On my way with no text-message capabilities

I have been more than a little stressed out this week, trying to juggle the State Department preparation and getting my grades finished from summer classes. Like a veritable superbeing, I got everything done by 6pm sans meltdown, just in time to say go out and say goodbye to my good friend Sue, who is starting her own yearlong adventure in Colorado Springs.

Afterwards, still not wanting to go home and pack yet, Big Dave and I went to the Frog and Peach. That's one of my new places because I have a sad, sick obsession with trivia. It was my goal all week to plaster my screen name "Thoth" all over the High Score list, mainly so I could annoy people for the entire month of August without even being here.

Anyways, Dave left and I was finishing up my last game when, while waiting for the National Rankings, I turned and watched the band for about five minutes. When I looked back, my phone had been swiped! Not even out of town and the chaos starts!

Longtime readers will remember that this is the phone I bought in Moscow (after having been roofied by the Kazakhstani) so it had a way cool Cyrillic keypad that made me the envy of all my friends. I went to Cingular to get a replacement -- I pay insurance after all -- but all the little harpy wanted to do was to get me back into a 2-year commitment. Um, anyone who knows me at all knows that I'm not into that word.

I plan to go back to the same groovy phone store on Tverskaya Ul. in Moskva to purchase a new phone. So now I have no way to annoy my friends and family with text messages as I scurry out the country. Tonight I fly into Las Vegas for a ten-hour layover and I dread not having a cell phone to pretend to talk into when the freaks start descending on me.

I will try to update again when I arrive in Frankfurt, Germany. We'll see how much Deutsch I remember..