Am I a slacker?

I've been slacking at this blogging thing, haven't I?

Confession: my life is perfectly wonderful right now, but it feels rather...boring.

I was talking with my siblings the other day (Skype rocks) and laughing about some of the bizarre occurrences that seem to surround my family, as if we are destined to appear in some reality television show or best-selling memoir. Unfortunately, I can't share most of those anecdotes right now. I promised. Secrecy and all that.

Okay, maybe just one teeensy teaser. My brother in law has his cellphone stolen in Haiti. He was traveling to Port-Au-Prince, which is a city roughly the size (and probably the roughness as well) of Detroit.

I guess someone broke into the car and lifted it off the dash. But as the phone doesn't contain a chip, it's not good black market merchandise. (This seems to be a regular occurrence for people that rob us--my house burglar a couple of years ago made off with a broken cellphone, a US chipless Tracfone, and a voice recorder he assumed was a phone. Useless.) The phone does, however, contain pictures of my brother in law, P. He is a giant Haitian guy (local) and is probably fairly well-known due to his work with basketball camps and semi-pro status. So the thief must have freaked a bit when he recognized P from the photos, and not being able to sell the thing, gave it to a buddy who returned it. He RETURNED it. He didn't toss it in the trash, or wipe it clean and fob it off on an idiot buyer. He just handed it off to a buddy who tracked P down and gave it back. In a city the size of Detroit. Strange, huh?

This happened to my sister, on a more Good Samaritan scale, when she left her backpack containing a brand-new laptop on the curb at a major bus station in Philadelphia. (I think. The city isn't that important to the story, so if it's wrong, I'm sure she'll correct me in the comments.) You don't really expect to get things like that back, especially as there was no identifying information in the bag except a college binder and her name on a couple of papers. No phone number, no address. But some nice man picked it up and called the school whose logo was on the binder. The school, in turn, contacted my sister, connected the two, and the guy drove out of his way to return the bag to her. Everything intact.

See, there IS good in the world.

But nothing particularly interesting is going on in my part of the world. I'm manhandling my new apartment into submission, dealing with a broken washer and erratic electricity, trying to figure out all the headache that is changing addresses in a foreign country. It's almost all figured out. If I could just get the handyman here to fix the washer...as it is, I'm planning on doing a handwash load in the shower. You read that correctly. In the shower. Because that is the ONLY place where we can get hot water. So if you'll excuse me, I'll get right on that.

And then maybe I'll have something interesting for my next post. :)