Back in Seattle

This morning I decided to leave the AirBnB at around 9:30, and I got home at around noon. My new iPhone 12 mini was waiting for me (along with an extremely needy Fiona, who needed a couple hours of lap time), and after getting the iPhone set up I went for a nice long walk, and ironically got more exercise today than I did the whole time I was in Port Angeles (a city I ostensibly went to in order to get plenty of outdoor exercise). Oh well.

After dinner I realized I’d left my fancy Nalgene bottle in the fridge at the AirBnB. Dangit. Not really worth trying to get it back (shipping probably would cost more than just getting a new one, I think?), although I let the hosts know in case they want to figure out how much it would cost to ship it or if they just want to keep it for themselves. It’s mostly frustrating because it was a gift from someone around 10 years ago (when my major health issues were starting up and it seemed like better hydration would be the key), but they gave me two of them and I still have the other one. Plus a pile of other water bottles I’ve picked up over the years. Mostly I hate accidentally losing thoughtful gifts.

Anyway the iPhone 12 mini is quite nice, and I feel like I made the right choice. It’s just the right size for a phone and I can actually operate it one-handed, and the camera is so far at least somewhat better than the XR’s was (both in terms of low-light performance and also having the wide-angle lens, which will be nice for a lot of things) although I haven’t really put it through its paces just yet. Also the screen is way sharper, not that it matters so much to my aging eyes anymore.

I’ve put my XR up for sale on eBay in case anyone wants to own a piece of my personal history or whatever. I figure as long as it sells for over $275 or so I’ll have made out better than the Apple trade-in program, and it’ll also be better for whomever ends up with it (since they won’t be paying Apple’s ridiculous refurbishment cost).

I also like the new red color. It’s not the same red as the 8/XR/SE2 red, but it’s still a nice red. This is the third (PRODUCT)RED edition I’ve gotten in a row, and I figured, why end the streak? The green and the blue both look okay too, but the red fits my usual wardrobe a bit better and I don’t get the hate that this lighter shade is getting.

Before I settled on the mini I was considering the 12 Pro for its supposedly-better camera array (telephoto lens and LiDAR sensor) but all of the reviews were saying that it didn’t really make any appreciable difference, and in some cases the LiDAR made things worse, and I really wanted to get back to the smaller form factor.

Size-wise, the phone is slightly smaller than the iPhone 6S, but due to the much thinner bezels the screen is the same width and much taller. It’ll take some getting used to having a phone this size again, but every time I’ve gone back to the 6S for a few days (just because) I’ve always ended up appreciating the smaller size. Now I can do it without having to sigh and complain when I go back to the big chonker, because the big chonker is no longer a concern.

Basically it’s everything I liked about the iPhone 8 (which was previously my favorite iPhone overall; I had actually lamented being forced to upgrade to the XR when I switched carriers) combined with everything I wanted to like about the XR, with the design sense of the iPhone 5. The XR always felt like a bit of a… well, not a downgrade, but a degradation, and the 12 mini fixes all of the problems I had with it. Oh, and finally having USB 3 syncing is nice. So much faster.1 (I hope the rumors of Apple moving to a purely-wireless charge-and-sync world aren’t true. Especially since I suspect the “-and-sync” part really means “using iCloud for everything,” which would be unfortunate.)

Oh, also, I upgraded my MacBook to macOS 11 Big Sur and I actually… like it? So I’ll probably upgrade my iMac as well, as soon as I can be sure that none of my software will break, or at least won’t be any more broken than it was by the disaster that was Catalina.

Anyway. Tonight was my first night of tapering nortriptyline down to 10mg. Last time I tried that it didn’t go so well but I also made the mistake of doing it in the middle of the week. I’ve opted to set aside this whole weekend to be in misery and hopefully I’ll be past the worst of it by Monday. Although I had intended to go to the grocery store tonight and I got sidetracked from that before I could, so… well, okay, if I can’t drag myself outside at least I have canned soup and grilled cheese to subsist on for a while.

By the way, has anyone been following this year’s novembeat? Some of my stuff I’ve done so far is pretty good. Also the track for day 10 will be really lovely when I can make it public, but I can’t because it’s for coverfight so I can’t put it anywhere visible until after the 21st so as to not ruin the surprise.

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