Why I'm too cool for the iPhone

My husband lost his cell phone.

I think he did it on purpose.

You see, many years ago, I was being a good wife and cleaning up our patio table when I accidentally tossed his cell into a bon fire along with a handful of actual garbage. I realized exactly what I had done the moment my hand opened and the phone went flying into the air. I desperately reached out to try and grab it before that sucker landed into the leaping flames of fire, fueled into a raging inferno with a little gas. (My husband can't start a fire by rubbing two sticks together if his life depended on it. He needs help. Preferably help from which ever large amounts of flammable liquid we happen to have lying around our yard, and preferably when I'm not standing near so as to retain my eyebrows.)

(Because oh yes, more than once he's burned these f*ckers off.)

It took but a nano second for Boo's phone to dissolve into a puddle of plastic goo. By the time I was able to safely fish out the remnants from the ashes, all that remained was a melted piece of metal barely bigger than a quarter.

My husband was less than amused. I kinda was. It was a draw.

From that moment on, my husband has made it his personal mission to always buy the most expensive, newest piece of cell phone technology he can get his grubby paws on. Just to rub my nose in the fact that he has it and I don't.

A grown man going 'Neener Neener' is not nearly as sexy as one would think it is.

What makes my husband's obsession with cell phone technology more annoying is he doesn't make use of most features his phone is capable of. Sure, he answers the phone and has been known to breathe heavy on the line for me now and then, but that's about it. He doesn't text, he doesn't take pictures, he doesn't tweet, heck the man doesn't even have a facebook account.

He uses his phone to simply talk on. How old school is that? In his defence, because I love him and he feeds me so clearly I don't want to get on his bad side here, they make cell phones so itty bitty tiny these days that only a toddler can press the buttons with any accuracy. My husband has been blessed with, well big fingers.

Ham hocks actually. His hands are quite literally as big or bigger than bigger plates. He's freakish that way. When he makes a fist it's as big as my head. When you have ridiculously big fingers it makes the task of pressing ridiculously small keys that much more comical.

So while he likes the idea of phones that do everything for you short of wiping your bottom, he is hampered by his physical inability to make them work because of his sausage fingers.

Meanwhile, I covet this technology for myself and my lithe little fingers and am stuck with an ancient blackberry which takes fuzzy pictures and freezes on me every two minutes while I wait for my contract to expire so that I can pick up the newest toy.

Clearly I need to start losing my phone as often as he does.

Since Boo has lost yet another cell in a long line of burned, run over, dropped or drooled on phones, he has set his eyes on the coveted iPhone. An iPhone. The blogger's phone of choice. My husband, the non-blogger, who I'm sure only wants the phone so he can waggle it in my face and say "no touchy touchy Tanis!"

I refuse to be bested by this beast. So I did what any smart woman who would have to pay full retail price to get a new phone thanks to contract law, and ran out to buy an iTouch. The poor man's cousin to the iPhone.

My delusional thinking was along the lines of, well, I'll buy this and see what the hype is about. And if I don't like it I'll give it to my kids to ruin.

I was so excited to get my shiny new toy. My kids were howling with jealousy and my husband (although I couldn't see him) was rolling his eyes at my crooked logic. I may not be able to afford the iPhone right now, but dammit, I can have it's cheaper, non-phone version.

(So I'm a sheep. I want what all the cool kids have.) Baaaaaaa.

Turns out? The apps that never end are pretty cool.

Also, turns out my fingers are not as lithe as I thought they were and I can't type on the damn thing for the life of me. I type dog and it comes out hog.

I'm so frustrated with this itty bitty piece of shiny new Apple technology I want to hurl it across my house. What's the point of making virtual keys so little you need a toothpick or a dead hobo's finger to be able to use it?

All that hype about the iPhone? I'm pretty sure was propelled by a horde of leprechauns. Because obviously they are the only ones with fingers small enough to use the damn thing.

Then there is the small fact I'm aging (as my beaver tail boobs like to flap about and remind me every day) that I can't actually see any of the text on the screen. Oh sure, I know you can adjust the settings to make the text bigger so the visually challenged, geriatric set such as myself can see the dirty text your best friend just sent you, but once again, that requires small fingers to do so.

