My family makes fun of me because my iPhone is literally an extension of my arms these days.  And I make fun of myself about it too.  However, I thought I’d talk a bit about WHY it’s an extension of me and WHY I love it just so much.  I was a Blackberry user, but I’m firmly converted. I could never go back to the ol’ Crackberry.  For me, the iPhone fits me much better. 

My entire business life runs online. If I don’t have access to it, I am not able to work.  Yes, I receive phone calls on the iPhone - that’s important.  I get texts about work, occasionally, but more often than not it’s from a friend wanting to poke fun at me about something or to respond to something we’ve talked about previously.  The phone is really the least important part of it to me, but it is necessary.  If you hadn’t guessed, I would much rather write - or text something - than talk on the phone.  The iPhone allows me to sneak around talking as much as possible.

Since training for the 10k began, I use the stopwatch feature on the phone constantly.  We’re doing a run/walk training for the first few weeks, and that’s been indispensable.  I can listen to music while timing myself.  If I run on the track at the Y, I can use the lap feature to count how many (or how few) laps I’ve completed.  Best of all, I’ve downloaded an app called “iMapMyRun” which can be used to map out a location (including things like calculating distance when you run around a cul-de-sac or the block), gives verbal directions, tells you what your pace is, and can berate you if you’re not meeting a goal or a pace you’ve set beforehand.  It uses GPS to map exactly where you are and you can see graphically how fast you were running during specific parts of your run. 

I constantly use Weight Watchers’ app as well.  I can track my points directly from the phone, yes, but I can easily search foods by restaurants or style and get the points value before I even order off the menu.  This enables me to go to a new place, scan the menu, do a few minutes of research and have a fairly accurate idea of what I’m eating and how much it’s gonna cost me (points-wise - money is a different story entirely). 

I’m a movie freak, so I use the Fandango app.  You can view showtimes and movie theaters, read reviews and rate your own experience, but best of all you can buy tickets with 2 touches of a fingertip.  For a $1 convenience fee, I’ll gladly bypass the ridiculous lines at my nearby theater, blow into the theater and swipe my card to retrieve my pre-reserved tickets.  Now if only they would let you pre-order Twizzlers and water . . .

QuickTip, for the mathmatically challenged, is fabulous.  Since I usually give 20% in restaurants, I can figure out the tip by adding 10% plus 10% and generally not make too big of a mistake.  It’s the pesky ADDING of the tip to the total that gets me every time (math major I am not).  QuickTip has a slider that allows you to move the tip percentage around.  You enter the amount of the check, slide to figure out what percentage you’re going to give, and voila - it adds that percentage to the total and tells you to the penny what you owe.  It turns a #mathfail into a #mathwin.

CheapGas uses GPS to determine where I am, and gives me a list of all stations within a preset radius of my locations (I usually set it around 5 miles).  I get a list of gas stations and their current prices for different octanes of gasoline, and lists the cheaper ones first. 

It took awhile for the value of FourSquare to sink in.  It’s merely a bigger and better version of BrightKite - basically a stalker’s tool to find out where your friends are and what they’re doing.  FourSquare is private - meaning only people you allow can see your location - but it’s better than a simple GPS system.  Those in Richmond can post their locations to their friends and add tips and suggestions that pop up when you check in at that same place, or near it.  For example, I was at Short Pump Town Center yesterday and checked in on FourSquare.  A couple of tips popped up, telling me to visit the Apple store for awesome customer service from a specific person. Another one suggested a menu item at a restaurant nearby.  Yet another alerted me to a discount at a nearby sporting goods store.  For the voyeur in me, I enjoy seeing where my friends are - I’ve been introduced to a few new places I’d never heard of.

The Flickr app lets me consolidate any pictures I take with my camera phone or on the fly into my main Flickr account.  It also updates my Facebook photos and Twitter, if I want it to. 

Tweetdeck is my choice for Twitter apps - I like being able to separate with columns the different things I watch for, like people tweeting from RVA or those using a the hashtag for #writeclubrva. 

The Facebook app is much better than it used to be, but I still find it clunky and a bit buggy.  Still, I check in with Facebook more through the iPhone than I do with my laptop. 

