A minor Thanksgiving miracle: more pie, less family tech support
Another Thanksgiving with the East Coast side of my extended family has ended, but this one broke with precedent in one welcome way: I spent shockingly little time on family tech-support duty and instead had that much more time for eating, napping, and eating some more.
I would give myself credit for that for buying my mom a 2021-vintage iPad on sale two years ago, but the appreciation properly goes to Apple for making app and system-maintenance updates in iPadOS such an automatic proposition.
When I picked up Mom’s iPad Thursday to see if it needed any software care and feeding, the only update awaiting an install was the unthrilling iPadOS 18.
I took care of that chore, explained the release accurately-enough as “they added a calculator,” and moved that app’s icon to the first home screen. My mother’s aging iPhone, meanwhile, was too old for iOS 18 but had no other updates pending.
Which is great! I’ve spent way too much time at other holiday family gatherings downloading and installing software updates that had escaped other people’s attention.
My sole other tech-support task for my mom was setting up a passkey for her Google account. Not that I expect she will be using it regularly, but that extra layer of authentication might save a step in troubleshooting later on for me or my brother (who works in IT in a Windows-first environment, so family Apple support usually falls to me).
With those digital duties out of the way, I had that much more free time left over for such more important work as making pumpkin pie from scratch (pictured above). And this go-round of Thanksgiving treated me to yet another minor miracle: Enough of my contribution to dessert was left over in the wake of Thursday’s gluttony for me to enjoy a slice of pie after dinner Friday night.
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