After six months of dutifully refreshing the buyer’s guide at MacRumors every day, Apple finally announced the upgrades I was waiting for last week. Woohoo! Well, except that now I’m poorer. (Apple’s next innovation should be inexpensive merchandise.)

So everything was going swimmingly, and I went to bed with visions of Mac-ish sugarplums dancing through my head. Particularly Mac-ish webcams and SD card readers and multi-track mouse pads. And Adium. And 10-hour batteries. Oooh the 10-hour batteries.

Oh, right, batteries. I’d heard somewhere that they weren’t end-user replaceable any more, and while the website says they’re supposed to last the “average user” 5 years, I’m not really an average user. I’ve typically gone through batteries quite a bit faster than battery manufacturers expect. And then I’d heard someone mention that you could buy some service when you first purchase the laptop that will cover you if the battery dies early. Better call about that, because I don’t remember seeing anything like that as an option when I placed my order.

So, the next morning, I dialed the customer service number.

Or, I thought I’d dialed the customer service number, but the voice on the other end was telling me about distinctly non-computer-related services. Services that require you to be 18 or older to call. Services that, had this been on the web, “safe search” would have kept from showing up in my ill-advised Google search. It took me longer than you’d think necessary to process what I was hearing and the options available to me were I to press 1 to indicate that I’m old enough to participate in these services without making the, er, “customer service personnel” on the other end into felons.

Surely I’d dialed correctly. I squinted at the phone’s read-out while the automated voice waited for me to get over my cold feet and press 1. The number looked right. Every one of the last four digits was correct and in the right order. I hadn’t dialed 866 or 888 instead of 800. And then I saw the problem. 4s and 7s are very close together on the keypad, and I’d dialed 646 rather than 676.

That’s when I realized the automated woman on the other end was reiterating the services she could make available to me. Ack! I hung up quickly and considered disinfecting my hands. And the phone.

Instead I very very carefully dialed the Apple customer service number. This time the voice on the other end welcomed me to the Apple customer service line and informed me, “I am an automated system that can handle complete sentences. So tell me, how can I help you today?”

“I have a question about the macbook I just ordered,” I told him, wondering just how good this sentence understanding was.

“I can tell you about your recent order,” Mr. Customer Service responded cheerily, and proceeded to read off the items on my recent order and their order status.

When prompted, I told him that of these three items, I had a question about the Macbook.

He then proceeded to tell me about that order, and its order status, and asked if I had further questions.

“Yes, I have a question about the Macbook’s battery,” I clarified, wondering why I kept up this pretense of speaking in complete sentences to a computer.

He then proceeded to tell me about the Macbook order again, just as cheerily as the first time but with no new information, and then asked if I had further questions.

“Customer service representative,” I said, dispensing with complete sentences entirely.

“If you just said something, I didn’t quite catch that. Please speak a little more loudly,” Mr. Customer Service suggested.

“Customer. Service. Representative.” I enunciated clearly and loudly.

“I’d be happy to connect you to a customer service representative,” at least he didn’t seem to have had his feelings hurt. “One moment please.”

When the connection went through, the human on the other end of the line said a couple of sentences that sounded like they should have made sense to me. They sounded exactly like sentences, and I could even tell which were the dependent and the independent clauses, but I couldn’t wrap my brain around the actual content of the sentences.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t understand any of that.”

“Oh, you must have dialed into the Spanish line by mistake. But don’t worry, I can help you anyway.” And she proceeded to tell me that I’d luckily and unknowingly already signed up for the service that would cover me in case the battery isn’t up to my abuse.

I wonder why Mr. Customer Service thought I would like the Spanish version. I suppose he thought that if, despite his advanced sentence-understanding capabilities, I hadn’t been able to make him understand me, I must have been speaking another language to begin with. Or maybe his feelings were hurt.

My supervisor and some woman were waiting for me when I walked in the front door today. That in itself would have been unusual enough to warrant a post, but as it turns out, the woman’s name is Iris (also incredibly odd, and only the second time I’ve met another Iris), and she and her husband were living in Japan at the same time as my parents, and her husband and my dad were roommates in the same Tokyo high school for a year. Crazy!

So now I’ve met both of them and their three sons (the oldest of whom is considering coming here for school).

