Walkie Talkies

I think I got bit by something a couple of days ago. When at the apple orchard, I wanted to scratch my ankle and noticed a blushed spot on it and a zit looking thing. It really hurts, but has not really changed much. 

We went to an apple orchard in a college town about an hour away on Wednesday. I went with the friend who went with me to the pumpkin patch last year and the Girl broke her boy's arm. No arms were broken this time, thankfully. My friend has four kids (she is also the one I went to the Renwick Gallery with---Smithsonian) and does so well with them. I am always impressed. I about lose my top whenever the Oldest and I are in the same enclosed space, but it helped that we were out in the open picking apples with a huge pole with a net on it. Eraser Eater kept whining too. At one point he stomped away and whimpered something, I can't remember, and I almost took a huge apple and pelted him with it. If I could aim. If I could actually hit my target, which is never something I am so fortunate to accomplish. 

But the coolest thing EVER was that my friend just deals with the fact that I don't have a cell phone. I know. Aren't I just totally not with it? I feel like a baby boomer staring at an ipod whenever I put a cell phone in my hands. "Here," someone says to me, "just use my cell phone." 

Just use your cell phone? You are assuming I know how to use it? I don't know how to use squat. So---imagine my hearty laughter when my friend pulls out her walkie-talkies. "Here," she said without flinching, "we can use them up to five miles apart." Roger. 

During the hour drive I followed her van all the way to the orchard. I had the walkie talkie on my passenger's seat. We passed a winery. "We may need to stop there," the walkie-talkie croaked from the seat. 

I picked it up. "Why?" I said, while pushing the button I was supposed to push if I wanted to talk, feeling highly ridiculous.

"On the way back," it said back to me surrounded in distortion,"they would have to give us a lot of samples!"

The other day my friend was telling me that only white people wear New Balance shoes (which is my sneaker of choice for running) and it struck me suddenly when we drove by a New Balance store. I had never seen one before. I picked up the walkie-talkie to tell her that we just passed a white people store but the stupid contraption just kept beeping at me so I threw it away from me in horror, back on to the passenger's seat. I felt like a caveman struck by the fear of seeing fire for the first time. It is a flipping walkie-talkie. I picked it up. I threw it in the back seat. 

"Here," I shouted at the Oldest, playing his intendo, "you figure this thing out."