A horrible thing happened Friday night. My iPhone went for an unexpected swim. There was a scream of horror, right after the most awful kerplunk sound ever.

I fished it out and turned it off as quickly as I could, but I wasn’t quick enough. David had pounded upstairs to see what was the matter, and quickly found a container of rice we still had – we stopped cooking rice for dinner quite a while ago. Into the rice it went and I waited, phoneless, for 2 days.

I blame a phone commercial that shows someone dropping their phone in a lake, I’m sure it suggested something to me.

Meanwhile, 2 days later, David brought the phone to me, we powered it up and charged the battery. It seemed to be working, until I tried to use if for the thing you’re supposed to use a cell phone for: making a phone call. I couldn’t seem to connect, or hear if the call was connecting. Turns out, it was.

It took some attempts and texts to discover that my earpiece speaker was fried, and also the speaker for playing music.

Well, shit.

However, all is not lost; David just bought an iPhone 8, and his previous phone could be wiped and reassigned to me. So I’ve bee somewhat frustrated today – using a familiar interface, but a bigger form factor. I’ve been mostly using it as I normally do, but keep running up against missing passwords (most made it over, not all) and signing back in to apps and tools.

Even for posting on this blog, the app I use is causing me problems; I can log in to all my blogs on the iPad version of the app, but I can only log in to 3 blogs on the iPhone. Not a big deal, but it’s frustrating – the WordPress app and the WordPress.com ”jetpack” plugin have these weird behaviors where I have to remember NOT to use the temptingly easy Gmail login, because that leads to duplicate logins that I made inadvertently. And inconsistencies between iPad, iPhone, and desktop “saved passwords” were causing me grief.

Still, at this point I have a working iPhone that I can live with, but I’d rather have my previous one; for one thing, I really like my case, which may be a dumb reason but it matters to me. A repair may be possible, and it’s not paid off yet, which really irks me; how I wish I had not fumbled it into the deep.

Meanwhile, at least I’m still able to keep an eye on the news and on Twitter; and I even texted a friend in Alabama to urge her and her husband to vote tomorrow. Get out the vote, Alabama- vote for Doug Jones and the future. Not for the man who represents the shameful past.