Bad news, good news

WOE IS ME! This sad little Ipod face is appearing on my Ipod all of a sudden. This is NOT good. You know how much I love my Ipod, yes? I tried all of the reset/restore options but this frownie face just won't go away and the thing seems frozen. Oh dear. In my distress, I rushed to the Apple store at my local mall where the tech guy informed me that because I have the HP version and it's out of warranty, Apple couldn't work on it and this symbol probably means that the hard drive needs replacing.

This is DISASTER, folks. I have spent time online and am somewhat calmed after talking to a non-Apple Ipod repair guy who informed me that this symbol can show up for things as minor as a disconnected inner wire or something. So, I am sending my Ipod off into the wide world to to an Ipod spa and hoping that it comes back playing music and podcasts just as happily as ever. We'll see.

Strangely, I feel almost as disconnected as one does when the computer crashes or one's internet connection is broken. It's very weird. Roger, knowing my distress, suggested that it might be worthwhile to get a smaller, cheaper one to hold me over while this one is sorted out. Isn't that nice? I suspect that there's Etch-a-Sketch-ness going on here, as he knows darn well that if my original beloved Ipod comes back all fixed, he'll then get to abscond with the replacement. But that's okay. I am checking out refurbished Ipods and will see if that makes sense.

This is especially frustrating as I'm told that my dear, dear, friend Annie Smith (who I've never met and have barely emailed with but she has obvious good taste so I'm sure we WOULD be good friends) talks about ME in her newest Quilting Stash podcast as the result of some thoughts I emailed to her! I know, I can just stream the thing over my computer and listen to it that way. But c'mon, podcasts just seem more fun when they're ... um, you know, cast on a pod!

But on to happier thoughts...



I've just finished the most interesting novel I've read in a long time. It was "Popco" by Scarlet Thomas. It's the story of Alice Butler, a young woman who works in the "ideation and design" department of a big toy company. She and her co-workers go off on a company retreat with the task of creating a product for teen girls, and Alice's internal and actual explorations around this task are the focus of the book. It's a fascinating, quirky, smart book-- and lots of ideas to think about. You get math, puzzles, cryptography, marketing philosophy, memories of adolesence... even a cake recipe. This book takes some work -- but you learn a lot, cover a lot of fascinating stuff, and I didn't want to put it down once I started it.



And another bit of happy news...Remember that dog case I was working on, where a veterinarian had found a good home for a young dog after it had been relinquished, but then the original owners tried to reclaim it? Well, the case has now settled and the dog gets to stay with the current owners. The original owners (who are a divorced couple who were still fighting over which one of THEM got to reclaim the dog...when they both live in apartments where they're not allowed to have pets) got a bit of cash. So, they're happy and the folks who have taken the dog in and cared for it over the past 9 months are happy because they love the dog, and the vets are happy because the court's order acknowledged that they didn't do anything wrong.

You have to take your happy endings where you can find them.

Now, if only I had my Ipod to listen to...