I awoke yesterday morning with a drippy nose and I’ve been sneezing. Got a headache and the hint of a sore throat, too. I’m not sure if it’s allergies (which have been nasty-bad this year – something about the late start to spring got the flora out there all riled up – it’s astounding how the weeds started growing the past three weeks or so). This sucks – I hope it goes away – but at least I’m off today and can work from home tomorrow. Since I got all the requisite chores done over the weekend, all I really need to do today is laundry. Good thing, ‘cuz after a rather bright sunny weekend, it’s looking dark out there right now and they say we could have some heavy rain and t-storms moving in. So I guess I’ll be spending some time with a dog panting hot wet dog breath all over me. I Maybe it’s like this every year, I dunno. Perhaps winter gives me amnesia.

Some good news over the weekend. We’ve been down a cat for several weeks now, and I was frankly beginning to suspect that she’d found a better place to live (or, as my mother-in-law so reassuringly suggested, “maybe she was eaten by wild animals”). She’s been gone for several days before, and she developed an infatuation with one of the nieghbor cats and was hangin out over there for while last year, but she’d never been gone this long before. I thought maybe she’d gone to hang out with Boomer. But then she showed up on Friday night looking kinda bony but otherwise no worse for wear. She’s mostly been lying around, plotting her next big adventure.

So last week I got my new iPhone from work, and I’ve had a chance to play around with it, add a solid glass screen protector and a Spigen case for it (I get a kick out of the way that all the iPhone cases have a cutout for no useful purpose other than to display the silly little Apple logo on the back – I guess it’s not about the phone, it’s about the branding).

Anyhow, there are things I like about it, things I don’t like, and things I feel decidedly “meh” about.

So what do I like? I like the fingerprint scanner to unlock the phone. It seems to work really well, and I can push the button with my thumb and just leave it there until the phone unlocks. It’s pretty sweet. Not that entering a PIN is all that difficult. I also like the camera.

The phone is slightly taller than the 4s, slightly thinner, and slightly lighter. I only wish I could get taller, thinner, and lighter as I get older.

It has the “lightning” connector, meaning all the old 30-pin stuff I had (dock, charger) went to the wife for her work iPhone. I mean, it’s nice that it’s reversible and all that, but I can get a micro USB cable for next to nothing (not that I need one, because I have a shitload of them). The EU is enacting legislation that says all chargers for phones and tablets have to be standard – micro USB – by three years from now. It would be nice if the US would do the same thing.

I mean, imagine if every manufacturer of electric devices had proprietary connectors. So if you buy an LG refrigerator or an LG teevee, you need to install an LG outlet. And maybe the LG outlet is nice because you can plug it in upside down or rightside up or whatever.

But you decide to switch to a Samsung when it’s time to replace that fridge ‘cuz costs less and has more features (plus a microSD card slot). Or maybe you decide to stick with LG, but guess what? Their latest generation of appliances use a different kind of plug. So you either have to change the outlet or buy an adapter (which you have to pay out the ass for, because anybody who produces it has to license it from LG).

I’d take fiddling around to plug the cord in a certain way over having to get new cord every time I change devices.

I also don’t like the fact that I can’t change the default keyboard (or browser, for that matter) on the iPhone. I’ve become a big fan of Swiftkey, and even the Google keyboard is better than the Apple one. Supposedly that will change with iOS 8.

Most everything else with the phone is “meh.” Basically the same as it ever was. I can’t change the launcher (can I?) and I can’t just tap it twice to get to the lock screen or use any other gestures that I’ve started to get used to on the other phone. I can’t flip to mute it, I can’t just pick it up and put it to my ear to answer it, and I can’t just pick it up in landscape mode with the volume buttons on top and have the camera turn on.

No major gripes, really, and now that I have another phone, I haven’t bothered to set up all the stuff I used to have. Except for Evernote, and maybe LastPass, but I really don’t intend to use it for more than looking at my work e-mail and answering work-related calls. And it’s certainly good enough for that.

Ah, here comes the rain….