Samstag
The kids came over today! I had been planning to bake corn muffins, so I waited till they got here so Lulu could bake with me. Sweet little soul. I baked with Henry when he was little, I baked with Em, and now I get to bake with Lu. I’m so lucky! And the muffins turned out great!
Yes, I’m frighteningly thin. Hate looking like a skellington. I’ve been eating so much better, too.
It was so great to see them all. The baby is a world class toddler now. She marches around with a huge grin on her face, just tremendously busy. And Lulu is my darling beloved little friend. And Henry and Jayla are such wonderful people! I admire them so much. They are truly excellent parents, and it’s obvious how much they love and respect each other. Heartwarming.
As I said yesterday, I couldn’t get my message notifications to work no matter what I did, even with a settings reset, so I did a factory reset on my phone this afternoon and now it’s FINALLY notifying me correctly! Hallelujah! Dave thought I was crazy not to restore from a back-up but I really enjoy setting up a “new” device, all minty-fresh and not full of crusty old forgotten apps and tangled settings.
Funny thing though — when it came time to sync my iTunes playlists, I was perplexed to find that iTunes was no longer installed on my laptop. Hmm, thought I, I guess Apple deleted it when my laptop was in the shop a few months ago. So I tried to reinstall it, but couldn’t find a download link for a version that would work with Monterey, which Apple installed while said laptop was in the shop. Some head-scratching and googling later, I discovered that iTunes no longer exists! It’s just music.app now. And good riddance, I say! What a piece of crap iTunes had become.
I imported my music into, um, “Music” (I’m sure Apple think they are cute and slick naming things “Music” and “Pages” and “Numbers” but damn if it doesn’t make it hard to google for info about those apps) but of course I had to create all my dozens of playlists all over again, which, again, is a chore that I find pleasant and entertaining. A deep dive through my library always turns up a bunch of audio that I’d completely forgotten about, including Elli’s homemade recording of “Charlie und die Schokoladen Fabrik”! (A German translation of Charle and the Chocolate Factory)
It took many hours to get all my settings tweaked, my apps set up (so many log-ins), and my playlists recreated, but I’m close to finished. And as of bedtime my notifications still seem to be working. Tomorrow I’ll sync my music and playlists over, reload my favorite photos, fix my wallpaper, and that should be that. Until everything goes haywire again, lol.
We started watching the first proper episode of the new season of Strictly Come Dancing, but it got late and we needed time for a chapter of The Martian (Mark Watney is in trouble again) so we’ll finish the episode tomorrow.