Shazam is the most fun app because it puts an end to the annoying “What the heck is this song playing???” question.  Hold it up to the source of the song and voila, it tells you artist, name of song, album, and links you to a place where you can download immediately. 

Trapster is another new favorite of mine.  Using GPS, you can quickly add a live police checkpoint, a traffic camera, or an accident.  It blasts the information out immediately through text messaging to other users of Trapster with a specific location of the incident.  Ironically, a friend of mine who is also a police officer told me about it.  Now that more users are on Trapster, the results are much more accurate and reliable. 

A friend turned me on to Beejive - I can’t tell if I hate it or love it.  It pulls all of the IM programs from Facebook, GChat, Yahoo, AIM, et cetera ad nauseum into a single space on your iPhone.  This means that at all times of day or night, anyone who sees you online can start a chat - directly to your cell phone.  I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I know I’ll enjoy bothering random people while in waiting rooms. 

Boxcar uses push notifications to let you know if you’ve been @ replied through Twitter or mentioned on Facebook and a variety of other programs. I find it highly annoying, but since I’ve been taking a break from Twitter, I’m getting notifications of @ replies a lot less frequently.  You can turn off the random beeping and clanging sounds but I always leave them on so the rest of my family can be as annoyed by it as I am.

Now if I could just find an app that makes my kids quiet and well-behaved, I would hermetically seal the iPhone to my forehead for all eternity. 

If you’re an iPhone convert, what kind of things do you like about it?  Favorite apps?

I’m sitting here staring at would could be possibly the biggest pile of clean yet unfolded laundry I’ve ever seen.  What do I do when confronted with laundry?  I blog. 

I also had to go to Walmart today.  I couldn’t believe how easy it is to shop there - at 8.30 in the morning.  I had almost escaped without any Walmart experiences (you know, like seeing a child beaten in the toy aisle, a baby running around barefoot in a dirty diaper, really fat people in spandex - you get the picture) when while checking out, I caught sight of a woman pushing a child in a shopping cart.  The little girl was cute and probably about 3 years old.  And what was she eating for breakfast?  The breakfast of champions:  a Coke.  A regular Coke in a plastic bottle.  Okay first of all, hello caffeine - what 3 year old needs it?  Second of all - well, I don’t even need to discuss the nutritional value of a Coke for a toddler.  My head said, “Don’t Judge!” but it was too late.  I can never escape Walmart without finding SOMETHING or SOMEONE to judge. 

Mike is spending the week out of the house. I made it through last week.  It was odd that the only horrible night I had was during the week.  I think that had more to do with recovering from what could be described as the world’s most intense 12 hour stomach flu (the house was nicknamed “The Vomitorium” because with the exception of Mike, we all had it).  Every time I’m sick, I have one bad day during recovery where I just am depressed and cranky.  I was dreading the weekend and while I missed the girls a bunch, I was very busy.  I also spent a lot of time working on the room, hanging curtains and bringing pieces of furniture back so that the room feels less like a place to crash and sleep and more like a place to hang out.  I also met the downstairs tenant.  Her name is Kristine and she’s fun, nice, and we have a lot in common.  She was kind enough to invite me to a movie with another friend of hers, who made delicious tilapia and acted like it was no big deal that a complete stranger was horning in on her evening with Kristine. 

This week, I’m enjoying being back home with the girls.  I’m not enjoying the housework but as Ethan Hawke said, “Reality Bites”. 

Labradors can eat ANYTHING.  Thankfully she was busted before getting into the actual Pebbles themselves.  (PS - the mask was not about the cereal box. it was about the stomach flu going around the house.)

Today is the first day of the “official” separation.  Thanks primarily to Dan and Nicole, I was able to move the basic furniture into the room we will alternate using on our “off” weeks away from the girls.  It is surreal sitting here on a familiar bed in a completely different location.  I’ve done what I can to make it feel like home, but it’s weird - beyond weird, really - to know that my children are sleeping and breathing and living without me for the few hours I am not there.  It hurts in a raw way.  Hearing the words “divorce” from Lily’s mouth is also surreal, and I always have to take a deep breath before answering her questions.  Most of the time, I have no answers, and most of the time, she is satisfied with that. 

