Days

I'm sure I made this observation last year (and I know I'll make it again next year), that I used to mourn the end of the Summer, the end to my unstructured days, the beginning of the school year. Now, as a parent, I can't wait.

(Well, no, that isn't entirely true.)

School begins later this week for my eight-year-old, but this almost took me by surprise — I thought it was next week, I'm not sure why. But it starts in fits and starts: Thursday is a half-day (not even), Friday is a full day, but then Monday is a day off (for Labor Day), Tuesday and Wednesday are full days, and then Thursday and Friday are days off. Two weeks later, a full week of school at last.

I'm looking forward to the beginning of my unstructured days

You may never need to know, but now you'll know where to look.

If there is but one essential piece of information available on the Internet — this is it.

Bamboo

It's been an anxious just-about-two-months waiting for my new iPhone case to arrive. I preordered, so I got ahead in the queue (for whatever that was worth), and a very generous discount, but because these Grove cases are mostly handmade, in a small shop in Oregon (even the aluminum bezels are anodized there), they tend to be kinda slow to manufacture. But mine has arrived at last.

(One thing I discovered, while waiting and waiting and waiting and checking for updates — patience isn't my strong suit — is how pointless Facebook really is. Grove has a Facebook page, where updates are posted from time to time, but mostly it's just short bursts of blah blah blah from customers, interspersed with people asking for information about the status of their orders and being politely told to send an email, instead. And more of the same from others who didn't get that message. I think I'll go back to letting this entire phenomenon pass me by, thanks.)

I wish there were a way to adequately describe the scent — the lovely aroma of wood, with a hint of what seems to be lemon. That must be the oil the case has been hand-rubbed with, to bring out the grain in the bamboo. (I can still smell it in my office.) The wood is otherwise unfinished (with no varnish or polyurethane coating), and I'm told it will wear it's age attractively with use.

It's very nicely packaged, too. The remainder of the wooden block the case pieces were cut from serves first as a sort of package, then can be used as a picture frame.

I have become accustomed (reluctantly) to using the iPhone without a case, though with persistent uncertainty — it's always felt fragile and delicate and small in my hands (even though it isn't, really). This bamboo case is thin, though not insubstantial, and it seems to add just enough dimension to the phone to make it slightly more comfortable to hold.



The case has been so carefully designed and manufactured that it just fits over the phone, with only friction (believe it or not) to hold it in place. The two pieces (that's the lower part, shown loose in the photo above) slide on and stay on, unless you remove them. Or, in my case, unless you place the phone in a very snug-fitting canvas case, and the added size makes it difficult to get the phone in and out, and when you try to remove it, the bottom half gets stuck. That was a disappointment (though the case I've been using was never designed for the iPhone 4 to begin with).

Which brings me to my only other disappointment thus far — the hole in the bottom of the case for the dock connector is just a bit too small to accommodate any of the dock cables I have. (I've been planning on getting a SendStation Dock Extender, anyway, but I might need to tinker with it a bit to get it to work.) The lower part of the case sides off easily, but I'm concerned that constantly removing it will inevitably lead to scratches, no matter how careful I am.

This is a very attractive, very beautiful iPhone case. It might not be the most durable (most cases are made from silicone, or plastic), but I like the warm, organic quality of the wood, and that's a sacrifice I'm more than willing to make. (And if your buttons are pushed by buzzwords like "sustainability" and "responsible," this is undoubtedly the case for you.) To be honest, it does seem expensive at $69.00 ($89.00 if you have the back custom engraved, by laser), though perhaps less so when you understand how much care went into this, and how much of the work was done by hand.

The Wild Green Yonder

Commerce

I've just purchased $300 worth of books (with the proceeds from my recent adventures in eBay), from a bookstore I've never used before: The Book Depository. What could possibly go wrong?

Prices — at least, the prices of the books I was looking at — seemed reasonably competitive with Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, but what made the difference for me was that I had a coupon for 10% off (and I knew I'd be placing an enormous order, so it would make a difference), and the fact that I could pay via PayPal (and avoid the trouble of having to transfer money into my Checking account to pay it out again).

Here's the part I don't understand, though: the free shipping. I just assumed that, although The Book Depository is a British retailer, they would have a fulfillment operation here in the US. But they don't — they're shipping everything by Air Mail. And if that weren't odd enough, they seem to be shipping each of the 18 or 19 books I ordered separately. (At least, I think they are — the first arrived this afternoon.) I suppose that might make sense, if various items were sent from different warehouse locations (we'll see how the other items arrive), but I can't help but wonder how they're making any money at this.

This all reminds me of the excitement of the pioneering days of Internet commerce, when retailers were willing to suffer enormous losses in a desperate attempt to grab mindshare. A friend of mine used to refer to the early days of Barnes and Noble's web site as "The Great Barnes and Noble Land Grab," because they were offering a discount coupon of $10 off any order more than $10, and virtually no restrictions on how often it could be used. (I bought so much stuff with so many transactions that my bank assumed my debit card had been stolen.)

Numbers

I used to have a head for numbers. No particular aptitude, mind you, but enough to get by in doing my own tax returns, and keeping my checkbook balanced, that sort of thing. I've run my own business, even done my own bookkeeping. And I'm good at following directions. That usually helps.

It was today, however, when faced with the task of filling out a new set of W-4 forms, that I began to wonder if all that had come to an unexpected end. (The "following directions" part, too.) I must have filled out that worksheet — you know, the one that's supposed to help you determine how many exemptions to claim? — I must have filled out that worksheet three or four times, and somehow I kept arriving at the conclusion that I ought to claim something like 24 or 25 exemptions.

I tried again, this time without itemizing deductions (even though we undoubtedly will be), with the hope that following the simple route might make more sense. It didn't — but at least this time I was only claiming six or seven exemptions.

In the end, I gave up and just went with one less than whatever we decided to go with the last time we had to fill these forms out. (We had a bad, bad year for taxes last year, and we're hoping to blunt the ill effects this year as much as possible.)

Drama

I enjoyed Degrassi so much more when it was about real kids — not this idealized fantasy of what teen years could be, should be, if you were living on your own, or playing in a band (or both), or somehow handed every opportunity you ever dreamed possible (an acting career, a modelling career, a recording contract, an internship in New York, two weeks in a lavish penthouse apartment in New York with your boyfrend, without parents).

It used to have something to say. That, and it used to be so much better written.

Apparently, the series will be trying something new this year — after having been shuffled off from broadcast television in Canada (where it's produced, and has aired for almost a decade) to a cable channel (due to a decline in ratings), the series will be adopting the popular form of the telenovela — or, as they used to be called in the days when I grew up watching them, the soap opera.

The thing about a soap opera I've always loved best is how a simple plot can very quickly go ridiculously, completely over the top, and how much fun that can be to watch. I am, in fact, as I write this, watching the first episode of the new season, and it's become increasingly obvious that this is the approach the series has now embraced. I'm not sure why it took three-quarters of the two-hour episode for the creepy rich siblings (introduced last year) to kiss, but there we are.

This may well be the only note the series has left to play. At this point, I think it's the only thing that might keep me watching with any real interest.