Twiddling thumbs

In effect, that is what this post is...I'm twiddling my thumbs while I reload my Sansa MP3 player. It has been about a month since I have posted anything...although I have had about twenty posts that I had planned--just never got around to actually writing them down. It has been a sort of up and down month. On the one hand, I got my Outback wagon so now I can haul stuff from point A to point B without nearly as much hassle as it was in the Saturn sedan, while, on the other hand, things like work and the swimming pool have been thorns in my side. First, let's deal with the good stuff. As noted above, I got my Outback wagon. In addition to making it easy to haul stuff around, it is just a cool car. It is, more or less, a basic model in that we didn't get any real whistles and bells. However, it comes with so much cool stuff that I didn't really think I needed much else. The built-in in-dash CD player plays MP3 disks, so I can use disks I burn myself...that works out to about 10 hours (mol) of music which is a day's drive anyway you look at it. In addition, it has a jack which allows me to hook up the MP3 player, and that adds about 2 gig worth of music or about 30 more hours. I don't have that much music that I really like. Aside from the music, we got the manual transmission 'cause I think it gives more control in snow and other adverse road conditions. And, anyway, I prefer manual trannies. All in all, it is a very comfortable car to drive and ride in. Not as quick around the corners as the Saturn, but, hell, it's a wagon. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I also got a gas grill this spring. I gotta tell the world that it is a great grill. Much less work than charcoal and the food tastes pretty much the same. I have been having a great time cooking on it for the past three weeks. My dear wife has pretty much closed down the stove and oven for the duration of the summer. About the only time they get turned on now is to handle overflow from the grill. I have the old charcoal grill out on the patio next to the new gas grill, but I have yet to have had the urge to fire it up. I think the only time it will be used this summer is this coming Memorial Day weekend when I plan to have a cook-out and pool party for my collegues at B&N. All in all, the gas grill is a real plus: big thumbs up!! Also, as mentioned in that earlier post, I got a new MP3 player. Way back when (2000, I think), my wife got me an RCA Lyra player for my birthday that year. I think the biggest memory card I ever had for that player was maybe 128meg. I don't think it could handle more than 256 meg...I know that it was limited to about 4-5 hours of music...and it ate batteries at a prodigious rate. That was it for me until two years ago when my daughter and her hubby-to-be got me a Sony Walkman CD-player which could handle MP3 disks burned on the computer. That gave me about 650 meg of storage to play with, and, for the most part, it has sufficed. However, now I am totally ruined. My new SansDisk Sansa player has a gig of internal memory and will handle up to 2 gig of external (SD card) memory. I just loaded the internal memory with 174 tracks or about 15 hours of music, and I am now working on building another playlist with about the same number of tracks for a 1 gig SD card. Now that I have been introduced to this slightly long-in-the-tooth technology, I am already thinking about my next player. This one's screen is a little small, and the firmware doesn't allow a great deal of programming flexibility. However, those small little quibbles aside, this little beast is soooo much better than any portable music player I have ever had that there is literally no comparison. 'Nuff for now...bitches and moans later...