Diane and I thought it’d be a good idea to get the new Covid vaccinations as soon as we could after coming home from Europe. There are signs at Safeway, CVS, and the like admonishing people to get their Covid shots, so I thought it’d be easy to get an appointment.

Ha.

I tried Safeway – nothing. CVS? Apparently only four stores in the area offer appointments, and none of them had two available on the same day. No luck at Rite-Aid, Stanford Health, or Sutter Health either. But Santa Clara County came through at SCC Free Vax, and soon enough we had two appointments booked at the brand new Valley Health Care Lundy location.

We got there soon after lunch – we were the only people in the waiting area. It took about 45 minutes from walking in to being vaccinated; that’s faster than CVS and the environment was a lot more pleasant!

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!