When I looked at my iPhone this morning, the home screen was missing a row of icons – I had five rows of apps instead of six. I hadn’t intentionally edited the home screen, and I certainly hadn’t deleted four apps!

I scrolled to my leftmost home screen and found the missing apps there. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just move them to their normal place”. But, try as I might, I couldn’t get them to move – they’d snap right back to the leftmost screen.

The phone’s software hadn’t updated overnight; there weren’t any reports of similar problems on any of the Apple sites I frequent; I was at a loss for ideas.

Finally, I realized that I’d somehow deleted a “medium” widget from my leftmost all-widget home screen, and iOS had insisted on filling the space with apps from the top row of the next screen. I put a new widget on the leftmost home screen to occupy the space, which made iOS move the four apps over one screen, and all was well, though I had to reorganize that screen to get things back to where my fingers expect them.

Then I deleted the widget home screen and recreated it to the right of the app home screen; that should prevent a recurrence of the problem. I hope.

I still don’t know what I did to trigger the problem, but I think Steve Jobs had the answer during the iPhone 4 Antennagate scandal.

I had been thinking about changing the name of these entries to something more cheerful like “Pandemic Life”, but given the latest trends in infection rates, I’m going to stick with “Shelter-in-Place”.

I had also been thinking about going to Costco to pick up a few things, but that’s not going to happen, either – fortunately, most of what I really need is available through their website.

On the brighter side, I went to two Toastmasters meetings today and won “Best Table Topics” at each one. Wish I could remember what I said….