Dolors and Sense

OK, so here's the scallop: she's back. I know, it seems like it's a week too early! But never fear; she'll be gone again all next week. It's technically a month, you see, just not all at once. I knew about this all in advance, and I purposely set out to deceive you. And it worked! What a maroon.

What other incredible stories can I tell you of my time on my own? The frantic canoe ride ahead of a raging flash flood? Tossing my own pizza dough for the first time in my life? The subtle art of managing a completely full social calendar? The incredible joy of reuniting with my wife again after three weeks of having thousands of miles separate us? I wish I could tell you these stories, but it's impossible; you see, there is an even greater story to tell, one that shames all these into the bleakest of memories.

This is the story of my phone.

I love my phone. It's an HTC Evo 4G, if that means anything to you, and that ranks it among the best phones in the world. This isn't a challenge - plenty of phones are great for plenty of people - but for me, this phone is tops. It's a beautiful device, running the Android operating system, and it does pretty much everything you could ask it to (except, until next week, animated GIFs). And the first month I owned it, everything was bliss. The impending disappearance of my wife almost didn't matter; I was on a second honeymoon, and it was with my phone. Apps flowed freely over the data stream and I became a roving, roaming danger to anybody who dared underestimate my interconnectedness.

But all was not well in la-la land.

Over time, my phone's responsiveness seemed to decrease, and the touchscreen grew finicky and unresponsive. These days, I'm lucky if I can press the home key properly once out of every three tries, and the phone carelessly dials itself all the time, opening up all sorts of unwanted programs and mistakenly calling unwitting people whenever I don't keep it firmly on lock mode. Sometimes it even manages to unlock itself, somehow, and I have to struggle with a device that seems to be trying to achieve sentience.

So here I am with a sleek, beautiful wonder of modern technological engineering that I can barely use. Yeah, I'll take it in to get it replaced eventually...but with a life as busy as mine, how could I find the time? All that I can think of is perhaps kidnapping a small child, and then holding him for ransom -- with the ransom price being, of course, that his family take my phone in to get repaired. Seems easy enough.

You know, the world would have a lot less problems if more people went in for a solution like that.

In the meantime, since I certainly won't be attempting any kidnappings while my wife is in town, I want to apologize for the paucity of posts last week. I assure you, I did best to completely fail at some utterly mundane task, but I couldn't screw anything up to a degree that I thought would be worth writing about. Although vacuuming is a looming chore that I will have to dive into...but it can't be that hard, right?