The first seed catalog arrived today, from Pinetree. I like them a lot, and will be buying from them again next year. But this is really too soon to get seed catalogs. Next year’s garden is still next year. They used to start showing up around New Year’s. That works well because January is a good time to plan and think about warmer things. Right now, when we’re still harvesting things like cabbage and cauliflower, it just seems early. I’m not ready to plan for a garden five months away.

Then again, one of my neighbors has had Christmas lights up for a couple weeks. So maybe I’m the only one not anxious to get on with winter.

Guy doesn’t really love it either. He will go out in it, but doesn’t stay long if I’m not out there with him. Pepper had that double layer of fur from her wolf heritage, so she thrived in the cold and snow, but Guy not so much. He’s glad to go running in it if there’s something to hunt, though.

When I bought my phone, it was my first smartphone, so I bought the cheapest one they had, for $30 (then the same phone was $1 for new customers a couple weeks later, but oh well). They all looked the same for my purposes. They all ran the same version of Android, a.k.a. crippled Linux. Some had nicer cameras, but I didn’t care much about that. I just wanted one that could make calls and texts and maybe run a few apps, and it looked like they could all do that.

And my $30 LG K8 does it all fine. There’s just been one problem: it only has 8GB of RAM. That would be plenty on an ordinary Linux system, because I could strip it down to essentials, but the Android OS is larded up with lots of Google crap I don’t need that can’t be deleted. It also has a manufacturer’s “feature” in that it will only let you use an added SDRAM card for certain things. It can’t just be mounted as part of the main filesystem. Most apps can’t be moved to it, including all the built-in Google apps. I put a 32GB card in it to store things like video, but most apps are still locked into that internal 8GB.

When I first had it, the built-in stuff took up maybe 6.9GB, so I still had a GB or more free to work with. That was about three years ago, though, and apparently apps have been creeping up in size. Now I can only pare it down to about 7.5GB, even after getting rid of some apps like Facebook and Twitter altogether.

So it looks like I need to upgrade to at least a 16 GB system. Kinda crazy, but there it is. Hmm, they have a new 16GB version of the same model for $20. What are the odds that I get that one and it has a newer version of the OS that takes up 15GB? Guess it’s worth a try. I’ve been happy with it other than the memory idiocy. The battery life is noticeably shorter too, so it’s about time.

Ideally, I’d toss the thing and get a landline phone that hangs on the wall and doesn’t follow me anywhere, but that’s not an option for now.

Here’s a sleepy hour of Stardew Valley to follow up on the other night’s. I didn’t have much in the way of podcast topics to talk about, so this is mainly just me playing the game. Maybe a couple funny bits.