Today, my iGoogle page presented me with this quote:

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.
-David Sedaris

David Sedaris is an amazing writer, and one I adore, so I am immediately assuming it’s 100% true.  It has been for me.

With that in mind, my family will read this post a certain way.  If Mike’s family reads here (and I have no idea if they do or don’t), they will read it differently.  My friends will read it and either truly agree or disagree, or they won’t be able to help the judgment in their heads.  I get it.  I’ve been there. 

Saturday, some truly wonderful people are going to help me move a few pieces of furniture out of the house.  Mike will be in Pennsylvania visiting a friend. 

It’s a long story, but I know someone through the Twitterverse (ironically I have completely stopped tweeting, but that’s another story) who has been going through a separation. He has a young son.  One afternoon we met up at a play area and let our kids go at it.  While they beaned each other in the heads with balls and made the walls vibrate with their loudness (mine, not his), we talked briefly about what we were both going through.  Other than a scheduled group ski trip at the end of this month, we haven’t seen each other since and I wouldn’t call us friends.  We are acquaintances.  However, he was familiar enough with my situation to know that I had tried to lease an apartment near our house, but cannot afford to actually move into it. 

He called me a week or two ago and said he was going to be renting a room out in his house.  I checked it out - it’s a room.  Nothing fancy.  But it’s cheap, and he eventually agreed, after meeting Mike, to let us switch off weeks.  Mike will stay with the girls one week, I will stay with them the next.  Whoever is not in the house will be in the rented room.  I’ll still see the girls every day as I am on mom-duty every afternoon, and I can’t imagine going that long without at least a couple of evening visits.  As for how Mike will handle it, I don’t know.

We had a very raw counseling session this week.  I know that things are going to get worse before they get better, but I have been unwilling to deal with it.  I am finally at the point, and I think he is too, where we know we need to face it and separate for real and see what happens.  I assume we’ll continue going to marriage counseling, but it’s as fun as getting my bikini line epilated.  I look forward to it about that much.  I will say that I learn more in that single hour than I do in an entire week.  At home, Mike will avoid telling me the full truth about things, but in counseling, they come flying out faster than I can absorb them.  Individual therapy is always hard, but I see now why so many couples bail on marriage counseling after a few visits.  A root canal (and Mike can vouch for this, having gone through it recently) is faster, cheaper, and a lot more fun. 

We sat the girls down tonight.  It went the same as it did back in the beginning, when we told them we were separating.  I mentioned that during my on weeks, Daddy would still come see them a couple of times, maybe for dinner.  True to Arden’s form, she said, “Um, can I pick where we go?  Cuz I want to go to McDonald’s.”  Lily asked if one of us is moving out permanently (meaning she thought one of us was going to disappear forever), and we reassured her that is not the case.  Then she scampered off to make whistling sounds through a straw shaped like a pumpkin. 

This is not to say that on Saturday when I begin dismantling our guest room bed, they aren’t going to freak out.  They will want to know why, again, they will want to see the place, they will not get it until it actually starts.  Having been through this in our earlier stages, I know that the questions are just beginning and we are totally not off the hook. 

The guilt I feel is often overwhelming.  I want a lobotomy, I want to forget, I want to reverse time.  I want to change who I am, what I want, how I think.  None of those things seem to be available for purchase, so I am firmly stuck in the present that I have created by speaking the words that have been growing in my brain for a very long time.  No one says it directly, but many people want to wish it away. Hell, I do too.  This isn’t fun for anyone. 

So people will read this in the way they want to.  Some will blame it on the big bad wolf, bipolar.  Some will say I’m flat out crazy.  Others will think that I have everything they want and can’t I just be satisfied, dammit?  Others will understand, having walked in my shoes.  Some will tell me they are proud that we’ve spent so much time working, and congratulate us for taking the separation step for real so we can get some answers.  Some are disappointed with Mike, many are disappointed with me.  I’ve never intended to tell both sides of the story.  I haven’t even written mine, because it’s not important. 

No matter what happens, I will always be able to say I worked hard, I tried everything, and whatever decision we come to, I will eventually be okay with it.