What Time Is It?

I had some experiences this week I'm not anxious to repeat.

First up - my phone battery went off the rails. Ever since two iOS updates ago - battery life has been nuts. My phone is pretty new and has always had really good battery life until these apocalyptic software issues.

Several months ago, they made me do a factory reset to try to eliminate some microphone issues I was having. That worked, and then #batterygate with an iOS update. It almost righted itself until the second update came along and then everything went to hell in a handbasket. The phone would go maybe an hour before being totally drained, and would randomly shut off at about 30% battery. Nonsense. Why in the world anyone would buy an electric car after owning a cell phone is beyond me. What I can tell you is, their brains will be the first snacks of the zombie apocalypse because their cars will be bricks all over the road. And if you will recall, this was the opening of the Walking Dead, in case you doubt me - dead cars everywhere. Zombie snacks. Zombie poppers. Zombie amuse-bouche! Gives the rest of us a head start - I'm okay with it.

So I made a genius bar appointment, like the Apple slave I am, and they told me that my battery was "passing their test" - which apparently means that to get a D, you just need to last an hour. They could see clearly on the diagnostics - he showed me the graph - that it would tank after an hour, but this registered as passing on the "every battery gets a trophy" chart, so they ordered another reset. I reset my phone, spent two hours re-organizing my apps and re-entering all my passwords, and lo and behold, nothing was fixed. So they tell me to come in the next day and they will replace the battery.

The timing for me is important because I'm headed to OnStage and a retreat next week, so I had exactly one day I could make this work. Genius bar appointment #2.

I bring the phone in, and they tell me to leave it for the repair and come back "in 30 minutes."

I leave the store, and then I realize I have absolutely no temporal reference whatsoever anymore.

I don't wear a watch - don't even get me started on the Apple Watch, whose purpose is to tell you you have a call on your Apple Phone which is one inch from your watch - and I realized as I wandered around the mall, that our society has stopped telling time all together outside of the cell phone.

There were no clocks anywhere - not in stores, not outside of stores. There was no clock on the store directory. My surreptitious glances at kiosk cash registers while simultaneously trying to avoid the creepy yelly people in kiosks who try to tractor beam you yielded nothing. Store after store after store had no temporal references anywhere visible. It was sort of like the relationship Las Vegas wants you in with the inside of their casinos - no way to tell if it's night or day.

I finally sought out the jewelry department of Dillard's, and saw that all their watches had different times - probably from lack of use - and I headed back to the Apple store where they told me I was ten minutes early.

I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. I tried to channel some primitive timekeeping methods, but you can't see the sun inside the mall, so I was stymied.

I might have to buy a sundial at Brookstone that I can strap to my arm like the sort of anti-Apple watch.

Anyway, when I finally guessed properly and went back, they were oddly slow about bringing out my phone. And when they did, they had both my phone and a new phone in a box.

I knew something had gone horribly wrong and that a good half of my work day was about to be obliterated. It's the modern technology version of a police officer knocking on your door.

Sure enough - while trying to remove my battery, they broke my phone. They broke it so completely that they could not even power it back on to kill it once and for all. So they gave me a new phone for the price of the battery I was going to buy (at that point I didn't think I should have to pay for that, honestly) and then I sat there restoring from backup for the next hour so that I could go try to reclaim what was left of my life, after God only knows how much time had passed.

The good news is, this battery seems to be marginally less terrible so I will probably actually be able to update you all from OnStage next week - yay me!

I thought for this theme a technology-related card would be appropriate, so I made a card inspired by The Craft Bunny in this ADORABLE video where her stamps take selfies. Seriously almost died of cute overload when I watched it.

Mine isn't technically a selfie since you can see his hands, so he's either operating the selfie stick with his feet, he pressed a magic button on his Apple Watch, or his friend is taking the picture. No matter what, he's cute and that's all I have to say about that.

Well maybe not ALL I have to say about that, because I'll tell you how I made it.

I stamped the bunny from Made With Love in Memento. I stamped him again on a Post-It and cut out a mask and covered him up. Then I stamped the houses from Welcome Words in Memento. Then I set all that aside and punched a scalloped circle with this punch from a scrap and used that as a mask with Tempting Turquoise ink and my Clarity Stamp Stencil brushes to create the cloud background over half the white panel.

Then I punched a scrap of white with my 1 3/8" square punch and then trimmed around it using the eyeball method to make a Polaroid shape.

Then I colored my bunny scene with Copics and used the Clarity stencil brushes again with Pear Pizzazz and Tempting Turquoise around the images.

I mounted the Polaroid frame with foam tape to the scene and then cut away the extra, and glued that down to the panel. Then I used Cheerful Critters (retired) for the sentiment.

I love the insecurity of this bunny. I feel like he's all "please don't post this on FB - I'll be so mad - I look terrible!"

Anyway, I DO like your face, and I hope you'll tune in here and on Instagram for updates and shenanigans from my mini-retreat on Wednesday in Salt Lake and then OnStage madness.

Speaking of the retreat - I have one of the projects available as an online class starting today - and this one is a little different. I call this class "One Ink Wonder", and it's designed as a mini technique class. There are six techniques in this class, all using a single color of ink and a few accessories, and they all fit in a little mini fold up book. This class is great if you're looking for inking techniques, or want to do your own technique series class with some fun simple projects that really focus on everything you can do with an ink pad.

The class is available now on my class page!

So I'm off to hang out in Salt Lake with my tribe. Hope to see some of you there and take little bunny selfies with you.

Loveyameanitbye.