Lunch With the Gallmeyers

I cracked the glass on my Samsung Note 2, a smartphone that has been mostly a disappointment the past two and a half years. I think it was in the neighborhood of $500 when I got it, and it did have a gloriously large screen. My first smartphone, I didn't even select, Corinna just came home from the T-Mobile store and I had a new phone. It was okay, an LG Somethingorother, it hooked me on the smartphone concept (before that, I just had a red phone, one that flipped open and required you to push the same key two or three times for a letter, meaning that I didn't even use it much for texting).

Believe it or not, this photo is actually relevant. Kinda.

Anyway, that LG phone was awkward when it came to docking to my Macs but it would mount essentially like an external hard drive and I could copy tunes into the music folder, swap photos around, etc. Not so with my Samsung. I don't think this is Apple's fault because my LG phone might not have been able to 'sync' on contact, but I could at least force an interface between it and a Mac. Apple and Samsung get along about as well as the United States and the U.S.S.R. did during the Cold War. Maybe not even quite that well, if those companies had nukes I'm pretty sure they'd have pushed the button on each other by now.

So whatever, I'm not switching away from my Macs. I wanted to switch to the iPhone when they introduced the plus, a screen just as big as the Note but in an iPhone, which I knew would not only talk to my Mac, it would flirt with it, eventually leave the party with it, wake up in its arms the next morning knowing it was true love. But I'm not one to just chuck something that cost $500, so I grudgingly kept carrying that damned Samsung around as it got laggier and slower. I couldn't put tunes on it. If I shot a phone pic and wanted it on my Mac, I had to send myself an email.

I worried a little about the switch as far as bringing my contacts over. There's an app for that, of course, and after the T-Mobile guy gave up on getting it to work, I went to the Apple Store where I spent almost three hours trying to make it happen. The Apple store guys were super helpful, and it almost worked. I think if I'd made one or two more attempts, maybe, but at a certain point I realized I could key it all in from scratch in less time, so I just went ahead and set up the iPhone 6S Plus as a new phone. Sure enough, it loved my Mac, instantly grabbed all the contacts and my iTunes, all that. I can still power on my Android, read contact info through the spiderweb of cracks in its screen and punch them in to the iPhone as needed.

This phone is everything I thought the Note would be but wasn't.

So anyway, that picture. Not an iPhone picture, I shot that with my Nikon, and it's not fantastic photography—I'm still learning the SB-800 speedlight, and that harsh straight overhead sunlight is a challenge every time. But I'm sitting at my desk at work and I get the ping of a new text message, a number I don't recognize by sight, but it's a 913 number. Asking me when I'd go to lunch because, 'I'm in town.'

I tried, but failed, to figure out who would have a 913 number, be coming into town, and want to have lunch with me. So I had to send a text back saying, okay, but who the hell are you? It was Brian Gallmeyer and his fiancé. And her cousin. I took them Papu's, an excellent little mediterranean restaurant, reasonable as hell, that happens to be in a Shell gas station around the corner from my work.

The transformation since Brian and Cheryl got together is remarkable. I don't think he'd worked a straight job with a time clock in fifteen years, he was the kind of guy who would conspire to get someone to drop him off in Santa Fe so he could bike home. Now he's working a regular job, doesn't ride much, he's doing the whole suburban new house, new car thing, and amazingly seems to be loving it. But going on a bike tour with almost no money, basically just your wits to get you by, well, that's a challenging lifestyle. So is the keep up with the Joneses thing, so as long as you look at those difficulties as part of an adventure, I guess that can be fun, too.

Brian found it endlessly amusing that I'd texted him back asking who the hell he was on account of switching phones.