Judith Martin always started her responses with a salutation which I considered my personal call to honor.  “Gentle Reader,” she began, before enlightening, exhorting, encouraging, or educating.  From Miss Manners, I learned to prefer  blue-black ink and, later, to shun the pretentious use of the appellation “Esquire”.  (To an unsuspecting reader who asked if female attorneys could use the designation, Miss Manners gently but firmly explained that no lawyer worth his or her weight would do so.)  I also delighted in her description of smiles which do not reach one’s eyes and which drop after a cold second.  Such a useful tool!

I turn to Miss Manners to politely explain my silence for the last two weeks. 

Gentle Reader:  I am not making excuses  but the plain truth is, my technology hates me.  I own two laptops.  At the present moment, I am straining to hammer out this brief entry on the pint-size keyboard of my 7-inch Android tablet.  To be clear, it is an external, Bluetooth keyboard but small enough that one must use the Fn key to deploy the apostrophe, in response to which I strive to avoid contractions.  Please accept this missive as a token of remorse for my lapse in continuous correspondence.  Most sincerely, (in blue-black ink on unlined paper) Your Missouri Mugwump.

I also unfortunately learned that I should not have deleted the announcement from Canon about changes to the WiFi support, a missive which I wrongly perceived as spam.  Now my pictures are stuck on the little PowerShot.  While I could transfer them via direct cable, alas, the laptop on which I installed my Watermark software is the most infirm of the two.

I am not complaining.  But August came into my life with a roar and shows every intention of defeating me.  I shall get all this fixed by and by, and return full force when I do.

It is (hahaha) the third day of the eightieth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.