Cold winter's afternoon

I appear to have a working, fully connected new phone, and an old one which does everything except phone and text, as planned.  I did it all online, and after the old phone stopped working as a phone and the new one started, I added minutes to the new one.  Now to see if they applied the minutes (I do pay as you go, cheaper) to the correct phone.  My account has not caught up with all the changes yet.  But I kind of doubt they'd apply minutes to a discontinued device.  Anyway, I'll wait a day or two and check again.  I'm very pleased I managed it without the aid of a net.  Interestingly, the first text that told me the new phone had gone live, was my prescription service telling me they'd shipped me vital pills.

 

Meanwhile, the old phone

Looks exactly like the new one. Which it is, just more storage and some features which work better. And a battery that holds a charge.  The camera isn't wonderful on either, but at the price, I'm not fussing. Today, to be fair, it's gloomy and dark and rainy, so the camera didn't get much help with light.

The good thing is that the new phone, posing here, can wear all the purses I made for the old one. Several are the result of going mad making granny squares. I got on one of those tears you get on, where you are doing just one more, just one more. I folded them over and, amazingly, they work fine as purses, with a long strap, so that I can wear the phone all the time. This is vital to an older person living alone, especially in a house with stairs.

Here's one of many purses. I've given away a lot of these to people who kept on losing phones or who fell down at home where they couldn't reach the phone that flew out of their pocket on the way down.

Then, on a more peaceful and thoughtful note, I've started reading Sand County Almanac, written by a naturalist who was a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, a town I used to live in, though twenty years after his death, so I know some of the geographical references. He's a wonderful thinker, about history, and preserving the natural surroundings, and knows a lot about the progression in various misguided directions, of Wisconsin and its attempts to  dominate the land and farm, and unfortunate effect on the wildlife.

It's sad yet very instructive and he understands so much about the movements of wild creatures and why.  It's set up in three sections, and I just started on the first, arranged by month. I've read January and February.   Not the sort of book you plunge through in my usual fashion, but one you have to stop and think about.  His description of the lightning- struck oak on his farm and how they eventually felled it and what it had witnessed in its life since probably the Civil War era, is an education in itself.  I do recommend this.

It's illustrated by Charles Schwarz, whose signature you can just see in the bottom right of the cover

Then, this evening and maybe a couple more, will be passed under a blanket, with a cup of golden milk, watching

 I have finally got hold of the third season, only a few years behind the rest of the viewing world, who has now galloped past the next one,  and is waiting for the one after that. I'm hoping for good hats.