So anyway… I’ve talked the spouse into a couple portraits in the last few weeks. She’s been a very good sport and when I saw her with straight hair on Saturday – after a haircut – I knew she’d have to be patient one more time – even if it took us about 10 hours to get organized enough (okay it toom ME – not us) to do it. Tah-duh!

As you probably read somewhere around here, Kev and I sync’d up on mobile carriers so we could save a little money and call each other for free – since most of our calls are to… each other. She’s got an issue at her end where only one carrier really works inside her building so that’s the carrier we went with – even if they generally have mediocre coverage. This mediocre coverage however keeps us from doing one thing I’d love to do which is get rid of the $60/month we spend on our land line. But the mobiles – they don’t work in about half of the house so we are stuck paying for telemarketers to call us all day long – calls that we never answer. You can purchase cell-phone boosters for your home – but they are pricey and may or may not produce results. So for now we continue to suck it up – unsatisfied with what we have but probably further unsatisfied with how we could possibly muck it up.

On the bright side, we are liking one aspect of what we’ve got now. We’ve moved our individual calendaring to Google Calendar which we both really like. We can maintain our own calendars but see each other’s calendar at the same time. And then we can sync the whole darn thing out to the phones at $0.01/kb – which is very reasonable for calendars – since we only need to sync once or twice a week. We can also put stuff on our phones of course – and sync back to Google Calendar. We’ve been after a solution like this for over 10 years – ever since we got our Handspring (nee Palm) PDAs back in 1998. Kevin was still using hers, I had given up on mine. I gotta tell you though – having this simple effective tool is great – a computer thing that actually works in a land of computer things that often don’t work. I’ve also loaded Google Maps onto the phone – something I’ll use sparingly but it’s nice to have. We also both have Google Latitude installed, which lets us see each other on the map for that day we’re lost in the midst of a crowded place. It integrates with the GPS in the phone and with good eye to the sky has been giving us three-meter accuracy. Hard to get separated with that.

Alright – that’s my topic of the day – and it still took about eight tries to write. But it’s done – tomorrow – something else. I have to scurry at some point and go pick up our tax documents. Nothing like waiting ’til the last minute to get your money back.