Zach! Don't Look!

My son Zachary is kinda obsessive about his cell phone and his Zune and his books and his video games and the cases his video games come in and, well, pretty much his stuff.

Seriously. Like a year and a half ago, I was holding his Zune while he was driving, and it slid down my leg onto the floor. If you bring this up to him, he still gets a bit ranty about how I carelessly hurled his Zune down onto the floor of the car. Although, really, his car is very low to the ground and I don't think you could drop anything from a height of higher than two feet onto the front seat floor...

So when he gave me an IPod touch, he bought a really nice leather case for it, and he mentioned I might want to (read SHOULD) get a screen protector for it.

So, Zach, really, I am right about you and your phone and your Zune, and I totally did nothing to it in the car that could have even gotten it sticky, much less scratched or damaged it - admit it -- but now, I think you should look away.

Because this is what the screen on my touch looks like today...



That's just sad. This gadget that is my most favorite inanimate object possibly EVER, and yet it looks like I use it while eating chips and sneezing. (But, hey, this photo has some totally awesome depth of field to it, did you notice? Plus, I think you could lift my fingerprint.)

I really like the case, it's made with recycled and leftover materials, so no cow died directly that I might encase my toy in leather. Nope. The cow died for my shoes and my car seats, but my touch is encased in the leftover scraps. I feel noble.

This is why I love this thing...

Sneezies. A ridiculously easy and mindlessly addictive game wherein you trigger a sneeze chain reaction:

and food IQ, in which I keep track of everything I eat and which makes me really think twice before I eat that potato chip. It tracks calories and fat and stuff, and so far it is really making me stay on track. Like for lunch today I had carrots, spinach, grapes, walnuts, and a string cheese. What I wanted for lunch? A Kirkland chicken bake, which is really delicious chicken and veggies in gravy encased in dough, and 600 calories and 22 grams of fat. Yeah. An hour on the elliptical burns about 500 calories, so while the chicken bake is in fact delicious, it is not an hour on the elliptical trainer delicious.


Now my special chocolate cake with the chocolate glaze, totally worth an hour on the elliptical.

(This is a screen shot of my breakfast -- an apple with cinnamon and sugar.)

And because my sticky messy screen has absolutely nothing to do with Alaska and everything to do with the fact that I misplaced that little black cloth that came with it...

The Daily Alaska.

Yesterday's sunrise, or perhaps more accurately, yesterday's a little while after the sun came up. I think,even without me farting around with my Photoshop Elements, that it has a sort of impressionist painting feel to it.

Later the sky cleared, and we had a beautiful, bright, sunshiny and whoa cold cold cold cold cold cold day. Like a high of FIVE cold. Sixteen below once the sun went down cold.

Still, I am very happy to be here, and not in Tucson, where I would be dreading the very soon return of ridiculously hot weather. (But I really miss my friends and family in Arizona. sigh. Can't you all move to Anchorage, just for a couple years?)