At one point last night, I was caught staring at my children's fingers and wondering if they actually needed ten full digits. Visions of one wee finger on a key ring kept running through my mind.

Suffice it to say, my children are now giving me the stink eye while keeping their hands firmly shoved in their pockets.

I'll keep the iTouch, if only to wave it in front of my children and tease, "no touchy touchy kids!" but the idea of actually going the next step and buying the over-achieving iPhone have been dashed. Right about the same time I lost a game of Tetris because my fat finger slipped.

What I am not going to do, however, is tell my husband how annoying the touch screen is for anyone who possesses regular sized digits let alone those with elephant-sized fingers.

I'm a bitter, cranky wife. And nothing will amuse my blackened little heart more than watching my husband try and fumble with the keypad.

I'm also a gal who is more old school than she once thought. Turns out, I'll take my worn out old crackberry with it's keypad full of actual buttons over the sleek and shiny and utterly annoying iPhone anyday.

Now, get off my lawn. (She says as she shakes her cane at every one with small fingers and iPhones.)

What a Girl Wants

In a few months my husband and I will have been married thirteen years. What's more amazing than the fact I have managed to keep a man legally bound to me that long is the fact we've been living together for fifteen, and a couple for seventeen. Which is exactly half the number of years I've been alive.

If you had told me Boo was my future husband when I was six years old and visiting his house with my daddy, I'd have likely kicked you in the shins. At that point in time I had no interest in the big lipped blond boy who constantly wore orange and brown striped tee shirts.

Life, she has a sense of humour in a dark and twisted way.

I have been in Boo's life from the time we were in diapers and his partner for half of my life and yet the man still cannot figure me out.

It's not like I'm complicated, it's just I'm rather irrational (I swear it's charming) and I happen to change my mind a lot.

(Like the time I told him not to bother buying me a wedding ring because I'd never wear it and then two days before our wedding ceremony I wept and whined because he actually listened to me and didn't buy me a wedding ring. After banging his head against the wall multiple times, he scraped up every bit of cash he could beg, borrow and steal and dragged me to the jewelery store where I happily picked out a tiny diamond solitaire ring.

Two months after the ceremony, he noticed I wasn't wearing my wedding ring. Yes, I had changed my mind and decided I was right the first time and didn't want the ring he had busted his bottom to buy for me. Let's just say he banged his head against the wall again.)

When I tell you I want mustard on sandwich, this is just means I want mustard on my sandwich right now. It doesn't mean I'm signing a life time contract of wanting mustard on every single sandwich I will ever eat from now to till the end of time.

Sometimes a little Italian dressing on a sandwich is a nice life distraction, you know?

My husband, he bangs his head on a lot of walls. But the one thing I can never, ever fault him for, his the effort he puts in to keeping me happy. He's constantly trying to keep up with my whims. He, in fact, spoils me even if he misunderstands me half the time.

We married young which means we married one another when neither had a pot to pee in. Literally. Boo came with a dowry of a butter knife, a used shower curtain and a broken telephone. I am not joking. Thank goodness for banks willing to give credit cards to young people in an effort to entrap them into a life time of debt.

Not only did we have two kids before our first wedding anniversary but we had more debt than should be legally allowed. Between the credit card that was racked up to buy things like food and diapers, we both had student loans tied around our necks. We came to the brink of bankruptcy more than once and if it weren't for our deep sense of lust and devotion, I'm sure we'd have divorced due to financial misfortune more than once.

Somehow, through time and a lot of hard work (on Boo's part, I'm the lazy one in this union) we made careful choices to slowly chip away at our debt until where we are today. Not much further ahead but just a few years shy of being mortgage free and the cars we drive are ours and not the bank's.

Years of surviving on boxed mac and cheese and bruised bananas are slowly fading into the past.

But those lean years, when we had to pick which utility bill to pay each month because we didn't have enough to pay them all and still feed our family, have permanently scarred us. So much so, that my husband feels it's his duty to make amends and provide for me everything he couldn't when we younger.

He's sweet, if not a wee misguided. I'll keep him though.

The past few years, despite being married to me half his life and observing my tastes and preferences, he keeps surprising me with bling.

A lot of bling.

I'm not exactly a bling-y type of gal. If the tattoos don't advertise that, surely the nipple rings would. You'd think.

