Frustrating Miracles

We live in an age of miracles and wonderment. It's snowing in Portland and I can show a photo of the cat looking forlornly out the window to my friends in California and Florida where it's much too warm for a winter wonderland. The juxtaposition of snow when you're in 80 degree weather is perhaps a mundane miracle, but a miracle nonetheless.

All it takes is my cell phone, a data connection, a Facebook account, the right email address to post it to Facebook, the right format photo so I don't exceed my data plan, a little editing tool to rotate the photo so it doesn't show up sideways on my posting… and… miracles of a cat in the snow.

Of course, there's the fact that both Comcast and AT&T are flaky in my neighborhood. So uploading the photo takes a few tries, and then getting onto Facebook to add a comment may, or may not work.

I really need to get a new phone, too. It's a three year old Windows Mobile phone and it keeps telling me that I'm running out of memory. I assume it means the phone, but I know I keep forgetting how to make some of these features work -- like compressing the photo to make it small enough to send as a text message rather than an email.

You see, for some reason, even though it used to work, I can't seem to send email from my phone as, well, email. I can send it as a text message, which is an entirely different system, and then it comes from some weird email address that has my phone number and some odd mms.attmobile.someotherweridstuff.com domain name. And if you try to respond to that email, I'll never see it.

But aside from having to reboot my phone, remember how to use some weird photo editor, find my Facebook email address, remmber to use MMS rather than SMS or email… oh, and aside from the fact that my phone 'auto adjusts' the light levels so a picture of an orange cat looking at the white snow with out of a dark room either gives me a muddy black image or a blinding white image….

Aside from all that. Miracles.

Except the photo still seems to be sitting at 0% sent…