The cow woman bought herself a present!

Since I didn't have to pay as much to the (*&^((%%^$!) IRS, I had a wad of $$$ in my pocket. As I strolled through Costco the other day, I noticed this big pile of iPods, nice new updated ones, affordable ones. I went home (my rule is I have to look at something three times before buying; I am a recovering impulse buyer), and thought about it. When I was visiting my very up-to-date daughter, who has had one of those gizmos for years now, I got the skinny all about what it does, and how it works, and gee, it looked really EASY. Just download iTunes and start building a library. I did that first, to see if I could. It was a snap. So I broke my rule and went back and bought one, not the really, really big 80GB one, the nice, manageable 30 GB. That means I can only store 7,500 songs. I figure at 3 minutes a song at a minimum, I can get 375 hours of music on this little machine. Of course, what I am loading is more than songs. I put on a bunch of symphonies, some opera, soundtracks, stuff like that. Now, when I come home from school, my first task is to feed the computer another wad of CD's, and plug in the iPod to sync it to my growing library. Today, it was an album of LeRoy Anderson by Arthur Fiedler, who I had the good fortune to see many times when I was young and he would come to San Francisco for the Summer Pops. Then some Verdi selections from Aida, Nabucco, La Traviata, etc., the soundtrack to American Graffiti (Rock Around the Clock), an album of Strauss waltzes, and the entire score of Bernstein's Candide. I feel right at home, bouncing around campus with my ears budding, listening to Puccini or Elton John. Music in your pocket! What a concept.