Facie’s Ramblings

On Thursday evening, the first day of "The Verizon Plan," the kid and I walked into a local Verizon store ready to make my soon-to-be 7th grader a smartphone owner. A woman greeted us, and I proceeded to tell her exactly what we wanted: the new plan for two smartphones for $20 each monthly one new smartphone for my kid, a Galaxy Core Prime, which I wanted to pay for outright 1 gig of shared data for $30 monthly Nicole mentioned a cool phone case she had, and I told her we would look at it, but we had already found something on Amazon we liked. Then she went to the back to get the stuff. After a few minutes, Nicole returned with the phone, a case, and a cover, and explained the plan she recommended, which contained 3 gig. I said that I had yet to use 1 gig in any given month, and my child would be using wifi only at home, so there was no need to spend the additional money ($30 versus $45, not including the 20% off the bigger plan with my Pitt discount). She then mentio...

J will be 12 in just over a week. We decided now was a good time to get her a cell phone. The vast majority of kids in her class have a phone; some have had one for years. J never needed one until this past school year, when she joined the drama club, which sometimes resulted in play practices being cancelled, added, or ending early or late. During those occasions, she had to borrow someone else's phone, which was not so convenient, to text the hubby, who, like many of us, hates to answer his phone for a number he does not recognize. What solidified the decision was last month, when J spent a week at a Carnegie Museum day camp. I signed her up as a self-sign out, which meant, as the name suggests, that she could sign herself out each day, rather than wait for me. I had no intention of her actually doing that, but I figured if I ever ran late getting there (I was a 5-minute drive or a 9-minute walk), then I could just meet her at the entrance. Unfortunately, her very first day the...

This post doesn't have anything to do with my being kind, which I mostly am. But I was pretty sure I had already used the post title I really wanted, "Make a decision already." Yep, just checked now, and I wrote a post with that very name three years ago, ironically about the topic this post is going to be about! But I digress. The real story? Ladies and gentleman: Facie bought a smart phone! This is monumental for me! Can you tell?! I am using a lot of exclamation points! The details: My over-three-year-old phone had been dying a slow death for quite some time. It couldn't hold a charge for an entire day. To make matters worse, my car phone charger died, but it seemed silly to replace that, knowing I was going to replace the phone soon. Or so I told myself for the past six or eight months. But despite my stopping into the Verizon store a few times in the past five months, I just couldn't pull the trigger. Last week, when my phone decided to shut its...

Many people have blogged, tweeted, and commented on Facebook about the horrific bomb explosion at the Boston Marathon and the subsequent days-long manhunt, which included gunfire exchange and additional deaths. Mercifully and thankfully the tragic saga now appears to be over, at least the scariest part. Because there is so much information and misinformation out there, I won't bother to weigh in on the specifics. I don't think I can add anything new or insightful anyway. I do, however, want to respond to people who feel the word is a dangerous, sad place. You are correct; there is really no denying that the world is hardly all sunshine and lollipops. And I think I can speak for the majority of people around my age by saying that "back in the day" we did not have to worry about someone shooting up many people in a school, a movie theater, or at some event, or setting off an IED and injuring scores of people at a sporting event. (Of course I grew up in a small town,...

Do you have something or several things (not people) that you cannot imagine your life without? Or maybe there is just a thing or three that has made your life better? I have a few such things in my world, one which most people would find odd. I have this most wonderful, soft eye mask that I wear to bed every night (if I remember, I will take a picture and post tomorrow). I have thin eyelids, and light finds its way into my eyes when I am sleeping, thanks also in part to mediocre, not-dark blinds. But it goes beyond the sun, which is not even out yet when I am up most days, and includes my ridiculously bright clock. I could not, not have a clock, but at least I can block it out (and easily lift up the mask when necessary). I am not kidding you when I say that most nights, I think to myself how much I love my eye mask. Yep, it does not take much to impress me. I know some of you would say you could not live without (or at least would not like your life without) your iPhone and iPads...

