Back in 2021 I had to take the cat to the vet.  The veterinary clinic near my house still had pandemic protocols in place: you had to park in front and call from your car, and someone would come out and take your pet inside.  I didn’t have a cell phone.  So I bought a $2 SIM card, good for a week of ser­vice, and a $50 phone to put it in.  I used the phone from the clinic parking lot and then put it away, doubting I would ever use it again.

A couple of years later I moved three miles up the road from Albany to El Cerrito, only to discover that I had a big prob­lem.  A few years earlier, the company I teach for had set up a system that allowed tutors to bid on students online.  To use it, I needed to log into my work account, which had a two-factor authentication system installed.  I.e., after I en­tered my password, the system would call me to verify that it wasn’t some miscreant who was trying to log in⁠—and since the signup page wouldn’t accept my Google Voice number, I’d set things up so it would call my landline at the Albany house.  Now I was about to lose access to that num­ber, and there didn’t seem to be a way to transfer it to my new address.  However, I discovered that I could transfer it to a cell phone.  So I dusted off the Nokia, set it up with a $5/month plan, and had the number transferred over.  The phone was still functionally a landline, because it never left my desk⁠—I rarely go anywhere, and when I do, the last thing I want to do is make or receive phone calls.  I did try to re­member to take it on vacations, though, in case Ellie and I got separated and had trouble finding each other while out and about.  So I had it with me when we went to Maui at the end of January.

As we were packing up to go back home, though, I discov­ered that I no longer had it with me.  I called Enterprise to see whether I’d left it in the rental car, but no luck.  I had no idea where else I might have lost it, but we had a plane to catch, so pretty soon it was two time zones away, wherever it was.  I tried calling it a few times, but no one answered.  The thing is, I didn’t care about the phone⁠—like I said, it was fifty bucks, so easy enough to replace.  And unlike a lot of people, I didn’t care about what was on the phone (“Oh, no, my pictures! My texts!”), because there was nothing on the phone⁠—not even a list of contacts.  What I did care about was that I couldn’t get into my work account without access to that phone number⁠—and my ability to stay financially solvent relies on picking up as many students as possible during AP season, which is a pretty short window.  So as soon as I could I got another $50 phone and a new $3 SIM card.  The next step was to transfer the old phone number onto the new card, and according to my phone ser­vice provider, that could only be done online.  The web site demanded that I enter a security code.  To my surprise, I actually found it, in an email from four years ago.  I entered it.  The site said that the code was wrong.  But no worries, the site reassured me⁠—I could change the code!  I just need­ed to authorize the change… by entering a verification code sent to the phone I no longer had.  I guess that’s what I get for signing up for cell phone service from the Happitec Corporation.

However, four weeks after I had lost the phone, I got a call from that phone to my Google Voice number out of the blue.  Apparently I had lost the phone on the bus while touring a pineapple plantation, and it had finally been found when the bus was being cleaned.  The folks there went to the trouble of packing it up and shipping it back to the mainland, and didn’t even charge me for it, which was awesome of them.  I guess Sparks were right: pineapple truly does fulfill every need!

I often get songs stuck in my head.  For the most part they are not songs I particularly like.  One frequent mental visitor is the French version of “Jingle Bells”, which I learned in my seventh-grade French 1A class back in 1984.  “Tintez cloches, tintez cloches, tintez dans la nuit…”  I mention this because a short while ago I happened across a reference to this song that gave the next line as “Père Noël et ses grands daims arrivent à fond de train”.  Wait, I thought, “grands daims”?  What are those?  I looked it up.  Apparently “grands daims” are reindeer.  Which would make sense.  So, if I didn’t know that, then what had the line been when the song had popped into my head over the course of all those decades?  “Père Noël et ses gendarmes”.  For forty-plus years I had just assumed that in France, Santa Claus was imagined to have his own paramilitary security force.

Near my house, and even closer to my old house, is an inter­section with a pair of gas stations across the street from one another: a Shell station on the northeast corner, and an Arco on the southeast.  The Shell station regularly charges a dol­lar or more per gallon than the Arco does.  For instance, on one day recently, the Arco was asking $4.39 for a gallon of regular unleaded gas, while the Shell station wanted $5.69.  And yet I regularly see cars at the Shell station!  I suppose this is a relatively well-to-do area, but certainly not to the extent that a lot of people can say that they’d rather pay an extra fifteen dollars to fill up their tanks than go to the trouble of crossing the street, right?  So what gives?

With Berkeley Bowl just a short drive away, I rarely have occasion to go to Whole Foods⁠—I mainly go there if I’m mak­ing dinner between eight and ten p.m. and discover that I’m out of some crucial ingredient.  That’s, what, maybe a couple of times a year.  But I guess there’s no need to speculate any­more, because I recently discovered that my Amazon ac­count now lists every visit I have made to Whole Foods since I got my current credit card.  I suppose that intellectually I knew that Amazon might have this information archived, and it doesn’t bother me that my account lists everything I have purchased from Amazon proper for the past quarter century, but, I dunno, it just weirds me out to be confronted with the fact that the second-richest man in the world has a permanent record of the fact that on 2023.0613 I bought a Brown Cow cherry vanilla yogurt.

What I can’t find at either the Whole Foods or the Berkeley Bowl are the chocolate candies they have in the bulk bins at Monterey Market⁠—they’re just like M & M’s, except the dyes are natural, the coating has no gross beeswax in it, and the quality of the chocolate is much, much better.  They’re great!  The only problem is that it’s kind of annoying to have to make sure that when you finish a given serving each color has the same number of remaining candies and that you never accidentally eat two of the same color in one bite.

…or is that just me?

Hey, tech-savvy people⁠—any idea why, when my students say they’re going to send me photos of their homework, more often than not the images they send are the size of postage stamps?  Is there some popular photo-sharing application on their phones that makes images default to 240×320 or something?