I'm thinking of getting us cell phones. Although we've always gotten along fine without such devices, over the last six months there's been about ten incidents when having a cell phone would have solved a problem of muffed timing, inconvenience, and miscommunication. The main trouble is when John and I leave our respective offices each evening there's a half an hour of being out of contact while I go wait at the train station in Redwood City, and he drives over to pick me up in Palo Alto. If the train is late, or I miss it, or there's a major disruption of service, then he gets to wait and wonder while I fume and fuss. There aren't any conductors at these stations, and CalTrain is remarkably reluctant to make announcements over the loudspeakers with actual information, although every morning some bozo at the main office dials into his modem with the speakers on and every station on the 50 mile line hears it.
Anyway, cell phone services are a baffling maze and I've been running through them trying to decide which one will suit us best. The bottom line is there's no way to get around paying about $60 a month for service, and I can't figure out where that money would come from. There's a good deal on phones right now where they'd be free after I sent in a rebate coupon, so it's terribly tempting to just damn the torpedos and surge into the new century with the ability to annoy everyone around us with our choice of ringer music. But gosh, there's that house we want to buy, and some kind of European trip next year, and of course we still have all those credit cards to pay off, so I don't know that we'll do it.
Meanwhile, John is continuing his charting of his family tree. He spends a fair amount of time poring over old census records and official documents written in squiggly German handwriting interspersed with gothic looking fonts like Fraktur. He wandered into the living room last night with his latest find.
JOHN
"I've just deciphered this 1851 German birth certificate for my great-great-grandfather's daughters."LUCY
"That's neat. What does it say?"JOHN
"It says, 'Schaeferknecht August Heinrich Ferdinand Wallschlaeger.' Schaefer means shepherd, and knecht means a hired hand or laborer."LUCY
"A sheepherder, eh? Gosh, how did they ever save up to immigrate? You wouldn't think shepherds made a lot of money, and he had the wife and two kids to support. I'm always impressed by that kind of determination."JOHN
"Good lord. I've just realized."LUCY
"Yes?"JOHN
"I'm descended from a German shepherd."
Well, it made us laugh. You take your amusements where you can with this genealogy stuff.
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