We had our share of mishaps during vacation last week, but my sister gets top honors. Friday, she grabbed me in the hallway of our beach house and whispered: "I washed Aaron's cellphone." I thought she meant that she wiped a bit of jelly off of her 10-year-old's phone, until she confided that it was in the pocket of a pair of shorts that were in a super load of colored clothing that made its way through the wash cycle. She didn't discover the mega-clean phone until she was transferring laundry to the dryer. Oops.

I felt her pain. About two years ago, I microwaved my cellphone. I was running a bunch of errands and somewhere between the grocery store and the post office my phone found its way into a tub of popcorn I bought at the video store. When I got home, I put the popcorn in the microwave. Only when the oven started making sparks instead of popped corn did I realize what I had done. My daughter, away on a Girl Scout camping trip at the time, told me upon her return home that I needed to be a little more responsible with my things. Wonder where she heard that?

My forgiving nephew, however, took a more pragmatic tone when my sister told him about the phone. "I was due for an upgrade anyway, Mom."