This past weekend, I spent what little crochet time I had clearing off this bed:

A cousin of mine was going to be in the area for a seminar, and she was staying the night while she was in town.

I had told her that if I didn’t get the bed cleared off, she could sleep under everything or on top of everything. Fortunately, I managed to find a place for everything on the bed, and she was able to get a good night’s sleep.

With the bed cleared off, I was then free to go visit with my cousin David.

As many of my regular readers know, my cousin David is beset with both schizophrenia and metastatic lung cancer, and while he has managed to outlive his cancer prognosis, his life is beginning to wind down, so I am making an effort to go see him in the evenings so that we can visit, and I can facilitate a good night call between him and my mom.

Tonight, I did exactly that, and during the course of his conversation with my mom, he told her, “Leslie’s phone is quite unique.” Feeling that he had not adequately explained it he told her, “It’s like a television telephone.”

My current cellphone has a large screen that is easy on my middle-aged eyes, a stylus with which I can take notes and make sketches that I can refer to later, and a camera that allows me to make videos that demonstrate and document my work.

My most recent effort was this video that shows how to make an invisible decrease:

The ubiquity and ease of cellphones makes it easy to forget there was a time when documenting and sharing our life’s adventures was not as quick and simple as it is now, but even with so much amazing technology literally at our fingertips, sometimes the best innovation of all can be the chair we draw up and use to sit next to another person while we sit and wait with them for whatever is next.