Slow day at rich people Starbucks. Word must’ve gotten out that this would be my last visit until the fall. Yes, Emma Kelly is taking her last art class of the semester. She says she’s finishing up her picture of a teapot and an orange. THAT’S going to look good in the living room….

And my barista is so digging me. I can tell. He even double blended my light mocha frappuccino. He’s the one who sorta kinda looks just like Ryan Reynolds with a beard, if you unfocus your eyes and squint a little. I should make my move. It’s not like I have anything to lose. If he rejects me, I’ll just never set foot in this Starbucks again. And to avoid the temptation come fall, I’ll just enroll my kid in an art class that’s located next to a middle class Starbucks. So instead of squinting to make my rich people barista look like Ryan Reynolds, I may have to settle for squinting a little harder at my middle class barista to make him resemble Burt Reynolds. Preferably a young Burt Reynolds…He’s still alive, right?

So anyway…Yesterday I was rushing home because I had to use the bathroom, but I noticed the garbage men knocked over my trash cart again. So I grabbed all my things out of the car, shoving my iPhone in my back pocket as I shuffled over to set the cart upright again, telling myself not to forget my phone was back there when I finally made it inside the house. I mean, how STUPID are those people who manage to drop their phones into toilets! You hear about this happening all the time, but certainly there aren’t THAT many idiots who let this happen, right?

Plop!!

I hesitated for about 2 seconds before I plunged my hand into the icy cold — and mercifully clean — toilet water. I grabbed a towel and dried it off as quickly as I could. But then what?? I know they say to put wet phones in rice, but I didn’t have any stinking rice! And I still had to pee!! So it looked like my phone was still working so it could wait a minute. Then I decided to test it by sending a tweet, which would simultaneously gain me sympathy and — hopefully — some useful advice. The little click-clack noises my phone usually makes when I tweet literally sounded like they were under water. Not knowing what else to do, I set the phone out in the sun to dry. After about 30 minutes, the watery sounds were gone, but the phone screen was dimming and going bright again. That didn’t seem so good. Meantime, I was getting an equal amount of texts saying either “GET RICE!” or “The rice is a LIE!!” But I decided to give the rice a shot anyway. So I made a special rice run to the grocery store. I went with the brown rice because I figured Steve Jobs was a brown rice kind of guy. I tossed my phone into a ziplock bag, covered it in brown rice, and six hours later, it seems to have worked!!

So now I’m an idiot who dropped her iPhone into the toilet. And while I’ll never quite get past the fact that every time I hold my phone against my ear it’s like pressing my face up against dried-up toilet water, I’m still thrilled with the fact that a simple $.79 bag of brown rice saved my multi-hundred dollar toilet phone.

And so I seem to have sucked down the last of my double-blended light mocha frappuccino. By the way, the double blending gets rid of all that chunky ice that forms in the bottom. That’s your helpful frappuccino tip of the day! And with that, I bid a silent adieu to Ryan Reynolds. It’s really best that I leave things this way. Emma Kelly really likes her art class and I don’t need things to be awkward when I come back to the rich people Starbucks in the fall.