Did you every notice how bad weather and holidays tend to bring out the worst in people? Sure, many come together in various, and sometimes positive, ways during those occurrences, but there are times when ugliness rears its head. Yesterday, western Pennsylvania was hit with some fast-falling snow, which happened to land on some ice. The roads, from the pictures and videos I saw and the comments I read on Facebook, were quite dicey in most areas. Considering this weather had been forecast for several days and this is PA in late December, not the deep South, the roads should have been in better shape. But on the other hand, you can pretreat all you want; when freezing rain comes down and there are a ton of cars on the road, it is unrealistic to expect smooth-sailing. But to read and listen to the number of complaints, it was clear that many (including the hubby) fell into the former camp. Admittedly, I was annoyed with the road conditions. Our taxes have gone up as has our house ass...

I am not sure when exactly I started doing this, but for quite some time, I have pretty much refused to go anywhere without my cell phone. Not because I am afraid I will miss a call. Not because I am dependent on my phone (considering my phone is stupid, how could I be?). No, I want to have my phone with me at all times, including church, because you just never know. I don't consider myself particularly morbid, and more often than not, I am optimistic. But thanks to the information age, I can know, fairly easily and quickly, every time something bad happens. And although I don't think the world is a lot worse today than it was when I was a youngster, I think people feel more entitled, parenting has become lax, and some other things that I just cannot comprehend. But the end result is that although I don't obsess about something bad happening, I know that it can, and I want to be prepared. A little over a month ago, I started attending daily mass three or four days a ...

This post is kind of like a "Random Ramblings" post (interesting that I just capitalized the "r" in "Random" when I refuse to use initial caps in my blog or post titles), except it is specific to things as of late that either I don't get or I find interesting. Here goes: With all the technology out there, one might think (one being someone other than I) that when you click on the "Find product in store" icon on a company's website, and an "in-stock" notation pops up for a selected store, the product might, oh, I don't know, actually be in said store . Since I am not "one," I don't think that to be true. Mostly because it has not been true for Walmart, Target, and Walgreen's the few times I have used this feature in the past 30 days. Third grade seems a little young to have an i-Phone, don't you think? Well, I do. But apparently quite a few parents of other third graders do not agree if I can believe ...

I have not hidden the fact that I think a lot of technology is ruining us. People become so dependent on their smart phones, iPads, laptops, GPS devices, etc., that they forget about human connection and even doing things the "old-fashioned way" at times. And sometimes people who are always wired (well, wireless is more like it) don't realize that not all of us are. For example, if you send an email a couple of hours before a meeting/practice/event/test change, you cannot assume everyone will read said email in enough time. There are some of us who still have our stupid phones, so unless we are sitting in front of a computer 16 hours a day (and sometimes that is not even enough), we are bound to miss things like that. But, of course, technology can be wonderful. I am glad I have a cell phone, even if it is stupid. When my relatives, traveling from two counties away, arrived late to meet me at the Steelers game, I knew what was going on thanks to my phone. And texting al...

Every year at this time, I find myself scrambling to get everything done. Yet I don't bake, I tend to have fewer than 15 presents to wrap, and I work only sporadically. So what is my excuse for being so behind?! My biggest labor of love during the month of December is creating an online photo album for both my and Brian's moms. It is an arduous process. I go through the hundreds of digital photos I have taken and saved the past year, upload them to a site, and place them in a suitable layout for each page of the album. Since more than half of the pictures I take come from my crappy, stupid phone, I have to make sure they are small enough to look decent. And it never fails that as soon as I think I am nearly finished, I realize I forgot to include a really great picture in one of the layouts, which means I have to redo the page to fit more pictures or I have to part with a picture I really liked. Despite the time this takes, it is a gift for me as much as it is for our moms ...

It is pretty rare for me to write a post not even 24 hours after I posted my last one. But I read a supremely annoying article on Yahoo today (from the New York Times ), and I had to comment on it. Here is the link, if you want to read it for yourself. In the meantime, let me summarize: You can apparently do almost everything you would ever want to do (and things you probably did not even know were possible) with a smart phone. Therefore, you don't need a point-and-shoot digital camera, a camcorder, a GPS system, or a digital music player. And apparently the desktop computer and thumb drive have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Excuse me while I go throw out all of those things and go directly to nearest Apple store so I can buy a super-smart phone. I also need to burn my desktop computer, but how about if I finish this post first, okay? We have a quite-old desktop computer. This may be a bad example, because the computer is now at the point where it turns itself off several tim...