Double digit temps! Warm enough that I can get away with flip-flops to and from the laundry room. But still cold enough that the trees are wearing sweaters.
It's a cheap party trick: I pull out my phone, flip it open to check the time or send a quick text, and watch for the reactions. In the decades I've owned a flip phone, people have given me a few double takes. Recently, though, when I opened my phone to squint at a photo texted to me, the person sitting across the conference table surprised me with a "Haha! I love your phone!" And I did, too. I loved my flip phone. Then, in a deadly mistake of distracted domesticity, I scooped it up with my bed sheets and dropped it in the washing machine: Eco Cold, extra spin. Oh gentle readers, the tragedy of beautiful T9 predictive text programming drowned at the bottom of the linens spin cycle! Yes, I lost saved phone numbers, the blurry store photos I'd snapped over the years to double check prices when back to internet access, the text threads with details about addresses and meet-ups... all lost. Sad, inconvenient, annoying, frustrating, all of it. But the biggest tragedy, ...
For several years, in the valley where I lived in my former life, there were large billboards along the freeway with a man smiling a cheesy smile as he draped his arms around the giant telephone number 222-2222. Aparently, if you were in an accident, he was going to be your buddy and fix all of your problems. What more could you want than a friendly accident lawyer who knew how to drape his arms around giant numbers? Fortunately, I never had cause to call him. But now I am curious, because on the same billboards, with the same giant red numbers 222-2222, there is a cozy little smiling family. They are smiling because they called the number to buy a house. They may also be smiling because they get to drape their arms around each other, but I'm not sure. I've thought a great deal about why a family would buy a house from an accident lawyer, and about an equal length of time wondering why an accident lawyer would change his career to realty without changing his advertising strateg...
Where have all of the apple cider mixes gone? I can't find them anywhere and this is a BIG, DEEP tragedy. Many years ago a friend's mother asked me, as she shopped her way through Costco for her college-aged child, "If you had an unlimited shopping trip to Costco, what would you ask for?" Apple Cider. Of course. Once I had my very own Costco card, I made certain to get a giant box of apple cider every time I was running low, and I have enjoyed every packet that I bought in the winters since. For a staff Christmas party, I volunteered to bring hot apple cider, imagining a quick trip to Costco and then tearing open a bunch of pouches. Since I knew I would be replenishing my supply soon, I extravagantly used up the last of my carefully guarded stash. But Costco doesn't have them. Nor my favorite grocery store. Nor my not-so-favorite grocery store. What has this world come to? I am lost in a world of no Alpine spiced cider!
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