a little calm, and a shiny new iPod

I know some of my favorites *coughharedawgcough* really hate iPods …. but I’ll confess. I’m an iPod fiend. I’m not techie, I don’t have a well-developed musical ear, and I’ve always liked iTunes- probably because I’m not techie and don’t know enough about digital music to not like iTunes. It’s easy and I’ve had very few problems with it. Basically, I’m one of the masses. I think the stuff techie people hate about iTunes and  iPods are things I don’t know enough about to even realize they’re a problem. So, I’m all about iPods.

I bought my first iPod three years ago, to celebrate finishing radiation and as incentive to do a lot of walking. I got a little Mini, and it has been one good iPod. Sadly its battery life has been dropping – it used to have fifteen hours on a charge, now it’s around five – and even worse, it’s full. I know, I know – I could just switch stuff out on it. It holds 1000 songs, which you’d think would be plenty. But now I’m all into podcasts too and it won’t do those, and blah blah blah … to get to the point, I decided to use my $300 from the research study we were in for something fun – a brand new iPod! With more memory than I’ll ever use and not only the ability to do podcasts… but movies!! TV!!!! Video!!!! I really doubt I’ll be watching a lot of TV and movies on the iPod, but I love that I can. And I really really love that I don’t have to worry about filling it up now. Duuuude, it will hold 40,000 songs. FORTY THOUSAND. Even I don’t have that much music to store. I don’t know how many movies it will hold but I’ve already put all my 1000 songs on it, plus a bunch of podcasts, plus The Royal Tenennbaums which I bought for $9 just so I’d have one movie I really like, PLUS an episode of Lost that I still have on my work computer from when we downloaded that weird first-part-of-the-third-season six episode thing that we missed on TV because we started watching it right after they aired. And the little thing showing how much space you have left just moved the barest hair.

Anyhow, my point is I really love this iPod. I just ordered it Monday and got it yesterday. I won’t go into the shipping trauma involving intending to put my work address as the delivery address and after getting an error message the first time I submitted, forgetting to change it the second time and having to call Fedex 10,000 times and having them tell me they’d hold it for me, then as I was watching the neat tracker thing, finding that after they tried delivering it at 11 they came back again at 3 and let my neighbor sign for it – which was okay, but weird since they are very specific about NOBODY BUT YOU CAN SIGN – I did finally take possession of it, though.

Then there was more trauma trying to figure out why it would synch part of my 1000 songs and then stop and give me a weird error message about not being able to synch the iPod –  ERROR -69 – Long story short again I finally found information on Apples help page and it was stopping on bad files (there is apparently something problematic about later iTunes versions and I’d just downloaded the latest – but I still love it!! I do!!!!) so you just had to watch and see what it stopped on and then delete that song. I did that to the first one, and then it stopped again on After the Goldrush so I deleted After the Goldrush and it stopped again on After the Goldrush and I thought well that’s weird and I deleted everything else from that Neil Young album, and it stopped again on After the Goldrush and I thought, okay, this is getting fucking annoying now and I emptied the trash and it stopped AGAIN on After the Goldrush and I said WHAT IN THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THIS THING, IT’S GONE, IT’S DELETED, WHY IS IT DOING THIS????!!!!??? And then I searched for After the Goldrush just in case it got copied somewhere else or something… and ooops, it was Thom Yorke’s version of After the Goldrush. Which oddly sounds so much like Neil Young that Baker B, Mr. Music, thought it was Neil Young and I was kidding about it being Thom Yorke.
 
BUT, after all THAT was over, I’ve had no trouble at all. And now I feel all smart and stuff for figuring out what was wrong and fixing it. I also had a bunch of weird random stuff on my work computer that I’d never downloaded since my iPod was full, and by setting it on manual synch I just added all that very easily. And it sounds great and it looks totally cool and I just love it. I felt great sadness at the thought of parting with my old one (Baker B is inheriting it) but I so far don’t miss it.

So I should get back to work. The weather has been beautiful, the students are all gone (yesterday was the last day of finals, yay!!) and we have a little break before grades are posted and we can clear the seniors. Hence my playing online. I also have the weirdest, most intoxicatingly  fragrant bush outside my window, full of bees – I don’t know what it is, but here’s its picture, taken with my handy cell that I forget has a camera –  

It’s really strange, but smells just wonderful.

And everything went through for my position — except the raise. And that will go through eventually, but Human Resources refused it because I actually got a good raise and was upgraded in October to the same grade my boss is – a total surprise to me at the time. So I’m already where I should be for that position. And there is a problem with our new Career Banding system that is taking the place of grades, in that there is no actual supervisory position existing for records people. SO although that’s what I will be doing, it doesn’t exist. This is a big problem in several departments – in the IT department there are people supervising ten other people, and making the same amount of money the people they supervise are making. So there’s a big push to get it resolved and straighten everyone’s pay out. So, it will happen but not yet. Since I got a really good and completely unexpected raise last fall, I’m okay with it. Disappointed, but it’s certainly not a deal-breaker.

Oh, and Draaaaama Queen is treading very thin ice and they’re actually taking action against her now, so she may end up not being my problem. Or I’ll get to be the one who actually fires her if it does come to that. Eeeeek. But at least she knows what grave trouble she’s in. And I really hope it doesn’t come to that. I like her a lot, she does a very good job when she’s here and focused, she’s very smart… but not about her job, obviously.