New and Improved! Buy One Today!

Access denied. Account disabled. Log-in incorrect. User name and password do not match. Scheduled outage. User does not exist.

These phrases have become part of our everyday life. Why, just the other day my alter ego was informed by a very unfriendly pink message box that her Facebook account had been disabled. Panic set in. How would she stay in touch with the old friends she's reconnected with? How would she know what events and announcements her company's competitors were sending out? And how would she recover photos of her kids that only exist on Facebook?

And just as I, Betty Lou, logged in to write this post, I see that an outage is planned for Blogger this afternoon (at least that's fair warning, but I better write quick!). And poor Peggy Sue is stranded in no-woman's land with no gmail. For two days! I'm not saying that Peggy Sue actually lives in the middle of nowhere, I'm just saying that no gmail=howwillitalktotheoutsideworld?.

But it's not just internet related technology that can put a hitch in our (collective) giddy ups. Believe it or not, I, Betty Lou, use a Nike+ gadget when I go for my long walks. You do not want to be at Betty Lou's house when she's all ready to go out for a walk (to get her 3.8 miles in for the day!) and it turns out that Young Zorro has snatched, and apparently, hidden the gadget. It's not a pretty picture. Or when Gidget, charming college girl that she is, "borrows" the iPod wall charger without asking and doesn't bother to put it back.

Here's another example: I have a new fangled electric food steamer that was given to me for Christmas. It's a triple steamer and you can makes veggies, rice, and fish (for example) all at the same time. Very neat, huh? Except it worked the first time I used it and then didn't work the other day when I was in a hurry and had dinner all planned. I was tempted to call for pizza, but that would have been bad for my girlish figure. So I steamed everything the old fashioned way. In the microwave.

My point is: we're all so reliant on technology that it really messes things up when something goes wrong. And "something" goes wrong all the time! "Something" that we normal people either don't have control over or don't know how to fix. So what do we do? Take the time to come up with plan B or throw everything out the window? Do we order pizza when the steamer doesn't work? Do we skip our walks because the gadget is misplaced and we won't be able to measure exactly how many fractions of a mile we'll go. Do we not track out meals and figure we're off the hook if we're not going to be able to get onto Blogger? Sometimes, to be honest, we do.

Let's face it, there are a million excuses and distractions out there. I'm trying my best to rise above them all or at least most of them. And technology or no technology, I'm sticking to my plan to eat right, to get my exercise in, to do my job the best I can, to be a decent mother, and to try to keep a sense of humor about all of it.