Taking Charge of My Life

When I was a young adult, the only rechargeable battery I had was the one that started my car. We had new fangled wired push button phones, but they didn’t need batteries because they ran off of electricity that came over the phone line. To organize my life, I carried an 8.5″x11″ Franklin planner that I adored. It was about 2 inches thick and weighed a lot but it was awesome. It had my calendar, my contacts and was a great place to take notes too.

I was always fond of the pencils from Pilot, because they wrote so very smoothly on the paper in my Franklin Planner. Nothing was better than the beginning of the calendar year when we would get the new pages all fresh and clean and ready to help me be productive.

I had an SLR camera, the wonderful Minolta X-700. It had a tiny little A76 battery but it ran for years on that one battery. Same thing with my HP 11c calculator (that I still use), three A76 batteries last for ages and ages.

All that has changed.

Now a significant portion of my day is dedicated to charging my devices. Every single day I go through a ritual of charging my devices:

• My iPhone goes in a dock on my desk
• My 12″ MacBook charges next to my desk
• My 15″ MacBook Pro charges through my Apple Cinema Display
• My Apple Watch charges on a stand beside my bed
• My desk is out of space and the bedside table is too small, so the iPad Pro charges in the bathroom
• I can’t believe I’m saying this but I have to charge my Pencil using a female to female adapter to a lightning cable on my desk
• My Bluetooth headphones get charged at the charging station in the kitchen that George from Tulsa gave us
• My keyboard and trackpad get charged alternating with the same cable on my desk that the Pencil uses
• My Olympus camera takes rechargeable batteries of course, so I have a proprietary charger that also sometimes has to live in the bathroom
• For the live show, Steve bought me an LED light panel for better lighting and he cycles in six AA rechargeable batteries for it that he charges in his den in a special charger.
• My dental hygenist suggested it would be good for my teeth if I used an electric toothbrush so I got one that uses an inductive battery charger.
• We got a new electric knife last year for charging the turkey, but it’s rechargeable so Steve had to put a reminder in his calendar to pull it out and charge it a few days before Thanksgiving.
• Let’s not forget charging the portable chargers, right? I have a little one in my purse and two big ones for travel that all get charged in the bathroom taking turns with the other devices

So now my phone, pencil, calendar, phone book, toothbrush, knife and my watch all have to be charged. Don’t you think the 25-year-old me would find that hilarious if I went back to tell her? I think the only thing left in my life that doesn’t require a charger is my glasses. Good thing Google Glass never took off.