The problem with the bling he buys, well, it's expensive. Sure it's pretty, but not only will I not wear it, but if I do, I'm likely to either bash it into pieces as I garden or scrub toilets or I'm likely to lose it.

Evidence of Boo's thoughtfulness over the course of the years and my inability to respect anything sparkly:



A Christmas gift he carefully purchased after tucking away money for almost a year. My tennis bracelet.Which I loved so much I refused to take off until the diamonds started to fall out of it. Whoops. I may or may not have broken the clasp on it too.

This lovely gift was bestowed to me after I wrote the Journey series, chronicling the loss of our foster-to-adopt child. Boo wanted to ease my fractured heart with sparkles. The necklace and earring set was aptly named, "The Journey."

Boo surprised me with this ring on our tenth wedding anniversary. It had been a tough year after losing our Bug and he wanted to turn my frown upside down.

As one diamond after another disappears into the ether surrounding my home it becomes increasingly obvious I am entirely not mature enough to be entrusted with shiny objects.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate both the thought and expense that went into these shiny purchases from a man who clearly loves me. I really do. I just wish I was a woman who wanted such trinkets and who treasured them more instead of taking them off, walking away and then wondering where they went.

Because I am an irrational woman, I'm going to blame my husband for this. Clearly every lost diamond is his fault. If he had been paying attention to who I am over the last half of his life he'd have known better.

I am the girl who loses bling.

(De Nile ain't just a river, people.)

Maybe it's because bling just isn't my thing. I'm a blingless type of girl. I don't generally wear any jewelery, not even a watch. When I'm trying to impress someone I may or may not be motivated to stick a silver hoop into my ear and call it fashion.

I'm the type of gal who cuts her nails to the quick, only paints her toenails once a year and then lets the paint chip off  naturally as the nails grow out and prefers tattoo ink to hair dye. I own four pairs of shoes, two of which are shit-kickers and there are two skirts in my closet: one for funerals and one for weddings.

I am, in fact, the most non-blingy type of girl a gal can be. Always have been, likely always will be. Which is why I feel physical pain when my husband hands me small packages.

He's clearly forgotten who he's legally bound to. Either that or he's wishing he married someone more sophisticated.

*scratches arm pit and resumes writing*

So, in an effort to save my darling husband from carelessly tossing more money into the wind and bringing home jewelery that will either get lost or spend an eternity collecting dust in the back of a drawer, I cleverly decided to start showing him my idea of a good time jewelery purchase.

After explaining to him that a small cost output in jewelry purchases would lead to a much larger cost savings and general satisfaction on both parties end, he rolled his eyes and walked away agreed.

Yet when my purchase arrived in a shiny black box, Boo was clearly curious to see what it was that would float my boat, save him money and perhaps earn him future blow job rights.

From the look on his face it was all too evident his imagination had never been stretched as far as it was in that moment.

Because my idea of a good piece of jewelry happens to include the word roadkill.

Oh, they tickle as they dangle against my neck.

Such pretty claws you have, my dear...

I told you I wasn't into bling. I prefer things stuffed and mounted. It's nature's way of recycling.

Sadly, it became all too obvious after watching my husband recoil in terror and then laugh until he cried, that I haven't been paying attention to him the past 17 years either.

Because if I thought I could convince the man I love that buying items from a taxidermist to decorate myself with is a good idea, I am more delusional than he is in his efforts to step-ford wife me.

Turns out, you can't class a girl up unless she wants to be polished.

Just like you can't force a man to buy his wife roadkill for their anniversary.

Wanna Be a SuperStar?

When I first started blogging four years ago, I had no clue what I was doing. None. My vast experience as a blogger could be summed up quite literally as a blog lurker for two months. Which, you know, darn near made me an expert.

Heh.

I had no expectations when I started this blog. I had things I hoped for, mostly finding a reader or two who would snicker at my jokes and remind me that life indeed does go on even if one's son drops dead unexpectedly in the middle of the night but other than that, I didn't really know what the hell I was doing.

I just did it anyway because it felt good. Like sex, but without having to worry about getting knocked up. Again.

I've learned a lot, mostly through trial and error over the course of time when it comes to the ins and outs of blogging. But I've never blogged about blogging because (yawn) meta-blogging is so not my thing. Nobody reads an instruction manual, so why write one?

