I haven’t posted anything for a few days because I’ve been trying to catch up with mundane life – tonight’s unexpected project was trying to figure out why our dishes were dirty after we washed them in the dishwasher; the immediate cause is that the detergent dispenser didn’t open when it should, so now I have to figure out what is causing that problem and how to fix it.

Apple announced this year’s new iPhones and Watches while we were in Europe, and I was interested in doing some upgrading when we got home. My watch is four years old and its battery doesn’t always make it through the day, so there was no question that I was going to upgrade it quickly. I was also very interested in moving to an iPhone 15 to get USB-C connectivity instead of Lightning, though that wasn’t as urgent. The Apple website showed good availability on watches and very poor availability on phones (2-4 week delivery time), so when I visited the local Apple Store, I expected to walk out with a new watch on my wrist and a new phone on order.

I started by looking at the phone – the 15 Pro and the 15 Pro Max, to be specific. I was very interested in the 5x optical zoom on the Pro Max, but the phone is huge! The 15 Pro was the right size (I had a 13 Pro already) and I liked the blue titanium color. I asked the salesperson how long it would take to get a blue titanium 15 Pro with 256GB, expecting to hear “weeks”; the answer was “we have exactly one in stock – do you want it?”

I did. It took a while to figure out the best way to buy it. T-Mobile offers “up to $1000 in bill credits” if you trade an old phone, but it would have required moving to their most expensive plan, which would have cost an additional $1200 over two years – not a win. So I bought the phone without T-Mobile’s “subsidy” and traded in my 13 Pro – done!

I was sorry that I had to replace my phone case; I was using one I’d picked up in Cape Town on our African trip last year, but it doesn’t fit the new phone.

By the time we’d finished with the phone, I wanted to go home and have dinner, so I haven’t bought a watch yet. I did make the mistake of looking at the Ultra 2, which is very tempting – more to come!

We had to be out of our room by 8:30am so that the crew could ready the ship for the next group of passengers. We went to the lounge and I played a round of Oh Hell, then Diane and I took a quick walk around Centraal Station and over to the Damrak.

Our van arrived about 10:30 and took us directly to Schiphol Airport for our 2:50pm flight. I expected to spend most of the time waiting in a nice comfortable airline lounge, but when we checked in, United told us that their “normal” lounge was being renovated so we should go to Cafe Flor where there’d be food, drink, and chairs.

Apparently United doesn’t have its own lounge at Schiphol, so they (and a bunch of other airlines) use a company called “Aspire” which operates lounges. And Aspire is renovating their lounge, so they’ve temporarily taken over the spot which used to be Cafe Flor.

They should aspire to do better. There was food (sliced pressed chicken) and drinks (Romanian wine) and not enough chairs – no power, though, and you had to go out in the terminal if you needed the bathroom. We left after a few minutes, visited duty-free to pick up some limoncello, stopped at the airport branch of the Rijksmuseum, and headed over to the gate. There wasn’t any food or drink provided there, but the chairs were much more comfortable and there was power.

The trip home was uneventful and we managed to stay up long enough to watch the first half of tonight’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The rest will have to wait.