Going from the top left corner, my phone starts with my mail
app. (I don’t have it in ‘permanent’ bottom row, and I don’t ever have 1,000
unread messages.) My email address is the first bit of evidence in the growing
case that I am becoming an old man. I’ve had a yahoo email address for years,
and that’s already bad news—maybe not quite as bad as a Hotmail or an AOL
address, but still not a young person’s mail server. But it isn’t just that I have
yahoo mail, it’s that I can’t figure out how to use any other mail platforms
easily. Each of my university jobs has tried to set me up with a gmail-hosted
school email address, and I invariably send emails before I’m done writing them
by hitting enter, or being unable to find something that I flagged for later.
The big downside to using the yahoo account (which I know) is that some servers
automatically flag it as spam, which gives my college students a ready-made
excuse to pretend that they never received the emails telling them when they
were supposed to have their lesson or what they were supposed to be practicing.
It may be an old man’s email, but it’s the email I know.
Next up is the calendar. This is the app that makes it
possible for J and I to be married to each other, because there is automatic
sharing. This app is also the arbiter of all final misfires about scheduling
problems. (Did you put your gig in the calendar? If I can’t see it in the
calendar, you don’t have a gig.) Looking at the calendar is how we know how
many babysitters we need. (Answer: A lot of babysitters.) If you know of any
more babysitters, please tell us. We’ll pay them really well if they can drive
themselves here. None of our kids even poop their pants anymore. At least not
very often.
The next app over is photos. I’m always telling myself that
I should take more photos of the kids or more photos of J, but my camera roll
is actually full of boring things like photos of weekly rehearsal sheets or of
lesson plans for the kids that I didn’t want to write out twice. Out of
curiosity in writing this I opened up my photo library and noticed that I had
83 selfies. I think I’ve owned a smartphone for about 10 years now, and there
is no way that I’ve taken 83 selfies. I investigated, and there were about 80
photos from when one of the kids (mostly Owen) got ahold of my phone and took
photos of himself making faces at it, and three great selfies (that I did take)
of me with J in a two-piece that she’ll probably never let me post online, even
though (or possibly because) she looks really hot.
The last app in my top row is the camera, which is
apparently (as evidenced by the rest of my camera roll) mostly used for taking
videos of myself practicing in the basement. That camera has seen a lot of
etudes. It is yet to record me throwing the trumpet against the basement wall
in frustration, although we’ve come close a few times.
The Weather app is up next. This time of year you only get
bad news. My saved weather places are Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, Paris,
Marrakech, Toronto, and Rehoboth Beach. Any one of the last four options sounds
spectacular right now. (It is only 19 Fahrenheit in Toronto as of my writing
this, but I’d still be down for a Canada trip)
The Settings app is a chance for Apple to try to make some
money off of me, because they can perpetually remind me with a little red
pop-up bubble that my iPhone hasn’t been backed up in 20 weeks. (And that my
iPhone can only be backed up when it is connected to power.) I’ve fiddled with
my iCloud settings enough to squeeze out some extra backups, but I think that I’d
need to delete all of my message history to actually accomplish another backup.
Or I could pay $12 for a little bit more storage…but it feels like that would
be a moral failing.
The next app is my first non-Apple application—a practice
tracking app called Andante. It’s pretty bare bones, but it times your practice
sessions throughout the day and also keeps stats. There is a simple recorder,
metronome, and notes app built in. I can see from the app that I’ve been
playing the trumpet for an average of 3 hours and 14 minutes each day this
week, and I can look back and see what I did during each session. It’s the sort
of app that I’m tempted to require my students to buy, but I don’t want to
encourage them to lie to me any more than they already do.
Next up is the notes app, which is one of the best features
of my iPhone. I think that it’s worth having a smartphone just to keep a list
of all of your employer’s addresses, phone numbers, and EIN numbers. (I did our
2021 taxes today, so it’s on the brain.) Here’s a sampling of some of my notes:
A saved pdf of the mileage form for Houghton College, a saved pdf of my vaccine
card, a list of all of the terrible things that happened to our cars from November
to January of this year that I was going to turn into a blog but decided was
too whiny/depressing, a list of LOC call numbers of rare books to look for
whenever I’m in a public library, a list of gift ideas for my wife, a shopping
list from July of 2021 (I guess I can delete that), the original sketch of
repertoire ideas for our movie music recital, a page of quotes from the kids
that I thought I would turn into a blog at some point and never got around to.
