Customizing

Thursday of last week a guy showed up and made a mock-up template of the tops of the cabinets, and Friday Richard and I went off to the granite cutting place to lay the templates out on our two big chunks of granite and figure out how we wanted them to be cut. It was interesting to see the granite after several months, since in my head I was remembering it as a brighter white, but I still like it, so that’s good. We figured out where we wanted everything, and they taped the templates onto the granite, and in two weeks they’ll come back with it all pre-cut and get it installed.

In the meantime, it’s been all cabinets, all the time around our house. At this point they’re mainly working on trim and molding and attaching the knobs and pulls. There’s a few pieces that have to wait until the appliances are in, but at least it’s starting to take more shape. And boy does it all look pretty against those blue walls.

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A few weeks ago we decided that, since we were due for an upgrade anyway, we would go get ourselves some shiny new phones. Richard found one that he liked with all the bells and whistles he was hoping for, while I poked around and eventually settled on a fairly basic model, because I prefer my phone to be mostly bell and whistle free. However, after I brought it home, we discovered that my shiny new phone was missing the only ‘feature’ that I had really wanted – the ability to send myself a sound and then save it as a ringtone.

Luckily we had 30 days to swap, so a few days later, off we went, back to the store, and this time I ended up with this cute little LG (image shamelessly swiped from the Verizon website).

It’s red, it’s tiny, and it does exactly what I want it to do, which is mainly to just be a phone, and it also let me save sounds as ringtones.

A little bit of poking on Google and we found a site where we can upload a song and convert it to a ringtone, so Richard and I have been having happy nerdish fun tracking down all manner of appropriate songs for our phones – the theme song from Red Dwarf, a snippet of the opening music from Battlestar Galatica (the new one, of course); even a Jonathan Coulton song about zombies. Anyone who knows Richard would not be remotely surprised by the fact that I have this particular ringtone associated with any calls coming in from him.

Our plan lets us get upgrades every two years, and we were both struck by how much longer the batteries last on the new phones. So much more convenient to only have to recharge the thing every few weeks instead of every few days. Plus, the camera on the new phones is *much* nicer than the one on the old phones, and even better, I can email pictures to myself (getting pictures off the old phones was pretty much impossible), and I can text to email, or email to text.I know, I know. Most of you have had all these cool features for years now, and I freely admit to being kind of a dinosaur when it comes to phones, but I’m still rather excited about my shiny new toy.