My Mother, My Sanity, My Wife's Toilet and My iPod

I consider myself a pretty technically savvy person. While I’m not a tech geek or anything, I know how to reset my ipod every time it freezes up on me. I now have programmed one remote to handle my whole entertainment system and turn everything on that I need at the push of a button. I can zoom around Windows Explorer and the endless files and folders on my computer like I’m deep among the clothes racks at Old Navy trying to keep up with my wife and I know which handle to turn to keep my her toilet from overflowing because I threw wadded up paper towels in it (yes, this happened last night and Nicole was actually impressed at how fast I moved when she screamed “my toilet’s about to overflow!”). So you can imagine my consternation when last night, after three hours of formatting then loading songs then syncing then formatting again then rearranging mp3 files then reloading then formatting then syncing and so on and so on and so on, I finally had loaded my mom’s latest mp3 player with the songs she wanted. I had no idea which songs actually uploaded to her player and how I even got them on there but there were songs I recognized on there and the player was working. Never mind that the ear buds wouldn’t have fit in Goliath’s ears or that you had to push three different buttons 17 times to adjust the volume or that she paid $50 for it (most likely at Aldi’s where you can buy two week old bread for a quarter) when I probably couldn’t have sold it at a garage sale for $10. It was transmitting sound and that was literally music to my ears. About the easiest aspect of the whole process was naming the mp3 player which I promptly labeled “Mom’s cheap crap”. My iPod took about five minutes to set up and Nicole’s took about two minutes. Remember how good I am with Windows Explorer? The iTunes music store is a stroll through strawberry fields compared to Explorer. So guess what my mother is getting as a gift out of the blue and as a gift to my sanity? Yes, an iPod. Now it’s up to my brothers (one who swears it’s all about the marketing – he owns one – and the other who is anti-iPod) to determine how nice the one she gets is going to be. I’m aiming for a refurbished 2 GB nano if they chip in with some money. If not, she gets a refurbished shuffle. Either way, I get my sanity back and the price will be well worth it.