My Phone is Clean

I washed my phone the other day.

It needed it. It hadn’t been washed in a very long time….

Actually, I washed it because it just happened to be in the pocket of my jeans, which I had stripped off in a panic and thrown in the washer, hoping to get the white paint off of my right pant leg…after it splashed up from the basement floor…but not before sprinkling an assortment of interesting Rorschach patterns on my collection of snow shovels and other basement detritus…after I reached around the side of the tool bench to retrieve the box of latex gloves that had fallen, thus knocking over the can of white semi-gloss paint that I was using to do a small little touch up on a small little knick on the banister, that might have disturbed one of our nosey parker dinner guests, just before Thanksgiving.

Got all that?

So I washed my phone.

There it sat at the bottom of the washer, with that look of, “Nice move, Bozo,” all over its soggy little screen.  It was clean though…clean as a whistle; and it still worked. 

Well it mostly worked….

My ringtone kind of sounded like it was still under water, and this odd shadowy substance sloshed around inside the display; kind of like a lava lamp, which I guess is kind of cool.

I wasn’t all that concerned, however, since I had an identical backup phone upstairs to switch it out with. 

You know, the one I originally used before I purchased this one—the one I just washed—to replace that one, last winter, when I stepped on Z’s snow boot, on the landing, coming down the cellar stairs on that snowy Sunday night and heard my ankle go snap crackle and pop, but without the rice krispies, as I turned it over and fell on my smartest feature.  

Hearing your ankle snap crackle and pop is always scary cuz it hurts like a son of a you know what and all you can imagine is weeks of immobility and rehabilitation, which is pretty much par for the course for me anyway, minus the rehab.  

Z, always the good wife, came running in a panic, shouting, “What happened…what happened?”

I think, that’s what she was shouting, but it was hard to hear over the sounds of my own woman like screams.

Z was certain I had fallen all the way down the stairs, to the hard concrete floor below; and I'm not sure, but I thought I saw a little look of disappointment sweep across her face when she saw I had only gotten as far as the first landing.

But again, I may have been delusional with pain.

Luckily, once the intense fiery pain subsided, it wasn't all that bad and I was able to hobble around a bit. It was a little sore but luckily no major swelling occurred due to my superior mind over matter healing abilities. However....unfortunately, then, I was well enough to go out with Z and shovel the 16 inches of snow that fell, which included crawling on our hands and knees in order to find and dig out our little lighted polar bear which had gotten blown over in the storm, and buried under a 3 foot drift of snow...which led to my somehow stupidly dropping my cell phone in a snow bank, apparently never to be seen again until the spring thaw.

Not that we didn't try; we made quite the pair walking around poking and digging at the snow as if we were looking for avalanche survivors in the Andes, listening all over the front and back yards for my poor little phone ringing, as I limped all the way.

I later found that particular phone—the first phone—right by the polar bear, right where we had been looking, once the snow receded sometime in February. And it worked too! 

So now I have two phones…sort of…cuz now I washed the second phone. 

But it needed it. It hadn’t been washed in a very long time….

Oh…and I did touch up that little nick on the bannister.

And I rescued my jeans…and my sneakers, which I hadn’t mentioned cuz I didn’t want to sound like too much of a whiner.


Gotta go...the phone is ringing.


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