My New Toy!

Spring is slowly starting to tease me with its proximity, in a cruel and vicious fashion - looking out the window, the sky is bright and blue and sunny, and there are tulips and daffodils poking up in our garden; twice in the past few weeks the weather has been glorious and warm.... but it's not *quite* actually spring yet.

Right around now is when I start craving my garden in a serious way. The days are longer, the air smells more like life, and the wet and ick is the wet and ick of life instead of the wet and ick of bleak darkness. But it's futile to even think of planting anything until late May around here, and so it's too early now to even start planning. I treat garden planning like an advent calender - a way to slowly dole out the joy and anticipation and fun leading up to actual planting, and if I start too early it'll run out before actual gardening can start, just making me more impatient and frustrated.

But it's never too early to grow things indoors. And I have a grow light. So last weekend umbran and I headed out to our local garden center to get some herb seedlings, figuring that if we started growing our herbs now, instead of in the end of May, it'd give us tasty food, lovely growing things, and a headstart on putting together a setup that we could use all year round.

Alas and alack, much to my surprise and disappointment, the garden store did not have any herb seedlings. However, they did have the best impulse-buy trap that it has ever been my delight to fall headfirst into. Even knowing that I was being targeted, caught, and manipulated, I was powerless to resist.

Right by the doors, where you couldn't enter or leave without walking through the display, they had set up their newest gimmick: Fairy Gardens. Stone bowls or distressed-wood boxes of varying sizes to hold a little indoor garden. Tiny dollhouse-sized wrought-iron benches and gazebos and birdbaths and statues. And, to grow in it, eensy-weensy three-inch-high flowers. Perfect little rosebushes smaller than the palm of your hand, tiny orchids and daisies and little yellow and white flowers that I don't even know what they are.

I'm usually not susceptible to impulse buys. I don't spend a lot of money on myself, and on the rare occasions that I do, I usually agonize over the decision for weeks before going ahead and splurging. Within ten minutes of stumbling across this setup I had spent.... okay, not a lot, it's just flowers and dirt, but more than I've spent on non-essential items for myself at one shot in a long, long time.

And now I have green, growing things in my house, to remind me that things are getting warmer and brighter every day. Tiny, adorable green growing things. And an overwhelming urge to go back and buy a bigger container, and maybe some daisies....

( Pictures, hidden, for those who might want to see.... )

Advise Me, O Internets

It's time to play a rousing round of Help The Luddite!

As far as I (and my far more technologically literate husband) can tell, my antique Ipod just had a serious aneurysm, and is in the process of dying. It's making odd ticking noises, refusing to sync, and crashing Itunes every time I try to plug it in. It's also doing "strange things" according to umbran; he won't specify what exactly. I assume this is because he knows full well that my imagination is capable of supplying far more interesting images than reality; odds are it's only lagging and skipping instead of wearing a basket of fruit on its nonexistent head or ritually slaughtering chickens for its circuit-laden pagan god, but a girl can daydream.

Anyway. Did I mention this thing was an antique? It's an Ipod classic, with an 80 Gb capacity, that was given to me as a gift about 4 years ago. The practical result is that I know precious little about mp3 players in general, and what's available right now in particular. And now I find myself needing to replace it, with no idea of what my options are or what I want.

This thing is my daily companion. No matter where I'm working, odds are I face an hour commute each way. I don't listen to it that much at home or on foot, but it's hooked into my car stereo and playing almost every day. I need something with a display big enough that I can glance at it at a stoplight and see what's playing, so the little fingernail-sized thingums probably aren't for me, and while I never used the full 80 Gb of memory, I need more than 8 - my music and audiobook collections are only getting bigger.

I've been browsing Apple's online store, and mostly it just seems to be full of Shiny! and Whizbang! And made-up words and phrases that mean precious little, but are designed to sell me little pieces of colored metal and plastic. So, I figured I'd come to y'all for advice instead.

What would you recommend as a replacement for my dear dying baby? It looks like I'm going to be dropping a couple hundred dollars no matter what, and I'm going to have to do it but soon if I want to stay sane driving to Sharon and Salisbury later this week. So, if I'm going to spend that kind of money, I'd like to make sure I'm getting the right toy.....