The title of this post is an overly dramatic reference to the fact that I got a new phone! Anyone who’s spent time with me over the last few months has heard me complain about the grief my old one was giving me.

It all began in March 2016, at Cousin Palooza. I was so hyped up for a hike with Hayden that I went up in my pajamas. My phone bashed against a rock, giving it a nice hairline fracture in the screen. Barely visible with the screen on, I decided to hold off on shelling out the $80 to activate my insurance policy and get a replacement device, in case I incurred worse damage later.

Over the last year and a half the phone started exhibiting spotty GPS reception and all-around lag. The worst issue was battery life; I’d leave home at 9am with a full charge, and return home with 30%, having barely used it. Unless I got it on the charger right away, it’d go from 30% to 20% in twenty minutes, and from 20% to 0% in five seconds. Cost me a number of good camera shots when they counted.

The tipping point came last week, when I dropped the phone like I had countless times. The thing’s solid, full-metal body, it comes out just fine. Except this time it landed funny and got a nice dent right where the power button is.

The button’s mechanics were pretty shot. If I didn’t handle it ever so carefully, the slightest brush of the power button would push it permanently in, triggering a boot loop. On more than one occasion I had to use the taser barbs I keep on my desk to pry the button out from the body.

It was near the two-year expiration date for my insurance policy, so I figured what the hey, let’s shell out and replace the phone, at least the screen won’t be cracked anymore. The replacement comes, and they must not stock my model anymore because they decided to upgrade me to the newer model. This new model doesn’t come in the storage capacity I had, so they bumped that up too. I’ll just say, it’s a strange feeling, going to bed with ~40% battery remaining. This model also supports VR, so that’ll be fun to try out when I come home for Thanksgiving.

It was a tender moment when I sent my old phone off gently into that good night. Insurance stipulated that I return the phone or face a $1000 fee, so after a few days of keeping the old one around to ensure I got all the data I needed off of it, it was time to issue a factory reset and ship it off to a facility in Texas.

I’ve been handling the new model gingerly until I get a case for it, but so far I’m very happy with it. Though, its model name doesn’t lend itself as well to a clever device name. The old phone, a Nexus, I dubbed “Jeffs’sNexus”. The new one, a Pixel, is tentatively called “AnderPix”, but I dunno if I’m sold on it. Open to ideas.

And I realize that the last eight paragraphs could be condensed into “In minor news, I got a new phone, it’s pretty sweet,” but it’s the most interesting thing that’s happened over the last two weeks; I really don’t have much else to write about. Driving is still annoying, as is sitting for much longer than half an hour at a time. This really precludes most activities beyond driving home from work and lying in bed.

I did go over to a friend’s house to help introduce her roommates to About Time, and I did have a few other friends over to play Betrayal at House on the Hill, so my solitude is punctuated with social stuff, but for the most part the last couple weeks have been pretty blurry.

Oh and I got some fillings yesterday, so that was fun. All y’all going to Dr. Larsen, know that my dentist gave him some praise: speaking of work done years ago, she said, “These fillings are solid!” She said this as she worked to destroy them unfortunately; had to replace them, new and old fillings don’t mix.

One other highlight this week was the launch of Star Trek Discovery. Watched the first couple episodes and I have high hopes for the show. This is definitely no Voyager or Next Generation, but neither is it entirely a child of J. J. Abrams’ school of storytelling. I’ll leave it to Dad to judge whether it’s true Trek or just new hotness.

I’ll leave you with this little fellow I assembled from a kit I snagged from our pile of swag on the recruiting trip. I dubbed it Steve in an offhand joke to a coworker, but—unlike AnderPix—I think the name’s suits ‘im.

This week was all around awesome. While I wasn’t 100% yet, I was mobile enough to head down to Utah for a week of chillaxing, with some recruiting in the middle of it.

