Electronics

How much time a day do I spend on some sort of electronic device? My husband says my iPhone is always 'glued' to me. That doesn't mean I'm always looking at it. I do pat my right back pocket about 5 million times a day, just to be sure it's still in there. I feel disconnected if I have to leave it in my purse or my car. I check my email often. Facebook. Reader. Various games. I have reminders on my phone for gymnastics, ballet, piano, football practices 1, 2, and 3, football games on Saturdays, YW activities, scouts, and preschool. Among those regularly occurring events I have interspersed irregular activities, like the dentist and stuff. Let me tell you, I would miss or be late for most of those if I didn't have my phone dinging at me an hour beforehand and showing me why I have to get ready. But then there is my iPad, which for now is used mostly for reading, gaming, facebook and recreational purposes. I haven't entirely slid over to using it for documentation, blogging, and whatever else. My husband's iPad has become indispensable for him at work. He's discovered how to integrate it in amazing ways. Moving on, I have an iPod and a shuffle. We have three cordless phones and one stationary. Two computers, one laptop, a small camera, a bigger camera (the cameras I don't use very often simply because I don't know how) a printer/fax/scanner combo, several tvs and what else? A few cordless keyboards, a couple of cordless mouses, a couple of external hard drives. I even have a digital thermometer for cooking.

I was just wondering how often I find myself searching the house for a charger. How much time do I spend monitoring my devices, keeping and eye on their charge, cleaning the screen, updating, downloading, rebooting, syncing. Or perhaps even searching for a cordless phone because my cell needs to charge and I have to make a call. Or because the person I want to make contact with doesn't text (grrrrrrrrr) and I have to actually call them on the phone. Or because I need to talk on the phone while I'm doing something else, but my iPhone is too skinny and slippery to hold it between my shoulder and my ear. I have experienced the slip and fall on that deal - right into the toilet. A very sad day. I have a thought about something and automatically gravitate toward the computer/iPad/iPhone to look it up on Google. I can find nearly everything I need to know right there. Google it. CeeCee Wilkes would have saved herself a lot of heartache if she'd been able to just Google a couple of things before she got in the mess she did. I might have saved myself a few messes too, if I could have Googled in high school. Can you imagine?

Things are easier, and so much more complicated. Either way, I would never give up all of my devices for less complicated. I like having so much access to information and groovy new things. I love the App store, iTunes, Amazon Kindle books, iBooks, Google images, blogspot, weatherbug, my scriptures app, my banking app, TEXTING!!!!!YAY!, Words with Friends, Facetime, my calculator, Convertbot, the Chipotle app (oh yeah), Shazam, Flixster, and even....yes even clicking my phone on in the middle of the night and using it as a flashlight while I walk up the stairs in the dark or search for chapstick in the middle of the night. I'll admit I've even propped my phone under my chin to shed light on a book I'm reading in the middle of the night. It works. It doesn't wake up my husband and I can get in a good few chapters on the nights when I can't sleep.

So maybe my phone is almost always glued to me. If you call and I don't answer, it's probably because I'm in the middle of something. Rarely because I didn't have my phone nearby. How much time on my electronics. A lot. A lot of time.