J’aime ma soeur, Krach.

My sister, Crash, just got an iPhone.  The one I coveted, then decided wasn’t good enough, then coveted again when Cap’n Firepants declared he was contemplating an upgrade of his own.  iPhone upgrade, I mean.  Though he probably secretly thinks about trading me in for a better model, too.

Crash has never had an iPhone, and she is approaching this brave new world with all of the zeal of a drunken gorilla.  This is her trying to use FaceTime, iPhone’s video conferencing feature.

The big pic is Crash. People like to say she got the beauty and I got the brains. Actually, I think she's the one who says that.

So far, we haven’t FaceTimed each other yet.  Partly because I’m scared of her picture.  And partly because I enjoy trying to interpret her texts so much.

It’s not like she’s never texted before.  She has owned a cell phone.  But it apparently did not have autocorrect.  Either that or she has recently started smoking weed because I suddenly can’t understand twenty-five fifty-three percent of what she’s saying.

It reminds me of when she would call my dorm room in college and my roommate would pick up.  Roommate would say, “Hello!” then listen for a few moments and hand it to me.

“I think it’s your sister,” Roommate would say, hesitantly.  The implication being that she wasn’t absolutely sure it was not the crank caller who graced us weekly with pornographic rants, but was willing to hazard this guess because of the higher pitch of the voice and the lack of heavy breathing.

We had moved to Louisiana when my sister was about ten, and she had thrown herself into the culture wholeheartedly, somehow adopting an accent that was a combination of Cajun, Hillbilly, Southern Belle, and the Bronx.

Crash’s iPhone autocorrect appears to embrace different cultures with the same zeal as my sister.  Usually autocorrections bear some kind of similarity to the new words it suggests, and the replacements tend to be in the same language, but Crash’s autocorrections sometimes appear in another language altogether – bearing no resemblance to the original word at all.  Here are a couple of her recent ones regarding Wonderbutt’s new Zazzle store.

How in the world did she get autocorrect to put an inverted question mark?

Note the fancy caret symbol over the "a" in "hate." And "d'armure." Did her iPhone suddenly start speaking French?

It doesn’t help that even her communications that come through the way she intended sometimes have me scratching my head.  So, I’m continually asking myself if I should know what  she is talking about – or point out that she’s had another autocorrect malfunction.  This somewhat defeats the whole purpose of texting – a brief correspondence that cuts through all of the pomp and circumstance of an actual telephone conversation.  I spend more time deciphering Crash’s messages than I do on composing my blogs – which, believe it or not, is a lot of time.

Crash used to call me right after she sent an e-mail, and proceed to tell me everything that was in the e-mail.  I’m thinking she may have to do some texting follow-up calls as well.  I don’t want her to stop texting, though.  She is my human Wonderbutt.

If you’d like to read more about my feelings on autocorrect, click here😉

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Can You Teach a Cat to Roller Skate?

Me (the taller one) and Sis. Don't I look like a future Anne Hathaway? Don't answer that...

Love my sis.  She texted me the other day that I needed to watch Anne Hathaway rapping on Conan.  Then she said that she and my niece think I look like Anne Hathaway.

Since my sis recently had a mishap as a result of wrestling with a car my niece backed into a ditch, I figured she might have double-dosed on her pain meds.  But I accepted the compliment graciously anyway.  I mean, what 42 year old woman in her somewhat right mind wouldn’t want to be compared to the elegant and beautiful Anne Hathaway?

Then I watched the rap.  Hmm… Is Crash (sis’ nickname ever since the car wrestling incident) comparing me to rappin’, obscenity spewing Anne or demure, eloquent Anne?

Not that I don’t like both of them.  The rap was hysterical and quite clever, and just a little off-color.  Well, the off-color part works…

Anyway, so I feel like I should offer a tribute to Crash for all of the ego boosts she has offered me through the years.  Here are the top 10 Great Things about My Sis:

1.  She doesn’t take herself too seriously (hence her self-applied moniker, Crash)
2.  She always places her kids ahead of herself (which is why she took on a two-ton Jeep at night in a rainstorm)
3.  Her childhood dream was to grow up and teach cats how to roller skate.
4.   She abandoned her childhood dream in order to become a full-time mother and part-time medical assistant, both of which are a whole lot harder than teaching cats to roller skate.
5.  She tells me that I write better than the author of her current favorite book.
6.  She makes the whole family pose for group pictures whenever we’re together.  In every possible permutation. “Now all of the kids,” “now the married couples,” “okay, let’s do the boyfriends and girlfriends.”
7.  She ignores the family’s insults as we grudgingly get into position for the photos.
8.  She magically inspires our autistic nephew to grin for a photo in the middle of a potential nuclear meltdown.
9.  She’s forty, but she looks like she is in her twenties. (Actually, I really don’t like that about her, since that genetic abnormality seems to have skipped right over me.)
10. She thrives on a diet of potato chips and cookies because she loves animals too much to eat them.  Plus, she thinks raw meat looks gross.

There are a lot more great things I could say about my sis, but that would, of course, no longer be a Top 10 List.  So, that’s my tribute to one of the kindest, funniest people I know – the one person who I am completely confident could teach a cat to roller skate once she set her mind to it.