I Think I’ll Keep Her

My wife is great, and she’s good at a lot of things.

One of the things she’s not particularly good at is keeping up with the latest technology. Just a few months ago, she called me at work so I could walk her through the process of ordering digital photos from Target. “O.K.,” I said. “The first thing to do is open your browser.”

After a long pause, she said, “What’s a browser?”

How quickly things have changed! In just the last month, my wife has accomplished the following 21st Century skills:

1. She wrote and received a text message on her cell phone.
2. She bought a USB flash drive, put a file on it, and took the file to Kinkos to be printed in color.
3. She made a playlist in iTunes and burnt a CD.
4. She watched a video on YouTube.
5. She started regularly reading a blog. (Note: not this one.)

All in all, I’m very proud of her. She’s made a lot of progress in a very short time. In fact, the two of us sat down and put together a list of goals for 2007, so she can become even more technology-savvy:

2007 Goals

1. Hook up the butter churn to the windmill so she doesn’t have to churn by hand anymore.
2. Make a washboard so she no longer has to clean the laundry by beating it on a rock.
3. Upgrade from a wood stove to coal.
4. Put fringe on the surrey.
5. Install an encrypted wi-fi home network, using BitTorrent to stream media files from one home-brewed Linux DVR to another.

If we can meet these goals, it will be a great year.

PS. If you know my wife, please don’t mention this article to her.