Cooking up a reason to buy a BlackBerry

Posted in Mom Stuff
by besttech

I’m as geeky as the next girl but I’ve never understood iPhone infatuation, and the only blackberries I’ve craved are the ones that grow wild in the mountains in the summer.

That could be because I’m cell-phone hostile to begin with. I have one, but at times I resent its ability to interrupt my life anywhere and everywhere. I certainly didn’t want an even pricier object strapped to my hip, nagging around the clock with its incessant beeping and ringing.

Ay, but was before I knew smart phones could be kitchen toys. Now I am all about BlackBerry lust.

I could use it to organize my grocery list, which now is an old-school pen-and-paper edition the guys love to amend with their scribblings. Not that there’s a huge difference between their scribblings and my alleged penmanship. And never mind that I could keep an electronic list through the note function on my dumb phone. I need database capabilities!

I could use it to find my recipes, the bulk of which are computerized because I’ve had to reformulate them due to food allergies. Yes, I can run to my desktop, print a copy and run back to the kitchen. But why kill a tree?

I could use it to quickly calculate ingredient amounts in recipes I’m forever halving or doubling. Yes, I know. My dumb phone calculator would work. But … but … but …

But I just have to have a smart phone. Because now that it’s a kitchen tool, it’s relevant in my life. And worthy of a major expenditure, because I try not to scrimp on cooking gear.

There is, of course, a rationalization for why I have a KitchenAid that could double as a cement mixer. And for why I just splurged on a top-of-the-line bread machine when my old one died after almost eight years.

I buy them because they last.

I have a 50-year-old Hamilton Beach mixer in my garage that I hold onto because it still runs well, as long as I hit it with the 4-in-1 once in a while. I can’t use it because the last set of beaters became hopelessly mangled in a mixer vs. spatula collision. But one of these days, a set will turn up at a yard sale somewhere.

The mixer joins a 40-year-old Oster blender that works better than one I received as a wedding gift.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to — that’s so true, unless you want to make a major investment. And I usually do.

That, of course, doesn’t explain a cake-pan collection in my garage that would lead my meddling neighbor to call code enforcement if he knew the size of it. The pans were just weak moments; the rest were well-planned purchases.

So after I read the New York Times story, I moused around to see if I could plan a BlackBerry purchase. A beautiful little Storm appeared on Verizon’s Web site, only $199 because I’m eligible for an upgrade.

I fell, and I fell hard.

Is it really so wrong to lust after a $200 toy that would jack up my phone bill to roughly that same amount a month?

Yeah, probably.

Rats.

–Debra Legg, debralegg.com

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Debra Legg is a writer and mother of two boys, Big Guy and Little Guy. Read more of their adventures in chaos at debralegg.com.