The Cheesecake Connection
The Cheesecake Connection
It’s 2020 and I am working through my self-assigned chores as diligently as I can. I have started on the garage door openers. What can be more suburban than garage door openers? They scream that we live in car country and that we are all about technological convenience. I choose not to call it laziness, and God knows I am lazy, but garage door openers have entered the realm of TV remotes. They have less to do with choosing the easier path of physical exertion avoidance and more to do with security and convenient living.
I have two brand new door openers with all the latest WiFi connectivity. My goal is to allow me to open and close them without little clickers, which are a nuisance on keychains or worse-yet on sun visors. Most cars long ago included universal remote openers that are imbedded in the rear view mirror casing. Programming them is never as easy as it should be. My Tesla is so smart that it now says, when I drive up to the garage that it plans to open the big garage door unless I override that. Sure enough, that’s what it does. I have no idea whether that’s on account of my zippy new Liftmaster units with imbedded WiFi capabilities or my too-smart-for-its-own-good Tesla X. It’s probably a combination of the two, but the mystery remains as to who told the car to make that change. It could have been my Tesla-obsessed brother-in-law, but then why does the Tesla key fob still have the clicker attached and why isn’t my motorcycle clicker on that key fob also wired in? I think I will leave it a mystery, like the bedroom nighttime animal sounds we’ve been hearing.
I see that Liftmaster has added a garage door app, so I’ve downloaded it and registered in hopes of this will solve all my garage door problems forever. This requires getting the serial number off the units and this requires a step ladder. I know how to use a step ladder, but I view it as like running with scissors. It may work, but it may end badly. Once stepping through the app simplified device activation protocol, I see that while the step ladder is unavoidable, old guy serial number vision is not a constraint since the app will read the bar code and take it from there. Somehow I get the small garage door hooked up, but, of course, since nothing is supposed to ever go too smoothly (or we will not value it, I guess) the big door will not connect. I leave it be since my Tesla is the main user of that door and I know that rig is already working the garage just fine. I will not rest until the app can handle both doors, but it can wait for now.
It’s time to take the Tesla out for a ride on this sunny Southern California day. I haven’t gotten back into the Tesla groove yet, so I view this as important training. As I try to pull out the charger, it won’t budge. It dawns on me that I may need the key to do this and I’m happy to learn that Tesla makes it hard for thieves at every step of the process. Once i get they key I pull the car silently out of the garage (always a little weird since it operates without sound or obvious turning-on), the garage opener mocks me by jumping up on the digital screen of the Tesla and goes ahead and closes itself (specifically the big door…neener, neener, neener) as though me and my little app are totally irrelevant.
One of the interesting things about the Tesla entertainment system is that Tesla gave early adopters like me, in addition to no-cost supercharging, a free subscription to this online music channel library that is sort of wonderful and sort of confusing. The wonderful part is that I can voice command any music that I want. For example, I wanted to hear Harry Chapin’s Taxi (one of my all-time favorite story-tunes). This system calls up a Harry Chapin channel which plays everything like Taxi, but not Taxi. I change up my command prompt and now it serves up the Taxi channel which is totally off-base. I’ve had this problem once before trying to get the Hawaiian version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwo. You know it as the song from the movie The Descendants. It turned out to be almost impossible to call up and now the same was happening with Taxi. Maybe it’s like peripheral vision and you have to sneak up on it from the side to get it to play something you REALLY want to hear.
Trying to drive safely while finagling the Tesla’s accessories to behave is challenging. I have to force myself to stay focused on the road. As I get on the Rt, 15 heading south, I predetermine that I want to be in the HOV lane, less for speed than for access to a closer exit ramp that will put me squarely at the North County Mall. This is Mecca to Kim since there is a Nordstrom’s. To me it’s like traveling across the River Styx. I put the Tesla GPS to the task of getting me right to the door of the Apple Store in the mall. It does just that and the only thing between me and my fix of Apple products is a parking space and a Cheesecake Factory restaurant.
Apple symbolizes the best-performing stock in the universe (well, at least the best in the Dow at 86% gain in 2019) and it is the Baby Boomer product of choice for all telecom and information needs. I couldn’t function without my iPhone 10R and iPad Pro. They are what my glasses used to be, the first thing I pick up in the morning and the last thing I put down at night. I have to admit that out here in Cali I seem to overburden my iPad battery much more than I do my iPhone battery, which rarely dips below 50% (God bless the 10R designers). But the engineers at Apple have put the new USB-C dongle on the end of the new iPad charging wire, requiring me to spend $100 on added rechargers to position in the Living Room and Kitchen so I don’t have to go all the way back to my master bathroom charging station at the far northern end of the house to reach my iPad. A trip to the Apple store is always a good way to see the future trends in retailing. It is never uncrowded at the Apple Store. It’s like In-N-Out Burger here or Shake Shack anywhere. There seems to be limitless demand. What it convinces me is that the future is all about online retailing to avoid the hell-mall visits I so despise.
But then I remember Kim telling me that I need to organize my own lunch. It’s a new year so I don’t want to fast-food it so soon, and I go into The Cheesecake Factory with a salad in my thoughts. It turns out I really like the Santa Fe Salad there even though it does tip the scales at 1,400 calories (which is probably why I like it). It’s a pleasant and cheap lunch by NYC standards and Diet Coke refills are gratis. I went in despite not liking the name because my son’s girlfriend (a lithe young lady with a dancer’s body) told me she loved the chain.
This was a New Year’s foreshadowing of my likely life in retirement. It’s all cheesecake from here on in. Work a little, write a little, drive more, become more tech savvy, do more chores for myself, appreciate the little things, eat more sensibly (really?) and enjoy the sunshine (Not too much – Kim is already warning me about sun damage to our skin – she apparently just got her first age spot – welcome to the club).