Our home phone voice mail stopped working on April 11 and we didn’t even know it.

In this post: Kidneys, outages, Howdygram 2.

I’ll begin with the results of this week’s lab work, okay? Dr. M sent me an email Friday evening and the news is swell, especially finding out that MY KIDNEY FUNCTION IS NORMAL following three years of slow but steady decline. In case you’re wondering, I never really detected a problem with my kidneys in any way whatsoever because the “decline” was something that only showed up in blood tests. Nevertheless, if anybody wants to help me celebrate please send an email at your earliest convenience and I’ll order Chinese food.

It’s Sunday at 1 a.m. and guess what just happened: WE HAD A POWER FAILURE HERE IN THE STUDY so I had to wake Sam and ask him to flip the circuit breaker in the garage for me. Just between us, I actually know how to do this all by myself but the garage always freaks me out in the middle of the night in case I step on a bug.

Here’s some news from the Howdygram’s Achievements in Modern Technology department. We found out yesterday that our AT&T home phone voice mail stopped working back on April 11 AND WE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW IT. After a couple of relatives mentioned that we never returned their calls Sam finally decided to check our voice mail manually — by dialing your own telephone number and waiting for the prompts — and discovered 22 unheard messages. HOLY MOTHER OF CRAP. I spent an hour on the phone with AT&T while one of their friendly customer service Einsteins “reloaded our mailbox settings” (whatever the hell THAT means) and promised that everything should be working now. However if you’re one of those 22 people who left a message and expected to hear from us, I sincerely believe that AT&T owes you a free meal at the restaurant of your choice. Pick someplace nice with cloth napkins.

Hey! My plan to launch the Howdygram 2 is in full swing and I’ll probably have it up and running well before my June 15 target date. This is thrilling for a number of reasons, but mostly because I’M SICK TO DEATH OF BEIGE and there’s no way to change the color palette of this blog without making every post from the first three years look like total crap. (It’s hard to explain. Take my word for it.) Stay tuned for additional developments and the big unveiling, okay? Tell your friends.