(My apologies to the people who actually earn their livings writing instruction manuals. Also, my sympathies.)

But recently, I've received a plethora of private emails asking me if I had any tips for a shiny newbie blogger dreaming of success in the big bad bloggie world. I admit, this is rather novel to me. Most of the time I just get a tonne of emails from horny losers asking if I will send them a picture of my boobs.

(The answer to that question is generally no. FYI.)

It seems that since I've won an award or two, and landed on a list here or there, my readers have confused me with someone who is a professional, someone who actually knows what they are doing and someone who doesn't spend most of her days surfing the net in hopes of finding a funny cartoon to read.

Silly chickens.

However, I am nothing if not a people pleaser so I thought I'd share with you my vast wealth of blogging knowledge. Here's your chance to either mock me or click away to someone who actually wrote a real post.

You want real advice, please direct your attention to Problogger. See? Even the name is more professional than Attack of the Redneck Mommy. Which, leads me to my second tip: Don't over-think how your are going to christen your corner of the internet. Don't bother with a google search. Heck, if I had done that, I would have missed all the fun of people accidentally finding my blog instead of the rat farmer in Alabama they were looking for.



Try to find interesting blog fodder, say, the opposite of writing a post about how to be a better blogger. Don't have anything of interest to write about? Well you should do what I do in times of blogging blankness. Write about your boobs! Or better yet, write daft posts about dying your cooter hair blue.

The internet is over-run with thoughtful, well-written posts. It's over-rated. Don't be afraid to be the google perverts' best friend. This way you'll know your blog really reached out to touch someone.



Nothing you write can ever come back to bite you on the ass. The internet is shielded from reality by the blood droplets of geeks everywhere. It is a magical force field.

So if you want to write a post about your mom, she will never find it and subsequently disown your arse for the following two years. You want to chronicle a lengthy and troublesome adoption process as you endure it? Go right ahead. I promise, the case supervisor in charge of determining your family size will never discover you called her a soulless bureaucrat sucking the hope out of good parents everywhere.

Go ahead and feel good about calling your psychiatrist an insecure fruit loop before he has rendered his professional opinion about your ability to function as a responsible parent. He'll never find it. And if he does, he won't be pissed at all. I mean, who doesn't enjoy having their sexuality questioned publicly now and then?

Other bloggers will warn you not to over-share, but personally, I've developed a taste for toe jam. And when someone tells you not to publish anything you aren't willing to have your arse kicked over, they clearly have never endured the joy of that particular experience.

I say grab a bulls-eye and bend over. Let the fun begin!



For the love of bloggers everywhere, remember that every blogger started out with the same origins. Just a lonely geek behind a computer screen hoping someone would find and read their blog. Except Dooce. Heather Armstrong is the exception. She fully popped out of her mother's vagina with a huge internet readership. Her family still talks about it at holiday get-togethers.

And if you believe that I've got a chicken over here that shits out gold eggs. Email me if you are interested in purchasing her.

Having said that, just know, if you don't have at least one hundred daily readers, you are clearly failing and not contributing anything of worth to the blogging community. Screw quality and originality. The only thing that counts for anything here in the blog world is the number of readers you can brag about.



The most important blogging lesson I can teach you, is always remember you are a STAR. Do not let your husband, your wife, your in-laws or your children forget this fact. Screw house cleaning and family time. You have a blog to update dammit, and twitter followers waiting to hang on your every word.

You must never disappoint them. It's the price of blogging fame. Didn't you know? Once you hit 50 readers a day you have to trade in your life and any real life obligations you may have for more server space. It's the law.

My last tip of the day? Read Mr. Lady. She has a great section on her blog called techstalk where she dumbs down the actual intricacies of blogging. Ftp, platforms, bedazzled vaginas er, blogs, you name it, Shannon covers it. And she makes it readable. She is hands down one of the best writers on the internet.

(And no, I'm not just saying that because she occasionally lets me sleep with my face buried in her boobs, although that doesn't hurt either.)

There. My blogging advice to you all. I feel pretty good about this post. I mean, not only did I directed you to a couple of actual pros thereby successfully shirking all responsibility for the success of your blogs, but I managed to mock blogging in general and avoid folding the laundry this morning.

That's how a blogger does it.