The interface was vaguely familiar from my phone, though with more features due to its desktop qualities. Not everything was intuitive for me but I figured it out. I do find the mix between the desktop and the start tiles to be abrupt and not entirely pleasant but that’s more an aesthetic thing than a functionality problem. Overall, it seemed fairly responsive and I didn’t have any of the problems that the Amazon reviews had warned about, especially with the touchpad. Perhaps I got the version with some of the major bugs worked out? So, I spent a fairly pleasant afternoon/evening customizing the tablet to get everything just so.

The one major feature I am adoring that I didn’t know about ahead of time is the parental controls. Windows 8 has fantastic parental controls, at least compared to Apple which may not be saying much. You can set time limits on how long child accounts can use the computer each day, white or black list websites as well as allow websites based on various ratings, and restrict specific games and apps your kids have access to. I tested it out, it is fantastic. It’s obvious that the Windows developers have kids (which I sincerely doubt about Apple developers). Another nice feature is if the kid tries to access an app that the parent hasn’t allowed, they can click to ask for permission and it’ll pop up a login screen for the parent. Very easy, I don’t have to switch accounts to add access because I forgot obvious apps. The same technique also works for websites. Since Calvin is so young I blocked everything except a white list of a couple of sites. Once back in my parent account, Windows will also provide a report of what website my child went to, how long they used various apps, etc. I find that a tad creepy but I’ll get over it. In any case, I can’t say enough good things about these settings. It’s made me seriously consider having him use this tablet more except for iPad specific apps he can’t get on here.

The biggest downside I’ve found so far is that there’s pretty much no good out-of-the-box options if I lose the tablet for finding it or wiping data. I was a little surprised by this because my Nokia phone has a pretty good setup for both finding it and wiping the data if I can’t retrieve it. However, I suppose that’s the difference between a cellular and non-cellular device. I’m particularly nervous because I haven’t setup Calvin’s account with a password. It’s a child account but I still assume getting in at all increases the options for compromising data. I’ll have to research this more. I’m sure there’s 3rd-party products I can get that will at least partially solve this problem.

Anyway, so at this point, I’m pretty happy with the tablet. Just to torment me, Jaeger now mockingly asks me what the TSA considers my new toy. Tablet or laptop? It makes a difference. *sigh*

Calvin and I got home from church and I headed up stairs to change. As I came down the stairs Calvin shouts something. It sounded like “mumble mumble mumble and a robin redbreast too!” I absentmindedly responded with a “that’s nice” while thinking about lunch. A few minutes later Calvin says, “The peacock is moving!” At which point I started paying attention. Yes indeed, there was a real life peacock in our backyard.

Naturally, the first thing I did was grab Jaeger’s camera and start taking pictures. I don’t know much about how to take pictures with Jaeger’s camera so I pointed, clicked, and hoped for the best. After I got some pictures, I considered what I should do. Willow was outside sitting in the shade and seemed to be completely ignoring it, and vice versa. So, there didn’t appear to be any immediate danger for either animal.

I looked up animal control and tried calling some numbers but didn’t get anything helpful. Eventually, I decided to call the Boulder Humane Society because they’re open on Saturdays and I figured they’d know who to call. The person who answered at the humane society seemed very bemused and patched me through to police dispatch who also sounded bemused and said they’d alert animal control.

Have I mentioned our house is a bit hard to find? I saw animal control drive past twice before I was able to wave him down. He came in to the house to peer through the window and verify that I was not seeing things, there was a peacock in our backyard. Apparently peacocks can fly in short hops so he wasn’t sure what his odds of catching the peacock were. He had gloves and a net and tried some subtle stalking of the peacock which the peacock was having none of. The peacock manage to elude him and either escaped or found a good hiding space.

The animal control officer walked peered into our neighbors yard with no success. He then went across the street and struck up a conversation with the neighbor that flies a Scottish flag who apparently used to raise peacocks. However, she also hadn’t seen it. The officer gave me his card and told me to call if I saw it again.

About ten minutes later, I saw it in our yard again. It might have been hiding in our yard all along. Our yard is full of excellent hiding places. I called dispatch again and was put on hold while they handled an emergency. Then he took my message. The animal control guy took my number and said he was going to go back to his office for a net gun and he’d call me again before leaving to make sure it was still there.

Jaeger arrived home incredulous that he’d gone hiking around Long’s Peak and I’d seen more exotic animals than he had. I don’t think he believed me about the peacock till he saw it with his own eyes.

The animal control guy arrived and chased the peacock around for a couple of minutes until it took refuge up on our neighbors roof. At the moment, it’s still there and doesn’t appear to be coming down anytime soon.