Going mobile

When we left Basel, it felt really strange to surrender my mobile phone (I had it for work) because in it were three years worth of text messages that in a way served as a chronicle of various events of our lives. Prior to turning it back in I cleared out my old messages, both sent and received, and came across such memories as:

--While skiing in Zermatt, a note sent from us on the Italian side back to friends on the Swiss side;

--An apologetic-but-insistent request to write a speech while on holiday pulling into Bergen, Norway on a ferry, resulting in the loss of a day in Oslo and a pissed-off wife;

--The play-by-play of an unruly passenger being offloaded from a plane on the runway in Frankfurt;

--A note sent from a massage chair at the Bangkok Airport while getting a foot massage on the way to Australia;

--Reassurance that I had survived a scary incident in Cairo;

--A report on dinner (not turkey) in Turkey;

--Notification that I was playing hooky from work to watch the US-Ghana World Cup match;

--A note to my boss from the delivery room telling him I would probably have to miss that day's meetings;

--An update from a friend aboard a US naval ship whose family was in the process of being evacuated from Beirut;

--Plans to meet a friend for a day spent with our babies in suburban Madrid;

--Description of a taxi driver listening to what seemed to be a live comedy show on the radio while blowing his nose directly into his white gloves in Beijing; and

--A 5:30am message from Swiss telling us that our flight home from London had been cancelled.