Saturday morning I caught a cab to the airport and flew on down. Waited in a super long and slow line at the car rental desk. Only one out of three self-serve kiosks was operational; the others had generic errors on their screens. I wandered over and flipped the switch on the power strip they were connected to, on the off chance that a power cycle would be enough to get them back in working shape. Sure enough, after seven or eight minutes of booting (during which the line moved maybe five feet) I was able to get all checked in.

Ended up getting upgraded from a sedan to a minivan, with a couple free tanks of gas for my trouble. And what nice minivans they make these days; all the bells and whistles.

Driving on I-80 for the first time in nine months, well let’s just say I wasn’t about to win any manly-man awards.

Made it home, and Scout barely recognized me. He was pretty standoffish at first, didn’t bark at me but didn’t try and tackle me either. Finally after sniffing me a while he got the idea and was properly overjoyed.

That afternoon we headed to an escape room where we prevailed with absolutely no a teensy bit a fair amount of hints. From there we had dinner, then dispersed for a time.

Sunday was a broadcast, so we watched that from home, given my back situation. We later went and got family pictures taken, and had a blast wandering around Fort Canyon. That evening we had fun up at the Davis’ cabin, good food and good family.

Monday I went with Mom to go assess the physical security of the Adobe Lehi office. Read: waltz in and have breakfast ’cause they don’t badge-check you in that part of the building. From there we went… clothes shopping. Spent the rest of the day working from Google’s SLC Fiber office.

Tuesday was another work day, but decided to take it easy and work from home.

Wednesday and Thursday were recruiting days. There were four of us from the Kirkland office visiting. We kicked it off with a small grad student info session. I recall sitting on the other side of the table at these things, weird feeling.

Afterwards I caught up with my old professor, Dr. Seamons. His lab now has three students, none of whom know me at all. Weird how the continuity breaks so soon.

I went from there to meet Aunt Lisa and bring her along to a catered lunch with the Women in Computer Science group. Gender and tech, wasn’t surprised in the slightest that she had a blast chatting with everyone.

Next up was the Cloud tech talk. I prepared some slides based on a blog post that recently went live. The talk wasn’t terribly well attended, but I’m pretty happy with how the presentation went. I mostly sat out on an info session that followed, to give my back a rest. The last thing of the day was a demo where an engineer got interviewed on stage, to demonstrate what a Google interview looks like.

Thursday morning was mock interviews, where we each interviewed students for ~20 minutes. Nothing official came of the interviews, they were just to help students get a feel for what it’s like to be in a technical interview.

From there we went out to a local pizza place to have lunch with a few professors. I met a few old faces, one of whom ended up being Mattie’s CS professor, a neat coincidence.

Mostly sat out on the sessions later that day. We wrapped things up with Google Games, a puzzle-hunt-style competition, where code can help solve some hints, but not all.

Friday morning I went with Dad to do breakfast at Adobe, then worked for a while before heading out to War for the Planet of the Apes, with Dad, Steve, and the Thomases. Delightful film, glad it’s still in theaters.

Shortly after that got out we all (sans Hayden, sniff) met up for dinner in Provo, had a grand old time. Afterwards us siblings went off to go see Mattie’s apartment, meet the roomies, etc.

Then a major highlight for the week. Ever since I scoped out the trip I’d been terribly excited to go back to the Provo ice rink for some Friday night broomball. One of my favorite parts of going to school there. I was a bit late getting out there, and was dismayed to see how full the parking lot was. When the line gets long it gets long. Parked across the street, ran swiftly hobbled in, and turns out the crowd was there for a dance party of sorts going on in one of the other areas of the rink. I hopped in on a nice little game going on, and oh it was just fantastic. Swingin’ my stick, blocking balls left and right, girls cheering my name from the bleachers, totally worth the pain.

And oh deary me was there pain. I did a fair job of protecting my back, but it turns out that when you don’t do anything strenuous at all for one and a half months, hopping into a [broom] hockey match does not do your extremities any favors. I was left hobbling for the remainder of my stay in Utah, from burning muscles.

