How I Spent My Blogging Vacation

Some advice. If you say you’re going to do something, do it. And if you have something to do that you don’t want to do, do that first. Trust me: if more people followed that advice, the world would be a better place.

I think, but I’m not sure, that the DJ blog has been put on hold. It may have been cancelled. Beats me. In any case, that frees up all that time I’ve been talking about not having. First off, I’ve been updating my music. It started with my old classic iPod being just about filled up. Then—horrors!—the hard drive on my MacBook was just about filled up. Now the old classic iPod was connected to Little Elvis, which is the jukebox in the house. There’s an exterior drive connected to Little E so there’s plenty of room there for more music, and the computer is never turned off. So…

Step one: buy big new hard drive. Attach it to the MacBook.

Step two: copy all the music from Little Elvis to the new hard drive. Connect the MacBook iTunes to the library on the new hard drive.

Step three: upload all of the new hard drive music to Amazon cloud (since I get it for free).

Step four: clean up iTunes on the MacBook. I realize that this should have come before step three, but nobody’s perfect, and how clean does a cloud drive actually need to be?

Step five: purchase new 160 gig iPod.

Step six: synch cleaned up iTunes music, with some new playlists, to the new iPod.

Step seven: coincidentally get Potentially Life-Threatening Burning Nano replacement in the mail. It’s the size of a first class stamp. Decide to turn it into a talking machine, with podcasts and audiobooks. Buy watch base for it because it’s so *(#&%! small I keep misplacing it.

Step eight: figure out what to do with old classic iPod and a portable speaker set already replaced by Jambox. (Pending…)

Step nine: decide that Bluetooth sucks.

Step ten: buy new car with USB and in-dash music access. (Also Bluetooth, but that sucks, so after toothy salesman demonstrates it with my iPhone, feel thankful that this wasn’t why I bought the car.) This is sort of unrelated, but I do a lot of listening behind the wheel. I also introduce Sailors to music they wish they’d never heard, and conduct Disney sing-alongs with O’C, which is why I mentioned it.

Step eleven: start listening to 1Q84 audiobook. After five weeks, I’m about halfway through. Which means that February is accounted for on the audiobook listening front.

Step twelve: think about ripping some more disks or buying some new mp3s, now that I have the room for it.

Step thirteen: leave out discussion of Time Machine and that drive getting filled up, which you know how to solve if it’s happened to you and if you haven’t, it will.

None of which would have happened quite so swiftly if the DJ blog had been breathing down my neck. Still, I liked that concept. One way or another, it will rise again…