Cell Phone: 1 C.J.: 0

1. As I'm sure you've noticed, I changed the look of this blog last night.

2. I've been wanting to for a long time, but every time I tried, something would go wrong with the layout, and because I'm so NOT a technical genius, I would have no idea how to fix it.

3. I have to give credit to my awesome friend Mandy for sending me a link and walking me through the process. I love that I have people in my life who ENJOY figuring out technical stuff.

4. Speaking of figuring out technical stuff, I have a new cell phone. We sort of hate each other at the moment. It wouldn't let me text correctly (I still can't make the Look Up Contact feature work), it wouldn't save my contacts in any semblance of order, and it defied my every (feeble) attempt to browse through it's options and figure out how to work it.

5. It likes to toy with me. Perhaps it thinks I want its shiny new features more than I want the comfort of a phone I can actually USE and thus refuses to take seriously my many threats to yank its sim card and return to using my old battered phone.

6. My hubby, who has the same Ooh, Shiny! reaction to figuring out gadgets as I do to reading new books, tried for about an hour to tough out my frustration and send me to my phone's manual.

7. That's not how our marriage works.

8. I don't read manuals because they are often incomprehensible to me without a herculean effort of focus and concentration and even then, the technical info raises my blood pressure until I want to scream and throw the phone against the wall because it's just not worth it. He reads manuals cover to cover and spends an hour he could've spent doing any number of truly enjoyable things tinkering with his new gadgets.

9. Yes, I'm a technological curmudgeon. I don't want an iPad, and iPhone, a Kindle or a fancy navigation system in my car. Those things don't look exciting to me. They look stressful.

10. About the time I began to think my battle with my new cell phone was going to make me cry (I'd already decided I would never be able to text my friends again), my hubby took pity on me, stepped in, and helped me navigate through the stupidly complicated features on my phone.

11. I still don't know how to work most of it, but at least it no longer takes me thirty minutes to respond to a text.

12. Apropos of nothing, Starshine walked in to the living room the other night and said, "Dad? When are you going to have that conversation with me? You know. The conversation about ... I can't even say it."

13. My hubby said, "Well, when do you want to have the conversation?"

14. Starshine spent a moment in deep thought and then said, "February 13, 2011."

15. And so we've penciled him in.

16. I've begun the new YA manuscript I pitched to Holly.

17. In a totally shocking development, the entire story is plotted out. The big stuff, anyway. I still get to discover how to make from one big plot point to the next, but I know what needs to happen and where I'm going.

18. I'm as surprised by this as anyone.

19. We'll see how much of it remains true once I get into the story.

20. I'd love to stay and chat more with you today, but I have three boys frantically putting the finishing touches on a clean garage so they can go to the pool. Time to go slather on the sunscreen and hit the water.