Day Sixty-One - Getting Ready!

Yesterday was a pretty big day around here.  I finally passed the 1,000 page view mark on this blog.  That means that I have roughly 20 regular readers.  It's a good thing that I am not planning to make a living as a blogger.

This is the week that my friend Jenny and I are going to San Francisco.  I'm looking forward to it.  Normally, at this point we would have met multiple times to make plans, run ideas for things we want to do past each other, and just generally sat for hours on end talking about the trip.  But this time around we are both busy and since I am no longer a regular at my former employer (who shall not be named) and Jenny still works there we haven't had lunchtime to make plans.  So, we have been emailing and texting each other as something comes up.

This is actually the most spontaneous trip we have ever done.  Normally, we have months to plan any trip we go on.  The only other time that even comes close was when we went to Key West a year and a half ago.  I think we only started planning that trip about 2 months before we left.  I think we really did Key West right.  I hope this trip is just as much fun.

Generally, when I come back from a trip, the first thing I do is get a new cell phone.  Hopefully, that won't be necessary this time.  I think it is sort of cute the way I always optimistically email confirmations and such to myself so that I will have all of them on my cell phone during the trip if I run into problems.  After all, it is always exciting if I still have my cell phone midway through the trip.  Forget about making it home with a working cell phone.  That's just crazy talk!

Jenny may have to confirm this, but I think my first cell phone problem happened during that trip to Key West.  In case you don't know me that well, I have a reputation for being a little accident prone.  On this one day in Key West we decided to rent scooters and cruise around the island on them.  I got an orange and white one.  It was so cute and we had so much fun.  We went to a lot of places and were just sort of taking it easy.  We decided to go to a beach.  In Key West the beaches are all man made, so at the place where we went there was this little seawall type thing.  Every couple hundred yards there were steps where you could walk down from the beach to the water.  Next to each set of steps there were warning signs with some kind of slippery step warning.

I walked straight past the warning sign to take the following picture of myself.

I'm not sure if you can tell, but I am standing on the top step.  You can see just a little part of the hand rail on the left side of the picture and a little bit of the concrete seawall on the right side.  What you can't see is the algae covered steps that I am standing precariously on.  As I was taking this picture Jenny was a few hundred yards down the beach.  I took three pictures like this one to be sure that I had gotten a decent one.  They all looked about like this.

Once I finished taking the third picture, I carefully grasped the handrail because I know that I am totally clumsy.  I had read the sign and I knew that if anyone could fall, I probably would.  In the hand that I was not grasping the handrail with I was holding the waterproof camera that I took this picture with, as well as my little camera bag which incidentally was NOT waterproof.  It contained my wallet and my cell phone.  You see where I am going with this.  I moved my foot about 1/4 of an inch and both feet went right out from under me.  I tried to keep from falling by holding onto that handrail for dear life.  It didn't work.  All that accomplished was bruising my arm where it attempted to literally wrap around the metal rail.  I won't go into the ugly details of all the other scrapes and bruises from the concrete.  But let's just say I went in butt first.  When I tried to get back up on my feet, they went out from under me again.  I looked like the freaking Three Stooges and there was only one of me.  But I did finally get back up and off of the steps.

Surprisingly, I was able to keep most of the upper part of my body out of the water.  After making sure that I had no broken bones, I took my cell phone out of my camera bag to assess the damage.  It was only dripping a little....  So, then I walked down the beach to get Jenny.  When I caught up with her, I asked her to take a picture of me just after I had fallen into the Atlantic Ocean.  This is the picture she took.

You can't really tell at this distance, but I was pretty wet from the waist down.  I think it is important to note, however, that I am still smiling because even the worst day in Key West is better than the best day here.  So, we got back on the scooters and headed back to the hotel so that I could change clothes.  Jenny had heard that if you put a wet cell phone in a ziplock bag full of uncooked rice, it might dry out.  So while I was showering, changing and assessing the damage to my backside, she went to the hotels restaurant and got them to give her a ziplock bag full of rice.  I think that if we had taken the phone apart and dried the inside first, it might have had a chance at working.  But it did not work.

Once I had changed clothes we went back out and rode our scooters for the rest of the day.  They were only rented for the day.  We had to get our money's worth out of them.  So, below is a picture of me on my orange and white rented scooter after getting into a fresh change of clothes.  Again, smiling because after all I am still in Key West on a scooter!

So that was my story of falling into the Atlantic Ocean and the reason that I now insure my cell phones against getting wet.

I have no idea what happened to my cell phone in Hawaii.  First of all, it wasn't even my normal cell phone, it was my back up cell phone because my normal smart phone had been acting up the week before we left for our trip.  So, to be safe (hahahaha) I took my back up.  At one point I had it and then the next time I needed it, I didn't.  We thought that I might have left it in a restaurant the day we went to the North Shore, but when we went back to the restaurant the following day, they said nobody had turned it in.  That night after we returned to the hotel after going to the North Shore, I had an incident while returning towels out near the pool where I started dropping stuff, when I would bend over to pick up what had fallen, more stuff fell out of my bag.  I think it probably fell out and we didn't notice.  I never saw it again and I was in a pretty crappy mood for a day or two as a result.

Once I was at a SFA football game with my parents and I moved from one seat to another.  A little later a kid tapped me on the shoulder and asked if this was my phone that he was holding.  I had apparently left it sitting on the seat where I had been before.  My mom, in a very snarky manner, told the kid that I do that a LOT.  Thanks Mom.

So anyway, we are supposed to return on Sunday.  If you need to get in touch with me Sunday afternoon, I'll probably be at the T-Mobile store.  Just ask for Susan, they know me by name.