so that happened

 Had a somewhat woeful meeting (it's accreditation time) early this morning. Still a little bit sick, my hypothesis now is this might be a mild allergy-induced sinus infection; it feels like one. I'm better but not BETTER. I did start taking guafenisin because it feels like my sinuses won't quite drain, and because of my blood pressure I can't take decongestants (and when I did in the past, I hated how they made me feel). 

And then I taught my class.. Then ran home for lunch. Pulled my phone out of my purse to check the weather or something and......1% battery? 1% BATTERY? it was at 100% when I had left the house shortly after 7 am....

So at first, I checked - had I left an app open that might drain it (most won't, though some of the dumb little games do). Nope. So I looked at the settings and it said "your battery is failing" with a link for instructions on how to take it to an Apple Store and get the battery replaced.

But. The nearest Apple Store is in like Dallas, and even if I drove in Dallas, I wouldn't have time to go there until after the new semester. And I need a trustworthy phone for when I'm traveling! And I thought a bit more - I got this in 2019, it's an old phone by Apple standards, maybe I can see if my provider (US Cellular, who have ALWAYS done right by me) can get me a not-too-expensive upgrade. 

So I called. At first I thought it was just a central number but the person I spoke to was in the local store, she said to come in and ask for her, they'd get me a new phone and change everything over.

Well, she was busy, but she called over one of the guys to help me. And he did. Turns out for the cost of an activation fee, I can get an iPhone very like my old one (but with new guts- the inner workings and iOs are new, but it still plugs into a charger and will accept the headphone jack, which makes me happy - I'm not sure I'd like earbuds for working out, I think they'd fall out of my ears). It's an iPhone SE? I think? Anyway, I paid for the activation fee (it will come on my next bill) and also bought a glass protector (the one on my old phone served me well; there are some hairline cracks from when I dropped it a couple times, but it's not jagged like some folks' phones are) and a new case to protect the phone itself (and it's pretty - it has flowers on it. I can't photograph it because it is ON the phone.

But the US Cellular employee was very professional, and he worked as fast as he could (there was a lot to do setting up a new phone) but now I have a new phone with a good battery and maybe a faster processor or whatever these things have. And as I was planning to do it, I thought, Well, maybe I can save my photos (those are on the cloud) and maybe he'll move over my contacts, if I lose everything else it'll be OK but of course phones now are essentially magic and things can transfer by a scan. 

He also noted "oh, your old phone is one of the 3G/4G ones, they're supposed to switch that off in January, so after then your phone might not even work any more" so maybe it was meant to be that the battery started to fail. I had vaguely heard about that but I thought that I'd have gotten an e-mail from Apple or US Cellular about it, and I did not (he noted that the contact about this was not very good).

 (ETA: now I'm not so sure. I had an iPhone 7; it is not on this list of devices that will quit working. So maybe if there is still a place you can donate an unwanted phone, have it wiped, and have it given to someone in need of a phone, I do that)

So I have the old phone still. It's deactivated, I guess, but I am not sure what to do with it. The guy said I probably wouldn't get $15 for it. I know in the early days you could do things like donate old cell phones to be wiped and given out to, for example, people who had left abusive relationships and just needed a new phone and be given a number that their abuser wouldn't know, but I'm not sure that's still a thing - and anyway, if this phone quits working? I don't know. I suppose such things can be recycled. I'll put it away somewhere for now and figure it out when I have more time

At least everything got transferred over. I tried to do a backup-to-the-cloud before going in, but I'm not sure if it worked. I also figured out how to get my iCloud photo storage to dump onto my computer (despite it being a PC)
so now it's easy to upload photos here (I had been e-mailing them to myself). 

so anyway: have a cat

This is the art department cat. He's kind of a stray, and of course because pets aren't technically allowed in the buildings, he has a little outdoor house right next to the vestibule of the building. He came out of his house and yelled at me when I was walking by, so I stopped and said "are you friendly?" and he yelled at me again, and I walked closer to him and he came closer to me and I said "do you want pets?" and he yelled at me again, so I figured he did. And yes, he let me pet him.. And one of the faculty coming in referred to him as "he" so I know he's a "he" (I did not look that closely)