I have now got me a cell phone. A cute little Samsung, currently set up to play a waltz when it rings. I had originally intended to just go with the cheapest phone that went with my service plan, but my gadget-loving nature won out. I paid a little extra and got a more aesthetically pleasing phone with a couple of nifty features. (It does count as a matter of aesthetics if your hindbrain insists that it must have a phone that flips open because that was the way the communicators on the old Star Trek show worked, right?)

I'm obscurely thrilled to discover that I can send a text message from my phone to any e-mail address. And that anyone with an e-mail account can send a text message to my phone. I'm not entirely certain what I could do with this that wouldn't be accomplished more easily and expeditiously with a simple phone call or e-mail, but that's hardly the point, is it?

Anyway, the whole process of choosing the phone, and buying the phone, and getting the calling plan set up and activated (by a couple of Verizon salespeople who were helpful and patient, but not exactly models of efficiency and dispatch), and reading the manual for the phone, and tweaking the setup on the phone, and playing with the phone pretty much ate up most of today.

Also had a nice long chat (on the boring old landline) with my friend Steve. Steve and I were undergrads together at Yale, and then grad students in the Chem dept at UC Berkeley. We were roomates our first year in grad school. We both play the guitar (Steve much more skillfully and seriously than I), and we both read science fiction (me perhaps more avidly than Steve), and he's just a cool guy. He graduated a couple of years ago, and now works for Abbott labs in Chicago. It was great to talk to him. He's been building up quite a nice home studio set up, and encouraged me to come out to Chicago sometime and play some guitar.

So many people to visit. So little time. Sigh.

Well, it's getting late. Think I'll go do a little reading before I go to bed.

Or maybe I'll just flip open my cell phone and practice saying, "Spock to Enterprise."