Owen, standing on the beach at Lake Ontario: “Is there a lot
of mud here at Lake Ontario?”
Me: “Yes.”
Owen: “Nuts.” Whispers to himself “Stingrays…”
James, pacing close to me then walking away, then pacing up
again, and walking away again. Finally working up the nerve to ask: “How do you
say ‘goo’ in Latin?”
Felix, sagely: “Know something that’s cool? Birds are
airplanes. BUT…airplanes are birds.”
I also have a note reminding me of where we keep our spare
key. (It’s a secret), a list of movies that we want to see at some point, a
list of donations that we made to a Goodwill in 2020 for tax purposes (I guess
I can delete that now), a sketch for a trumpet method book that I could write
(an update to the Arban “Art of Phrasing” using modern music, our travel bucket
list (Scotland, Morocco, Maine, New York, Montreal, Key Largo, Boston, Greece,
France again), a list of our regular babysitters and babysitter ideas, a list
of Flock of Uncles repertoire to try, the police report number from when Owen
scratched up an SUV, a different note reminding me of where we kept our previous
spare key before I looked for it and couldn’t find it when we were locked out
of the house (I guess that can be deleted now), a list of the scientific names
of several species of lily, and the measurements several windows around our
house.
In a similar vein, the Reminders app is incredibly useful. I
currently have overdue reminders to clean out my trumpets (I try to do this
once a month), to write a Valentine’s day card to J, to clean the kid’s room,
and to publish a blog. (I’m about to check that one off). The reminder to clean
the bathrooms is going to go off tomorrow. I get a reminder to clean them once
every two weeks, alternating with cleaning the kid’s rooms. I don’t feel guilty
about whatever state they are in until I get the reminder. (I’m probably going
to feel guilty tomorrow, because I don’t think there is any way that either the
bathrooms or Owen and Felix’s room is going to be clean by the end of the day.)
I also have stored future reminders to submit the boy’s 3rd and 4th
quarter homeschool reports, to write to various grandparents, and to check to
see if a pair of boots that I’d like are back in stock.
Yet another listing app is Clear, which one of my teaching
colleagues introduced me to back when I worked at LCS. Clear is great, mostly
just because it’s a very satisfying swiping motion when you cross things off of
your to-do list. There is some redundancy with the Notes app, but I have 16
lists on my Clear app in various stages of completion. There’s the main “To-Do”
list, which has mundane stuff like sending out my teaching schedule and answering
various emails, and then there’s “Stocking Stuffers for J” (I guess that can be
deleted), “Winter 2022 projects, “IKEA” (we are hoping to make a first-ever pilgrimage
sometime this year and are looking for kitchen storage) “Date Ideas,” “Sacred
Music Projects,” “Things to look up on Youtube,” (what does just v. even temperament
actually sound like on a piano, how can I do a better job of wrapping
presents?) “Things to look for in Libraries,” “Things to do with the Boys”
(swimming lessons, an aquarium visit, making a pinata, etc.), “Trumpet Ideas,” “Household
Projects,” “Long Term Expenses,” and “Blogging Ideas.” (That folder is empty
most of the time.)
The last app for now is TE tuner, which is absolutely the
best 4.99 I ever spent. Not only is it a great tuner, but you can adjust it to
several different intonation systems and set the key signature, then slow down
your playback so that you see exactly which notes are flat and sharp within the
key that you’re working in. (Unfortunately, the tuner only ever has bad news
for me. Slow, sad, out of tunes.) This one I DO make my students buy. As a
slight consolation for all of us who struggle against the trumpet, the app gives
you a green smiley face when you happen (by some strange coincidence) to hit a
note in tune.
I had intended to write about all of the apps on my phone, and
I’m only through the first quarter of them! It turns out that this was a more
fertile idea that I had initially thought. Part 2 coming sometime soon…
