Monday, January 31, 2011

Back among the living!

Hey y'all, hope you didn't think that I fell off a cliff or something!

I didn't...I've just been feeling like I did. The old Arthurs decided to visit me last week en masse. One could say it was Rheumatism Roundup Week at my house. I was forced to medicate and wait it out. Finally around Friday my thumb, hip and shoulder joints unfroze enough to make daily chores and living possible again. Argh!!!

First order of beeswax was....oh, man, I have to make 2 birthday cards for relatives' upcoming birthdays! It took me all weekend on and off to make them. It sure felt good to be creating once more, though.

At any rate, let me try to catch up here. First, Saturday was Jill's One Little Word Captured weekly photography challenge to document the use of the word PLAY in my life. I think I've got a real good one this week. Meet my new portable "I" tunes device:

Ladies and Gents, I've recently gone old school sound. That's right, I pushed aside my ipod touch in favor of this sony walkman fm/am/weather radio with headphones. And if that isn't retro enough for ya, you should know that this wasn't pulled out from some closeted black hole and dusted off. Oh, no, this was purchased brand new on amazon just a few weeks ago! And although Hubster and Missy have each owned their fair share of walkman incarnations, this is my first model.

I like to think of it as $27 worth of heaven. I absolutely love it! When I think about it, I believe it all began in my subconscious several weeks ago when I read that Sony announced it was discontinuing the manufacture of their Walkman line. I remember thinking back at how much my family used their Walkman models -- Missy began listening to music on a CD player variety and Hubs got one, too, but different. They constantly fought over their headphones...whose was better, etc. (Both were awesome.)

And what I ended up remembering most was that those Walkmans endured and lasted through tons of bings, bangs, bonks...dropped on concrete while roller skating and biking, getting rained on, buried in beach sand, left in the car and heated to the boiling point...you name it, it was done to them. And yet they took the lickings and kept on ticking. Both Walkmans were literally worn out by the time the MP3 players took off.
Meanwhile, fast forward to now. Hubster had had Missy load his new ipod with all the music he liked and all was well until he wanted more music. Just one problem: Missy had used her Mac laptop to format and load the music, and Hubs learned a hard lesson: his Dell PC laptop couldn't just pick up and take over, no matter how hard we tried or how many times I scoured Google search results trying to change it. I told him we'd just start over downloading the same songs, but Mr. Cheapskate balked at that. Didn't matter when I told him that Missy probably had gotten a lot of the tunes free or dirt cheap. He was ticked off at Apple.

Then he began having battery charging problems with his ipod (as have I with mine, but thankfully mine will still charge most of the time off my laptop). Now Hubs' mindset is that it's akin to a Communist plot. One night he got so ticked at his player that he threw it across the room where it hit the ceramic floor tile (and in some kind of machine revenge it actually recharged like it was supposed to, one last time).

So, now we are kind of in mp3 limbo. We love the sound of the ipods but not the problems...and we don't really know what other brand to get. I've tried researching and I lean toward a Sansa, but Hubs is still adamently anti-mp3. I'm waiting for his hissy fit mindset to eventually thaw before proceeding to get him something else.

Now, he likes downloaded songs, but you know, I really like a good radio station. What have I played the most on my ipod touch? Pandora radio and I Heart Radio. My problem with most radios and tuners is the reception, but recently a new station that plays 80's & 90's music with hardly any interruption has cropped up on my side of Houston, and the reception is awesome on my Walkman and on my stereos in the house. So, they are all now preset to the new 103.7FM , Houston's Adult Alternative KHJK.

If the Hubster would just be so easy to solve....xoxo