WHEN TO DISOWN YOUR SON

My son is home from college for the holidays, and I am catching up on a year's worth of mothering. He's been at school for two semesters, and then spent the summer working in Chicago, so I have not had him home for an actual year.

Today, in the spirit of giving and Christmas and the fact that tomorrow is his birthday, I took him to Radio Shack to get his cell phone 'ungraded.' It sounds good, he gets a prettier one, and it doesn't cost me a penny because all I have to do is extend my contract with AT&T for another couple of years.

So he got a new cell. It's nicer. Big deal.

Until we got home.

Josiah then began reading the little instruction book that comes with it upon my recommendation. Unless you are the type of person (which I am) that will continue to push every single button and every single combination of keys over and over again until you discover all the ins and outs of the electronic equipment (which is the only reason I become the computer guru at two different jobs without ever having taken a single computer class), you honestly are better off reading the instruction book which is commonly written by someone who is the least qualified to write anything worth reading - you should read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and yes, that honestly is a book.

Wait... where was I?

Oh, yeah, the new cell phone.

So I'm tapping away at the computer keyboard as I normally am and Josiah is playing with the new phone and suddenly...

Josiah speaks to the cell and clearly says "Call Mom's cell."

Then my phone rings.

HIS PHONE IS VOICE ACTIVATED.

I am never going to forgive him.

SEARCH AND RESCUE TEAM

I can't tell directions. Well, no, actually I seem to have a magnetic needle somewhere in my body. It doesn't point exactly north, but it generally gets me where I want to go.

But when I hear a voice (I mean, a voice that is not inside my head), I have to do a 360 to figure out where the heck it's coming from. It makes me look pretty goofy... okay, those of you who know me, it makes me just a little more goofy than normal.

So when my cell phone rings (BIZARRE-MY CELL PHONE JUST RANG), I check in the places I normally keep it - my jeans front pocket. I just don't keep it any place else - so I usually know where it is.

Today? Guess what? IT WASN'T THERE. And since I was driving at the time, I pulled over to the side of the highway.

By chance, I had also just driven past a group of workers who were creating a rather large rock entryway into a has-been-in-developement-and-yet-nothing-being-built-for-the-past-three-years area. And after watching a frantic white woman throwing random large items from her truck in a fruitless hunt for the ringing phone, several men offered to help (after muttering "una senora loco" or something like that), used their cell phones to make mine ring, located it, and pulled it out for me.

I also discovered that under my truck seats was an sickening, gelatious viscid MASS, composed of melted bubble gum, squashed Carls Jr. french fries (from when my son was driving my truck every day to work there), spilled Diet Coke and items that I don't ever want to acknowledge, and mingled with $8.39 (mainly in nickels and pennies), thirteen bungee cords, and two towels I must have snitched from Cochise Health and Racquet Club years ago.