New Toy

It's silly to have three entries that center on a silly cell phone, especially one at the very low end of the Verizon catalog, but I now have my new cell phone. And it's very pretty.

The very first thing I did with it was to make a test video to send to Phil, who responded with a video of his own (which I inadvertently deleted after I watched it. :(

Then I came home to try sending mp3 files and .jpg files to the phone. It strips them off the messages, but I figured there must be a workaround.

I found a "make your own ringtones" program which would also format .jpg files to send to your cell phone, so I downloaded the trial version and tried it. Viola! I had my very first ring tone. (It was the mp3 file of Munchkin barking that I posted on a journal entry awhile ago. It is now my ringtone for Ashley!)

Then I tried making a photo of Brianna and it worked beautifully, but it posted to the phone with a big "DEMO" across her face. But that was all I needed to know that I would definitely use this program, so I parted with the $20 to buy the registration for it. (What a scam that is...you try a program, like it, then send them $20 and they will send you some numbers by e-mail that you can enter into your program--they don't even have to pay postage to mail off a disc or anything!)

While I was working on ring tones, Walt was out on the patio, with a glass of wine and an instruction book, figuring out his new phone. He can now finally take photos and send text messages without paying for each and every one and he was trying to figure out how it all worked. We spent time sending each other messages to test the new phones.

I've been having such fun making ring tones all afternoon!

Now the really silly part of all of this is that I get calls from Walt and, when my mother forgets which is my cell phone and which is my home phone, I get calls from her on the cell phone. I don't actually know if Ashley has ever called me. Steve has called me (but I haven't decided what I want to use for his ring tone yet) and when we are in Santa Barbara, there will be a flurry of calls from the folks there, but setting up some of the ring tones was just plain silly. Jeri calls sometimes (but mostly we text). Tom and Ned may call if they know that I'm out of town, but otherwise I almost never get phone calls on my cell phone.

But still I had such great fun choosing tones anyway.

All of our Pinata Group people, the people from our UC Berkeley days, all now ring to the Cal fight song. (In fact that's what started this whole desire for having personalized ring tones. I think it was my friend Jeri who uses the Cal fight song as a ring tone and I really wanted to set aside that tone for that group!)

But then I started getting creative. I went thru Lawsuit songs to use for Ned and after discarding The Monks of Poo (from a Preoccupied Pipers CD), I finally settled on "Ugly Butt." I'm sure that will be wonderful going off in the supermarket if he should decide to call me some time.

I haven't figured out Tom's ring tone yet, but Jeri's is a song she wrote and recorded which I've used several times on videos, called Kettleman's Lustige Streiche.

Walt was the only one who had an official musical ring tone on my old phone, only because it came packaged with the phone ("When the Saints Go Marching In") but I don't have that recording available to me now, so I chose another Lawsuit song, "Maria Moonbread," of which he approved.

I have Ellen and Shelly listed on the same contact and I used one of the photos appearing in newspapers around the country this week for their photo ID and then made a ring tone of "Going to the Chapel and we're gonna get married" for them. I chuckled when I did it.

I also chuckled a lot when I added a ring tone to my friend Mary, in Seattle, who has never ever called me, but who occasionally sends a text message. Mary is one of the smart people who knows what kind of spider ran up the water spout and so her ring tone is a recording of "Eensy Weensy spider."

For my mother, I chose a Perry Como song ("Hot Diggity, Dog Diggity") which isn't exactly perfect, but "oh so all but.".

Then I was trying to come up with a good song for Peach, whose real name is Carolyn and who is a huge Neil Diamond fan. Her tone is now a snippet of "Sweet Caroline," of course.

My favorite, though (I still have lots to go--and am not trying to get ring tones for EVERYONE, but just the ones that seem to work well) is for my cousin Kathy. We have spent many hours over the past many Cousins Days bemoaning the problems that accompany getting older, as we fan ourselves and drink more ice water. I discovered I had a recording of a song called "Middle-Aged Woman" and chose a part out of the middle of it where she talks about hot flashes. I don't know if Kathy will find it as funny as I did.

So that's what I've been doing since we got home from Verizon at 4 p.m. At 9:30, Walt finally came downstairs to ask if there was ever going to be dinner (fortunately, it was cooked; I just had gotten sidetracked and hadn't dished it up yet).