The first nasty surprise was that the house I am renting has, bizarrely, no phone connection. So my expectation to be able to blog using a dial up modem was shattered from the start. That left me with two back up solutions using my mobile phone: direct phone blogging (reading the internet on the phone, and posting from there using my phone's virtual keyboard on its touchscreen), or using the mobile network to connect the computer to the net. The problem is that both are agonisingly slow - it takes about one minute to open the front page and any other subsequent page on ET, for instance.
But at least I could receive e-mails (except bulky ones) and send those that I had written.

The next step in my woes was that my son needed to be hospitalised once again to receive a blood transfusion. This is one of the side effects of his chimiotherapy treatment, which takes its toll on his immune system, and makes him more vulnerable to small infections. So his blood numbers are monitored constantly, and as they had been weak in recent days and he had some fever, treatment was required. While this is not a major intervention, it does require him to go yet again to the hospital and spend time there. What we do to make his time more pleasant is to have him watch DVDs on the computer, which can be brought long with him to the hospital. In this case, he spent two nights over there and I was computerless for that time.

(As a side note, and just for the record, please don't worry about me caring apparently more about my computer than my boy ; it only looks that way because I am telling you the story from the perspective of the blogger in me. In case you had any doubts, I did take care of our two daughters while my wife was away to the hospital with the son...and they seem to have survived that experience!)

(And as another aside - go give blood! If you wonder what's the point, here's a very concrete example. Sadly for us, my wife lived in England during mad cow fever, and is thus not allowed to give her blood, but I have now overcome my fear of needles for a good cause, and am slightly ashamed of my earlier behavior of ignoring appeals for blood donors. Be smarter than I was!)

So I phone blogged when I could, and was able to post a few comments on the site. A nasty side effect of this is that I now have "blogging thumb" (as in "tennis elbow") from using the little plastic touch pen (held between thumb and index) too much in what must obviously be a very unnatural use of my hand muscles... It's a pretty inconvenient pain...

Finally, left with only my phone, I received the coup de grâce - the screen on my phone has started to go crazy and now appears as the mirror image of itself: the bottom appears upside down at the top, and vice versa. This is especially problematic as this is a touchscreen, which requires a lot of commands to be made via the screen - imagine trying to select a menu at the top of the screen with the relevant info appearing upside down at the bottom of the screen. It's almost impossible, and makes the phone useless beyond a few basic tasks that I can do from automatic memory...

So there, internetless, computerless, thumbless, phoneless. Is that what they call a "trifecta"? Quite the combination for a blogger anyway... Add in the hospitalised son as a real life worry and you'd think my holidays suck...

Luckily, the flip side of this is that I actually have all the time in the world to spend my holidays doing holiday things, like reading books, building castles in the sand, enjoying lazy lunches and dinners in our little garden, and swimming in the 17° water, so why should I complain?
We have rented a small house with a garden, about 500 meter from a nice sandy beach with a very gently slope which makes it possible for children to go in the sea and play in low depth water without any fears. This being Brittany, the weather is never very hot and there are no big crowds, especially in July. Heat waves are the ideal weather here, as temperature reach a nice 25-28 during the day and come down gently to 18-20° in the evening. We were here in 2003 and we seem to be similarly lucky this year in that respect.

The irony is that I have actually had to work in the past few days, and spent a few hours on conference calls and the like, so my holiday is more a holiday from blogging than a holiday from work...

My only worry in the world is that of a gnome coup.