The Bermuda Triangle known as our home

Oh, we have the same problems as every other parents with things disappearing in our house. Between the car and the den, backpacks get lost. Between bedtime and 6 a.m., one half of a pair of shoes gets lost. A Wii game that was played in the afternoon can disappear 20 minutes later, not to be found and put back in its case for days.

So none of that is unusual, because it happens to everyone.

But I'm concerned that our house is akin to the island on Lost, mainly because we seem to have some weird sort of electromagnetic field going on. And it wrecks things all. the. time.

For 10 years, I've tried to keep a clock running in our master bathroom to keep us on time for work as we go about our routines in the morning. For 10 years, I've been unsuccessful. Sometimes the battery will go dead about a week after I put it in the clock. Sometimes we'll get a month out of it. And sometimes -- more recently -- I'd put a battery in the clock in the morning, set the clock, and come home from work later that day to find that it had stopped dead two hours ago. Last month, I threw the last in a series of four or five clocks we'd tried in the bathroom in the trash. I give up. SMOKE MONSTER, YOU WIN.

Then two weeks ago, Grayson's car wouldn't crank. Granted, one of the rear doors hadn't been shut all the way the night before, but the battery was on its way out. We jumped it off that night and ran it for 20 minutes, but it wouldn't start the following morning. We jumped it off again that Saturday so we could take it in to have the battery replaced. No biggie, right?

Two days later, my van was slow to crank. Not only had no lights been left on or any doors been left open, but the van has a feature that automatically corrects those things anyway, so that if you DO accidentally do it, your battery won't run down. The problem got worse over several days, and finally on Saturday -- a mere week after we'd had Grayson's car in the shop -- we took the van in for evaluation. Sure enough, I had about three more cranks left in my battery. Had to replace it.

Add to this the fact that we can't keep an Internet signal in our house to save our lives, and you've got me thinking that we're sitting on top of some sort of giant magnet that renders anything powered by something wireless completely useless.

How do I blog every day, you might ask? I wait until the signal is most reliable, which is usually after 11 p.m., and hope for the best. I have had to retype MANY a blog post, which is why we are switching from a cable modem to DSL in seven days. If the installer gets sucked into some magnetic vortex while he's poking around in our basement, I'll be sure to let you know.