A Couple Of Questions...

I don't know where the children are, and I don't care. I can't seem to get enough of the quiet, you know? I'm going to end up in a padded room.

Marriage question: If your husband goes out and buys himself an MP3 player and figures out how to use it all on his own, including (but not limited to) how to download podcasts from ITunes....is that a midlife crisis type of thing?

What's the big deal, you ask? Understand that Larry still can't figure out how to access our voicemail. He can't find the phonebook on his cellphone. I think even the toaster puzzles him a bit. So what's up with the MP3 player, huh? And why didn't he get me one?

Vacation question: We're going on a long-planned trip in a couple of weeks, a real trip where we stay in a fully furnished cottage that we rented (over the Internet) months ago. No bunking down with long-suffering relatives, no "let's go camping, that's more fun!" prevarications - an honest-to-goodness vacation is going to happen to us, where we will spend at least as much time at the destination as we spend in the car. Exciting, right?

So! If the very nice-sounding person that we sent mucho money to for a deposit last January (before we needed the new car, but let's not think about that) hasn't answered our e-mails for the past week, he's just busy, right? He's busy fluffing the pillows and cleaning the sofas and generally making sure we get our money's worth out of this vacation cottage - that's why he doesn't have time to communicate and reassure us that, yes, he is still in the country.

Or this is a scam and all those pretty pictures on the Internet represent some cottage that does not belong to him the way, say, half our vacation money now does. That is another possibility. What do you think?

You know, I have really been looking forward to this vacation; unlike last year, this year I have a nifty laptop I can sneak into my luggage so that I don't have to be deprived of blogging while away from home.

(I know, I know, let's not think about what's so wrong with this whole situation, all right? I have a problem, I admit it. Now go away.)

But I just checked and there is no AT&T wireless access where we are going. Now what am I supposed to do? I'm betting holding up a wire coat hanger in the air above my laptop doesn't facilitate Internet reception, does it? How about bunny ears?

You young 'uns who don't know what I'm talking about - here's a picture. We old folks used to place these contraptions on top of our television sets (the sets weren't flat back then, so you could put stuff on top of them) in order to improve the picture on the screen. No, we didn't understand how that worked, either. But it did.

And if the picture were still fuzzy, we would put tinfoil on the tips of the "ears." I have no idea why. And if that particular technological innovation failed to work, someone would have to lift up the bunny ears (complete with tinfoil) and wave them around until the fuzziness went away, at which point everyone else would shout, "That's it! Stand still!"

At least, that's what happened in our house. Kids today don't know how good they've got it.