The Dog Ate My Kindle!

My family was kind enough to get me a Kindle for Father's Day this year. The dog ate it (part of it, at least, and the part that made it work) last Wednesday.

There are very few material possessions that I hold near and dear to my heart. One is my Gatorland hat. I managed to lose the first one of those on a rafting trip, so we had to pick up another when we were out in Florida a few years ago.

But another such possession is my Kindle. In seven short weeks, I've probably done more book reading than I have in the previous seven months. It's that portable and that convenient. I'm the least tech savvy one in our whole family, but I've been absolutely amazed at how easy it's been to learn to use this device. I've put up with reading e-books on a computer screen when there's been no other alternative, but I've never actually enjoyed doing so. The Kindle has changed all that. The screen is a pleasure to look at and no strain on my eyes.

Imagine my chagrin, then, when I got an email from my wife saying that the dog had chewed it to pieces. Here's the crime scene:





And here is the criminal:




All I did was leave it on the coffee table the night before. It's not as if I put it in his dog dish and sprinkled cheese all over it. Maybe he was just jealous that I was spending more time reading than throwing him his chew toy in the backyard.

For whatever reason, Yukon Cornelius (yes, like the prospector's name in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) turned his nose up at the delicious leather cover, and chose instead to put teeth marks all over the Kindle screen. After putting the pieces back together and picking out all the black hairs, we tried to get it to light up again, but to no avail. Yukon suffered no ill effects, by the way, although he did pretend to look at least a little bit sorry.

It's a good thing that Amazon has lowered the price on these things, because I'm counting the days until the replacement comes.

Bad dog!