Saturday morning I went on a drive with Mom & Dad up the canyon to go see Tibble Fork and Mutual Dell. Afterwards I watched a movie at Grandma’s place with Steve, then darted down to Provo to do some tech consulting for Aunt Lisa and see a couple friends. One just recently got married and the other just recently bought a condo. Both on my todo list.

Sunday I packed and got ready to head out. Stopped by a dinner at Grandma’s for a while, got to see a few more cousins.

Now that I’m back in Washington I just can’t wait to be back in Utah for Thanksgiving. The other night I accidentally dropped some cheese on the ground, and knowing full well that I was alone in the apartment I still called out, “Scout! Get your food!” And nothing happened 🙁

I’m just now getting back to the level of mobility I was at when I landed in Utah last week, so at least that’s improvement. Today I worked from home in the morning, then headed in in time to compete in a science/math trivia contest. Got some help from a couple of classic movies (I know what “perigee” means cause they use it in the Recess: School’s Out film, and I know that CD player lasers are red cause it’s used as a weapon in A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (well, and also just cause I knew that one, but still.)) Killed myself though, when I failed to remember that in Battlestar Galactica, a show with obvious cues taken from Mormonsim, the home planet of humanity is known as Kolob. Though, even given that and a few other missteps, we were still able to pull off a victory.

Onwards and upwards.

The back is on the mend. Feels kind of like one of those silly never-ending quests in Zelda or Dungeon Siege.

“Piriformis muscle, what do I gotta do to get you to calm down?”

“Well it’s all the fault of this dodgy calf muscle you’ve got on your left leg, it ain’t working right and is causing mayhem with your gait.”

“Calf muscle, what gives?”

“Well I’ve sort of atrophied due to what we suspect is interrupted motor control stemming from your slipped disc jamming against a nerve root in your spine. Go take care of that.

“Spine?”

“Yeah you just gotta strengthen your core and such, so I can get some support here and let the disc back in.”

“Fiiiiine.”

Before I started physical therapy I wasn’t much of a believer in special stretches or whatnot. I didn’t stretch myself funny to get into this situation, so what could PT do to get me out of it? But these guys really know their craft. Yesterday I got one of those elbow-massages to help get one of my perennially inflamed muscles to calm down, and boy howdy was it effective.

Apparently this phrase was coined by some French psychologist, but I know it best from Charles Dreyfus in The Pink Panther Strikes Again: “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better, and better.” My daily condition manifests itself as a sort of budget, for time I can spend not on my back, and it’s some linear combination of time standing and time sitting. Every day this budget expands. Today I managed to drive half an hour in to Seattle, the farthest I’ve driven myself since I returned from California last month.

Another dimension is flexibility, and that doesn’t seem to be improving as fast. Even before this blew up I wasn’t the most flexible of guys. Never could touch my toes, even in junior high. Ah well.

On Friday I had friends over to watch Non-Stop, and on Sunday I attempted to host a Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang movie night. However, enough people couldn’t show up that wanted to see it that I scrapped that plan at the last minute and we went with The Incredibles by popular vote.

That Sunday I actually made it in to church for the first time in three weeks, and it was awesome. Managed to sit through fifteen minutes of Fast & Testimony meeting before I had to go chill on a couch, then got through all thirty minutes of elder’s quorum; made it longer through that since the chairs there had arms I could hoist myself up on to “de-weight” my lumbar, always a delightful sensation.

On Monday I had arrangements to see the sister missionaries at my place. Wasn’t able to wrangle up anyone to be there as is required by mission rules, so I had them over to the office rooftop instead.

That night I hosted a hastily-put-together showing of Much Ado About Nothing, performed by David Tennant and Catherine Tate, now on Plex for your enjoyment.

Didn’t do much in the intervening week besides work and more work. Tonight I hung out with the same group from Monday to watch a rendition of Hamlet performed by David Tennant and Patrick Stewart. Excellent acting, though I prefer comedies.

On the way back from that I made a slight detour to see a friend in the emergency room. Wrote most of this in the lobby. Now it’s 2am and I just really want to get this out the door.