A pox on PowerPoint Creator

Notice how I only find time to post on Sundays? And I'm procrastinating because I'm preparing my PowerPoint presentation for tomorrow morning. I like PowerPoint about as much as I like WalMart. It's cheap, low-end, and everywhere.

In fact I'm feeling like one big Luddite today. It seems all my technology is pressing down on me. For instance, I'd like to go for a run/walk tonight with my little I-pod Shuffle but my son lost his ear plugs for his I-Pod Mini and so keeps using mine and I'd go get them but then I have to go through this whole routine of wiping down the little white ear buttons with rubbing alcohol because, well this is gross, but because he has what we call here "sweet potato ears."

And I'd load up some new songs for both him and myself except our home Mac needs an OSX update and without it we can't use I-Tunes. Or Netflix. Or online banking through TCF. Except for the life of me I forgot my Mac user name and password and somehow didn't write it down.

Our small digital camera is out of batteries, too, and doesn't take a charge. It has a few nice pictures from Oslo on it. When those batteries ran out in Oslo, Megan and I both decided the price of Norwegian batteries was too high so I took a dozen or so other photos on my cell phone, which I'd load up on to Facebook but I can't do that on this laptop (I need a work IT professional to install the photo uploader) and I keep forgetting to bring the cord into work.

And speaking of my phone, I just opened my AT&T bill and saw that they charged me $57 more than usual because, apparently, my phone keeps attempting to auto-sync by wireless and it's racking up the minutes doing so.

They're doing all kinds of sewer work in my Highland neighborhood and every day that repair work trips off the power in our block. I come home to 13 blinking digital clocks--on the stove, on the coffeemaker, on the undercabinet radio, on the alarm clocks--and it's one big fat metaphor for my Life in the Digital Age, everything yelling out for attention.

Ken and I stopped by Korte's to pick up some coffee beans and potato chips (he needed the first for the morning; we had some good French onion dip left over from our Friday night party) and on the rack in front of the register were the magazines of the week: "The Tweet Smell of Success" and "If you're over 5o, you can't ignore Facebook anymore." Geez, what happened to celebrity snooping and UFO spotting? And then, the credit card machine broke down at our register and we didn't have cash.

You know that night last spring to honor Earth Hour, the effort to get people round the world to turn off their lights? I'd like to declare a project called In Praise of Analog and make it last a week. I'd like to take my pointer finger and pull the big hand toward the little hand and flip off the thin rubber band of the morning newspaper and spread the sheets across the dining room table. I'd like to talk to my mom with my ear cradled on the heavy plastic of a rotary phone receiver, winding the curly cord around my waist as I cook.

Think of the extra calories we'd burn if we had to get up to turn the TV whenever we didn't like what was on?