My wife, the mutant

A little know fact about Cathy is that she is actually a mutant.

Does she possess the power to control men's minds, like Professor X? No (well, outside of mine).

Can she change shapes like Mystique? Nope.

Leap tall buildings in a single bound like Superman. Uh uh.

However, if you have an electronic devise that you would like to desperately kill, then Cathy is your girl. I don't think she has Magneto level powers or anything. And I wouldn't want her to be your go to person if you needed to kill a rogue super computer about to launch nuclear weapons and wipe out humanity. Her powers require more time and patience. But if you locked her up in the room with the rogue super computer for a couple of months, she could do the job.

Cathy murders electronics. I don't know exactly how she does it, but it happens on a regular basis. She cannot wear digital watches at all. She kills those in short order. So they have to be ones with gears in them or you might as well toss your money in the garbage. And it's not that the battery dies. You could swap the battery and the watch would still be dead.

This house is an iPod graveyard. Her digital cameras fare about the same as iPods.

More recently we were in Florida when the Garmin (henceforth known as the Bitch) displayed a tendency to have little strokes anytime Cathy handled it. It would start screaming "Recalculating" at random and would occasionally state that the car was in the middle of the bay ("Recalculating. Turn left, then right." "Um, according to the Bitch we're in the Gulf of Mexico, so I don't think that's going to work). When I handled the Bitch, it was fine. Not a problem at all. We drove the same route over the period of two days, one time with Cathy in the car, once without her. The Bitch didn't make a peep when I was travelling solo. When Cathy was around, it freaked out no less than 20 times.

Since we've come back from Florida, the Blu-Ray player has up and died. The bloody think is only 16 months old and I'm quite annoyed by this. I have no idea how Cathy's anti-electronics field managed to do the trick on that. She rarely used it and quite actively disliked it. And for good reason. I'm kind of annoyed with the Blu-Ray player, specifically how bad the audio was on it. However, it is dead now. I've tried all the tricks to revive it and none of them work. It is, of course, off-warranty.

Then, last night, we noticed Cathy's laptop ceases to work when it's not plugged in. The battery worked just fine when we left to go to Florida. It could hold a charge for hours. Now, nada. Plus, it has a host of other little quirks and glitches. It's about 2.5 years old and pretty clearly we're going to have to add a new computer to the ever increasing list of things we need to pick up this summer.

I'm thinking she should get one of those wind-up ones like they've been giving to kids in some third world nations. That might be more resistant to her abilities.

I'm not saying everything electronic dies around her. The TV is still going strong after more than four years. And, um, her headphones. Plus most of the stuff in the kitchen. So that's something.

It's not a particularly good super power. Or a cheap one, but hey, at least now I can say I've married a mutant. I wonder if the X-Men are looking...

Last Five
1. Death of an interior decorator - Death Cab For Cutie
2. Mind games - Gavin Rossdale
3. Where I was before - Blue Rodeo*
4. Disorder in the house - Warren Zevon
5. Whip-smart - Liz Phair