So what have you given up for Lent?
Chocolate?.., it's over thirty degrees, it would only melt all over any inappropriate surface. Cabernet?...not available, what grapes that are cultivated are for the table. Cigarettes?...never been tempted. Cervesa?...are you joking, beer's cheaper than water here, and it's served colder. Coffee?... get real, I'm in the Zona Café Colombia, where the brew costs two dollars a kilo, and anyway, it's not a contender; I class it as research. Cycling?...now we're being silly.
Lenten abstinence, it's supposed to be an opportunity for purification and self improvement. My ch of the above are already 'pure', so that simply leaves 'Cursing!'.
'Curse!', 'cuss!', 'swear!', or 'invoking the invective' and 'profaning the profanities'. I've taken the pledge; but only against 'TheTechnologies'. Close-passing cars will still receive their expletive-infused commentaries, as is their due. Dogs whose jaws are attached to my rear pannier will still receive a full throated roar of "please kindly desist from eating my bag" or something similar, shorter and infininitely more satisfactory.
For the next forty days I hereby pledge to abstain from commenting when my fully charged 'phone remarkably and suddenly decides that it requires feeding yet again. Probably because that gremlin switched on the video. I will not thunder against the 'photo-app' when it arbitrarily decides to fill the delete album with my treasured pictures. I will be abstemious in my use of foul adjectives, even when the 'blog-app' wipes a piece I've been working on, allowing it to be washed away into the ether. I will not rant against the 'great GodApple', when one of his grand innovations renders one of my chosen pictures unrecoverable, unreadable, stuck, or so I'm being repeatedly informed, in one of his vowel-hyphenated meteorological atmospheric apparitions. I will not allow my mind to be clouded by verbal abuses of any deity's name, even when attempting to capture a near-instantaneous moment, and the camera-app is suspended by a request as to whether I would consider this moment appropriate to carry out an update.
To all these minor interruptions, inferior annoyances, distracting discords I will smile, keep calm and carry on.
I'm on the wagon. I've signed the pledge. I'm sure I will manage. It will be easy, I'm sure that 'TheTechnologies' will cooperate. It will be harmony and concord.
My main concern is that the forty-first day is also my first day back at work. It's the day when I will have to re-engage with 'shop till'. A contraption which wilfully takes inordinate pleasure in frustrating my feeble attempts to master it, that, and I will need to create yet another set of passwords, ones that I will instantly forget. However, my concerns are not so much for the 'Beast of Beelzebub but for my colleagues who will not only have to thole my post-travel enthusiasms, but also my newly released intemperances.
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