I did the unthinkable today…

I left my iPhone at work.

All I wanted to do was to come home, turn my Bose system (complimentary from my brother Dan/Steve) up loud with the music I love that no one else does and make cookies for my friends and I to decorate a week from this Saturday. But, I got home. Fed the dogs. And proceeded to realize that I did not have my iPhone. Shit!

Admittedly, this week has not been one of my favorites. It actually started on Saturday. I kept trying to push Paul to move faster on Saturday morning but he just wanted to sit back and enjoy his coffee. Izzy and I both wanted to go! I should have just left without him. No, he kept giving me that look: “Sit down!” So, by the time we got to Mac forest a little after 9, there was no parking. We ended up going to Bald Hill, which didn’t turn out to be a bad thing because I think everyone had a good time on what turned out to be a walk, not a run. Izzy even caught a mouse.

But that wasn’t all. Saturday afternoon I went to meet a friend at a coffee place where we have met before. I drove in and there was one person leaving, so I got her parking place. Other than that there weren’t any. I got out of my car and waited a bit. I went into the building and didn’t see her, so I went back outside. A few moments later she came walking toward me from across the street. She had come earlier and found no parking so she had to park in a parking lot a little way away. We walked in, looked around, and realized that there was no table at all. After a number of minutes of ambivalence, we decided to leave. As we walked across the street to where she was parked, we both tried to think of somewhere else where we could go. Neither of us could. Mind you, businesses here turn up and close down in a matter of months.

But I got to see her dog, Maggie, who I haven’t seen in probably 8, 9 years? She looked like a completely different dog. Completely white/grey faced, much hairier (old dogs seem to get hairier, I have learned) and WAY calmer. We ended up going to Bald Hill again to walk Maggie. It turned out to be a great walk. We saw a Ferruginous Hawk, a long name that means rusty-brown hawk. And I found a Wood Rat (also known as a Pack Rat) mound. I haven’t seen them there in a few years. Before that, I could find at least five.

On Sunday, I managed to cut a chunk out of my left index finger on a SAFETY RAZOR!! I was in the shower and opened my body wash while I was holding the razor and the bottle sprung back and jabbed the edge of the razor into my finger. Finger cuts bleed like crazy. There I was, stuck in the shower with my finger bleeding all over the place. I was stuck. I couldn’t get out and dry off or blood would have gotten all over my bathroom. But, I had to get some sort of tourniquet on it or it was just going to keep going. Amazingly, Paul happened to knock on the door right then. I cried a pathetic help and he came in and managed to bandage me up without too much of a mess. Crazy thing is that it has hurt like a fucker all week.

Then, on Monday my boss informs me that the entire website that I created for him, and have been working on for about four months, has the wrong name. Of course, he didn’t know this because he ever LOOKED at the damn thing, it was only because I ran across a Facebook page on the subject and the link to what was supposedly the website I created was not called the same thing. He didn’t even remember making the damn Facebook page!! Anyway, I spent the entire day trying to change the name of a website that had already been set up. It isn’t quite as easy as just changing the name.

Tuesday, I realized that the search application that I had bought as an add-on to the side, no longer worked. Unfortunately, the designers of this application live in Bangladesh, which is exactly 12 hours different in time. Which means, I have to wait until the next day to even find out if they did anything (they always have so far). So, I can’t do anything with that for an entire day. On Wednesday I came in to find an email from my Bangladeshian friends that informed me that my password had not worked for them and they could not make the necessary changes (written in very bad English, but my Bengali isn’t so great, either). I reviewed the credentials I sent them and they seem fine, so I don’t know what happened. BUT, because they had attempted to get in too many times, I was suddenly LOCKED OUT. Okay, fine, here’s the information to click to get back in. Click…’please enter the customer number and name of the owner of this site.’ So I add the information and click back to my log-in page. ‘Please change your password’…etc…So, I do all of this, click the log-in and it says that I have been Locked out again. Thus it was back and forth in a continuous loop of computer nothingness. I was forced to call (and I hate calling just about anyone, much less tech support). I explained that the Bengalis had attempted to get in too many times and got the account locked. We go through the whole rigmarole to get me back in. At the end of the call she says “Next time just change the password before it locks you out.” But, but it wasn’t ME, I wanted to say and then realized neither of us really cared.

So it took another day until they were able to fix it. I was thinking inside my head the whole time: “oh, no, did I buy an application that’s suspect?” But, the Bengalis came through and everything worked again. Whew!

So, it was really no surprise that I left my iPhone at work. I was soooo mad at myself. Coincidentally, as I was grasping with the thought that I was going to have to bake without music and wake up with a regular alarm clock that I wasn’t really sure worked anymore, I thought about an article I had read just a few hours before on how Smart Phones are bad for our brains. I read it thinking it was going to tell me about some microwaves in my iPhone that is eating the cells of my mind like a cancer, but it was really about how iPhones are so distracting that no one can even concentrate on anything because they are too worried they might miss some flash or a “VERY IMPORTANT text.” The writer went on to say that we need to leave our phones somewhere else for a while. So, I told myself that this was that time and, so what? That I couldn’t have music or look up recipes. So what that I would have to use a regular old alarm clock for one day. So, I went about and made my cookies and made dinner without music.

Later in the evening as I was heading up to bed, I admitted my sin to Paul. He immediately got on his phone. He says in his charming way ,“Hey dipshit! Your phone is in your car”

I suddenly flashed back to the moment I had gotten in the car after stopping at the pet store for treats for the dogs. I heard a thump in the dark and thought “Oh, God, I hope that wasn’t the treats falling all over the floor of the front seat.“ When I had gotten out and looked around, I saw no immediate source of the sound so I just figured it was one of those things…..