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My husband was out of town on a business trip all last week. At one point in time that might have meant a luxurious mini-vacation for me in terms of sleeping sideways on the bed and bogarting the remote. But now that we have two little kids his presence is sorely missed. Not only for the myriad kid-feeding and butt-wiping duties, but for the snippets of adult conversation we still manage throughout the day.

By Thursday evening, I was lonely. Like, really lonely. The kids were in bed for the night, and I was clicking around on my laptop with that feeling of being close to discovering the famed last page of the Internet (which I assume says "K THX BAI" next to a goatse), when I remembered, hey, I haven't logged into my Facebook account in months -- why don't I go poke around there?

Click here to read what happened when Linda got sucked into the Facebook vortex.

Well, Facebook sure has changed since last I saw it. There are status updates and pictures and a wall and you can send virtual good karma to people and grow pretend flowers and play Scrabble and whoa. I thought I was fairly savvy about the blogging world, but Facebook's site made me feel like a mouth-breathing Cro-Magnon poking at my stone wheel while everyone else had their brains wired into the Web Neuromancer-style.

A friend messaged me to welcome me to Facebook. "Join us!" she wrote. "We send pictures of plants! We feed pictures of food to pictures of animals!" Individually, her words made perfect sense, but ... wait, what?

In order to use Facebook for my initial purpose, I tried searching for people I vaguely remembered from high school. I finally found one girl I recognized, and once I realized you can't nose around in someone's profile without "friending" them, I gathered my courage and jotted a friendly note to her. "Hey, is this Lisa Tretan from Corvallis? It's Linda! Remember how we used to melt Wet N' Wild eyeliner with our hairdryers? Ha ha!"

Later, I got a response -- "Sorry, you have the wrong person" -- and I realized it wasn't Lisa Tretan that I was thinking of, it was Lisa Taylor. Or was her first name Melissa? Crap.

I accidentally turned on some Flickr importer that displayed all my photos, including the embarrassing self-portraits. I tried to comment on someone's wall but goofed it up. I became irrationally fearful of the phrase "NEW FACEBOOK IS NOW THE ONLY FACEBOOK" (four legs good, two legs bad!).

I hated Facebook and its ass face.

On Friday, with my husband still away and the kids once again tucked into their beds, I open my computer, deliberated for a second, then clicked the "FB" button in my bookmarks. I thought about deleting my account, but instead found myself trying to figure out how to grow a damn plant. A pretend Internet plant. For the rest of the night, the only sounds from my darkened living room were the clumsy clicks on a stone wheel.

Tell us! Have you had misadventures in Faceook? What are your favorite features, and which ones leave you baffled?