I now have phone service at our house

I ditched my cell phone carrier today. For the last two years I've had to tell people, "sorry, I couldn't talk to you when you called because you called when I was at home where my phone company doesn't have service." How tiring that has been. Now I can call and receive calls in the house where I live. Today Jami called me from the porch and I got the call in the living room. Amazing. The company I had been with seemed unable to provide service to a wide part of Atlanta - our home wasn't the only place that coverage was non-existent. I can understand. If I owned a company the last thing I would want to do was be anywhere efficient in a large metropolitan market with over 5 million customers. As I understand it, from the way things exist, people who are paid six figures by a large communications company to plan strategy, have determined that the best possible way to conduct business in the Atlanta metropolitan area is to provide sporadic coverage that frequently cuts off. Congratulations to them. I'm sorry that I had to leave for a company that has opted for the counterintuitive plan of offering coverage to every geographic spot in a large metropolitan area. I hope that they're able to continue with this strategy - apparently against all odds.
The important thing is that now I can make phone calls while I'm in the shower and speak to friends and relatives while drinking a beer in my underwear. Otherwise I've had to walk half-way to the East Lake station to get a signal so I could do that. I think that that's what America is all about: making phone calls on the privy. It's what brought our Puritan ancestors across the pond - that and finding a place they could practice religious oppression unhindered - this desire to speak while indisposed. Nothing could be more representative of puritanism than lying in bed throwing a toy for a cat while having a conversation with a friend or telemarketer.
All this with the phones is another sign of our departure. We needed to join our phones on a single plan for the Durham/Decatur household.
Jami bought a blackberry and she's having a great deal of fun with it. The camera on this phone takes good pictures. One picture of our cat, Cleo, is weirder than the picture I took where she seems to have four eyes. In Jami's picture Cleo has eyes brighter than the sun - the tiny cat is over whelmed by two large green discs that take up most of her head. So in a way, these phones are helping us to see reality in new ways.