Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Note to 21st Century: We have joined you.

While Ben has gymnastics, Leah has to wait for an hour by herself, without mommy to entertain her. She did great last week (although I think sitting in the balcony may have reduced the whining opportunities) but I wanted her to almost look forward to that waiting time.

My original thought was that I would get a personal CD player & headphones, so she could listen to books on CD and music while waiting. Then I talked to my friend L who mentioned that she had gotten her kids iPod Shuffles.

Ever since my trip to visit sister Ruth in Chicago, I've had the thought to get a Shuffle. This was the perfect opportunity to convince Aaron. So we picked one out on our latest date night. I spent a couple of hours last night trying to troubleshoot my way through iTunes trying to get some music onto the thing other than one of my new Jewel CD's that Aaron put on there. (That's right, folks, I said one of my new Jewel albums. I have three. New ones.)

In addition to feeling totally inept, adding to my frustrations was the fact that our fridge had apparently stopped working. And it appeared to be my fault. We messed around with it a bit, and Aaron went downstairs to try to find the breaker.

He came back up rather crabby, because he had tried to call my cell phone so that I could identify which breakers controlled which rooms. I hadn't heard my phone at all, so the search began. I backtracked my path for the evening - the entryway, my purse, the back door, my bathroom (twice) and the closet (three times) and even the kids' bedrooms. Finally, just as I was starting to panic and think I had included it in the washing machine with the laundry (hi Suzi!) I had Aaron call it again.

And I followed the ring into Leah's bedroom, where the phone was glowing and ringing merrily on top of Leah's blankets. While she was sleeping.

As I was IMing my woes to Tara, I decided to check the fridge again. And it was working!

And then Aaron figured out how to add files to iTunes again, and things started going more smoothly.

But this new-fangled technology? I hope Leah figures it out.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Most of the time I love my MP3 player. Sometimes I want to smash it to pieces, like when I recharge the battery and all of a sudden a bunch of songs are missing.

I have a Sansa and they use Rhapsody as their music source. Since I have bought music from other sites, I seem to have to reload them much too often. It never happens with music from the Rhapsody site, of course. Luckily the battery lasts about 15-20 hours, so I don't have to do it that often.

If you hate to exercise an mp3 player is a terrific motivater. If I have good music on, it helps keep me moving. I have even gone over my "planned" exercise time because I have a great song on that I want to finish. Plus Lincoln tends to watch "his" shows when I'm on the treadmill, which means I have to listen to something since Dora and Diego get a little annoying after a few minutes.

Noel said...

I had Yahoo Music as my subscription service which has recently been bought by Rhapsody. I was pleased at the fairly seemless moving of my playlists, but the transfer of subscriptions on my Sansa 200-series MP3 had a minor glitch. I'm in the process of moving from subscription-to-go to just subscription music service to save money. All the music on my MP3 player will be ripped from CDs I own.

The Sansa Fuze has caugth my eye for an upgrade, but I opted to get my bicycle fixed instead for my Christmas present (see www.Xanga.com/DakotaNoel re the bike). Besides playing MP3, it also supports JPGs and video.

My mp3 use tends to be while traveling by air and sitting outside at home.