I don’t know what it is about this town. My dad’s best friend from grade school is living here, too, and teaches at the College Across The River. It’s far too small a town, in far too remote a location to make all of this sound plausible.

I’m only moving a couple of miles, but it feels momentous. P is less thrilled, but I simply can’t wait. I’ll miss my morning view of the sun coming up over a bank of pine trees. I’ll miss my bathroom (it’s nothing special, but the new one isn’t great). I’ll miss controlling the heat for only my own apartment. I’ll miss not having to think about snow removal. But everything else will be orders of magnitude better. I hope.

I’ll finally feel free to invite my local friends over (more room, walking distance to everyone, no parking restrictions). I’ll be able to walk just a few blocks to everything I normally visit in town. I’ll have a gas stove, free laundry, and a basement for tornado season. I’ll have a little yard and a three-season porch. The cat will enjoy all the critters he’ll be able to see. Maybe we’ll get a bird feeder.

But more than looking forward to the change, something bigger is happening to me. It’s like I’ve finally decided to be a member of this community. I don’t know what took me so long. Maybe it’s that I’ve almost never lived anywhere as long as I’ve lived here. By the end of next year, I’ll be tied for the longest I’ve lived anywhere. I know that when I moved here I wasn’t planning to stay longer than 4 years. Maybe I’ve just been waiting to suddenly have to leave.

So I think I’ll subscribe to the local paper. I think I’ll finally start my tandem reading club.

A good friend came to live with me a few years back. She had to put up with being a semi-permanent guest, sleeping on my futon in the guest room, having almost no say about the arrangement of the house. And yet, I think we had a pretty great time for those months before she found a place of her own.

Now, every time I get mail addressed to her dad, two completely different emotions jostle for prominence. On the one hand, I remember those months fondly. On the other hand, I remember how creeped out she was that her dad was signing himself up for junk mail using my address.

She had a restraining order out against her dad and had tried to keep him from knowing her current address. Somehow he found it, though, and this junk mail with his name on it was his way of saying, “I know where you are.” Later, when she moved again to get married, it took him a couple of months before he mailed her Google Earth satellite images of her house.

She’s since moved yet again, and I’m about to move, too. I imagine this will be the end of my getting social security information in his name.

Last week I had an MRI (adding to my first-hand investigations of the tests I see every week on House). I can now report that MRIs are loud and long and every once in a while they hit some nerve or other that make your hands tingle like you’ve just hit both your funny bones. Lying still for 40-ish minutes is hard. Lying still that long with your eyes closed (as directed by the technician) with strange loud noises coming from all directions can lead to disorientation. Sometimes it sounds like a jackhammer, sometimes like the machine is being whacked with crowbars, and sometimes like a landing alien space ship. Also, it apparently doesn’t matter if you have metal on you unless it’s very close to the part of you that’s being scanned. I could wear jeans, for example, since they were scanning my head. This was a surprise.

All in all, it’s not painful or anything, but it thoroughly wiped me out. Thoroughly. Utterly.

A few days later I went to see my doctor who gave me the news that I do not have any visible abnormalities in my brain, and specifically that I do not have MS. Good news for sure. (She also told me that there’s nothing left to test for, which wasn’t so much fun to hear.) When she handed me the radiologist’s report, though, I had to smile.

MRI BRAIN WITH AND WITHOUT CONTRAST

CLINICAL HISTORY: Generalized muscle weakness, coldness, fatigue

TECHNIQUE: Images of brain obtained using non-contrast sagittal T1, agittal FLAIR, axial T1, axial FLAIR, axialdiffusion, post-gadolinium contrast axial and coronal T1 weighted sequences. l4 mL Magnevist contrast agent was utilized.

FINDINGS: Brain is normal in signal intensity. There is no hydrocephalus, mass effect or midline shift. There is no abnormal subdural collection. Diffusion weighted images show no evidence of acute infarction. Flow voids are present in the internal carotid and basilar arteries. Brainstem and cerebellum are normal. Orbits and paranasal sinuses are normal. Post-contrast images are normal.

CONCLUSION: Normal brain.

Ok. All those things that I don’t understand may be true, but that conclusion … The radiologist clearly doesn’t know me very well.