time to back up my laptop...

I have had a month-long run of odd, mechanical- and electronic-related mishaps. It feels like Mercury is retrograde, if you believe in that sort of hooey. Which I do, because I swear that every time a computer goes on the fritz or a printer runs out of ink or the cable goes off (and we've actually paid the bill), the planets are aligned in this particular way. But that hasn't been the case since the end of May, so I don't know what the deal is. In the month of June our DVD player broke, my car horn stopped working, the garbage disposal literally ground to a halt, our Internet access went out for 2 days, my Bluetooth and Michael's satellite radio were stolen at separate times from separate vehicles, and some other stuff I can't remember right now.

So, it was funny to come across this today on The Daily Fairfield, as I deposit my phone, once again, into a Ziplock bag of basmati rice. I thought the hair dryer/rice combo had worked several weeks back after my fancy, fairly new, uninsured phone fell into the toilet at the pediatrician's office - an unexpected risk of potty training in the mobile age. I believed I'd triumphed over water damage and my own foolishness at having not purchased that insurance plan, when the screen again went white and sweaty yesterday. It hadn't been totally restored to health, but was limping along well enough. I could get by without the letter L (the number 1 works in its place) and the number 0, since the gadget has two keyboards and it worked on one of them, and the "back" button. I was even able to use the GPS feature by switching back and forth between screens and fudging spellings, although getting directions sometimes took longer than actually getting to my destination. I don't know how many lives a smart phone has. I hope 3, at least. I can't afford to replace it, and Sprint has told me water damage is considered "beyond repair"...but I could try submerging it in rice.

P.S. This post is showing up in a font and point size not of my choosing, and I can't figure out how to change it! None of this crap is life-threatening or even particularly interesting, but it's really getting old.