The dog ate my phone.

Okay, not really, but really enough. 

I could actually blame it on the wind as much as the puppy, or on my bad back, or on my annoying friend whom I'll call Roger. But the worst thing is, it's probably my fault more than anyone or anything else's. 

Let's take it from the top. 

📱🐕

You may have thought I was kidding yesterday about baby dog Izzy eating ornaments, but I'm totally serious. There isn't much around here that he has not at least tried to bite. If you drop anything around this guy--food, tools, tissues, bottles, papers, gold Krugerrands, radioactive ingots--anything at all he will be on it before you can bend over to pick it up. He's discovering the world by biting it, one thing at a time, and he drives me batty. So no, I don't think he'd try to bite a glass ornament, but I'm not ruling it out, either. 

I mentioned last year that since my brief but wildly expensive hospitalization for crushing back pain I have been prescribed the antidepressant duloxetine, which hasn't helped my mood at all but has done wonders for the musculoskeletal pain. I've wanted to get off the drug, though, because it often leaves me very sleepy. Since I work at home I can take a nap if I absolutely must. And when the dogs are a whimpering mess or fear because of a windstorm outside all night long, you can bet there will be a nappin' come the dawn.

That's what happened on Saturday night. The boys took turns being fearful or just wakeful, and I thus had to take them out, soothe them back to sleep. So Sunday morning came, the wind eased up, and I was dying for a nap. So were the dogs. So I crashed on the sofa, as I often do.

Somewhere in there Roger called. Roger usually has little to say but chooses the most inopportune times to say it. Am I asleep? Check. On the highway? Check. On the can? Checkeroo. In the shower? Check and recheck. He's not a bad guy at all, but his timing is just terrible. So he woke me from my nap, we spoke briefly, and I went back to sleep, tucking my phone in the pocket of my sweatpants. 

OR DID I?

Because sometime later I awoke to my wife shouting and Izzy chomping away merrily on my iPhone right on the floor in front of me.

The good news is, he didn't completely break it, and he didn't get hurt. This is because I have broken a phone in the past by dropping it on the floor (yeah, real galaxy brain here) so I have an Otter Box to protect this one. The bad news is, he broke the Home button anyway. You can see the chomp marks around the button on the Otter Box. 

Those clever chaps at Apple have a workaround, though, and once I'd cleaned the slobber off the phone I discovered that my iPhone had self-diagnosed the breakage and put an on-screen Home button where I could use it. There is, however, no way to fix the actual Home button.

So, at my wife's urging, I did not punt Izzy like I was at my own five-yard line, but rather got on my laptop and ordered a new phone. I can use all the features on the old phone in the meanwhile, so Roger can rest assured that it will be taking his call next time I'm in the shower.  

Was it Izzy's fault? No, he's just a kid. Was it my fault for leaving the phone out? I think it may have fallen out of my pocket while I was sleeping, but if that was caused by the fatigue I was suffering, can I blame the windy weather? Or the makers of duloxetine? Or can I blame Rog, without whose call I would have left the phone safely where it was? 

It simply seems that these kinds of dumb expenses come right at the most expensive time of year. The credit card was already steaming, and now it's got to carry the freight for a new phone, thanks to my goat-like puppy. This is the kind of thing that makes people turn off the Grinch cartoon right as he's about to dump all the Who gifts off of Mount Crumpit and yell "That's a happy ending!"

Anyway, I'm blaming Rog. He can take it.