Wireless

This has been quite a week. It has reminded me how ridiculously dependent I am on technology and just how stupid one week can get.

It started on Monday. I had an OB appointment, so since I was already in the Big City, I decided to head south and get Neko’s birthday party scheduled, since, of course, you can only do that in person. That’s a whole other entry…yes, I know it’s only January, but once the baby comes along we’ll be sleepless and distracted and then all of a sudden it will be the day before her birthday and she’ll want a big whoop-dee-doo and I will be on my knees begging someone to let me use the party room in the basement of Pizza Hut and making mermaids out of crepe paper at 3am.

The upshot: I’m trying to be pro-active and organized.

That whole event went fine until I was about halfway home and reached for my cell phone to make a quick call and realized I, in fact, had no cell phone. I’d been about eight other places besides the birthday place, and usually when I misplace my cell phone it’s somewhere in my bag and stroller. But it wasn’t. It was at the birthday place. An hour away.

Several phone calls and $16 later, the birthday place was overnighting my phone. And for the next 24 hours, I realized I probably make 463 phone calls a day, based on the number of times I reached for the phone and grasped nothing but air.

So Tuesday, I have the phone back. Yay! But I spent the day at home trying to do housewifey things like laundry and having my children play independently while I play June Cleaver, which turned into a total disaster and several small emotional meltdowns from multiple people. Boo.

As a result of several emotional moments, Tom graciously gave me Wednesday afternoon to start plugging away at my big to-do list. I even took my laptop to my sister’s house to keep the momentum going. My sister’s house with very hard tile floor. I know exactly how hard this tile floor is because of the earthshattering noise my laptop made as it crashed to the floor after I tripped over the power cord and dropped it.

I know this has already been a really wordy entry, but I need to add the point that as it crashed to the floor, the tiny part of the power cord that makes the connection snapped off in the computer and stuck. Any attempt to remove it, just shoved it further in, making it impossible to recharge. You know those scenes in “24” where there’s that clock ticking away in the lower right-hand corner indicating exactly how much time remains before the whole world blows up? The “minutes to battery shut-down” clock began.

I won’t go into all the details, but Thursday morning involved charging batteries on other dead machines and swapping them in and out while I desperately try to back up my machine (which I haven’t properly backed up since last February) and lots of sweat and swearing and Tom being verrrry nice and helpful while I am very grouchy and not very nice or helpful. I did not get it fully backed up before the whole machine went belly up and refused to boot in any capacity whatsoever.

So Thursday afternoon was spent in the Apple store with lots of other grouchy people. My new favorite person, Kurt the Apple Genius, thinks he can fix my machine, but is not so certain he can retrieve my data. So, good news, bad news. It may be fixed by tomorrow. Maybe.

In the meantime, I would give my left arm to check my email.

I went straight from the Apple store to dinner with Tom, Renita and Diane for Tom and Diane’s birthdays while my mother graciously watched the kids. That was really fun and very relaxing. I think my blood pressure almost returned to normal.

For at least five minutes.

As I stood debriefing with my mom about how the kids had gone to bed (Tom was 15 minutes behind me, since he stopped at Meijer to see if they had a Wii, which they did not), we heard a thunderous crash over one of the monitors. We opened both kids’ doors to find two sleeping angels. After a completely freaked out 10 minutes where my mom and I became increasingly convinced that there was some intruder in the house and we all were going to die, Tom and my Dad arrived, and poked around until they discovered that the 40 lb. mirror that hung over our bathroom sink had come crashing to the ground. One side of the wire mounted to the back had detached. I can’t even imagine how hurt someone could have been if they had been standing right next to it.

Anyway, I’m sure there’s some incredibly profound connection I could make here about my whole life being turned upside down by going “wireless” in so many ways, but right now I just want to go to bed and wake up to discover this whole week is finally over.