okay, i’m a label-whore. i might as well start wearing $85 sweatpants with “abercrombie” embroidered across the butt. (for the record… i actually used to own a pair, but it was a hand-me-down. then i took it to goodwill in a fit of spring cleaning that included getting rid of all my fat clothes. this was about a month before i got knocked up again. yay, optimism!) anyway, i just upgraded my 1GB sandisk sansa mp3 player with a sweet-ass 80GB ipod video that i got for christmas from my mommy and daddy who love me very, very much (okay, so it was from my mom, anyway… my dad was checking out my new gadget last weekend and asked me where i got it. when i told him, he didn’t even ask me how much it cost! yay, dad!)
i’ve been having a lot of fun finally getting around to digitzing and organizing my music. no more skipping crappy tracks on cds, no more listening to an entire discography of an artist whose songs suck about 50% of the time. my playlists are TIGHT. after spending the last two weeks (in which i haven’t been able to move much anyway, given that i’ve had a huge cranium lodged firmly in my pelvis for at least a week now) i have 30.5GB of pure listening enjoyment, and that’s after going through about 75% of my music collection. got my pop, my rock, my new age, my soundtracks, my classical, my blues, and most importantly, my motherfucking johnny cash. now i just have to tackle the rather daunting task of sifting through 50-100 bluegrass cds.
today’s project was really satisfying: taking a stack of cds that i owned for one or two tracks (meatloaf: yeah. i know there were like 12 tracks on bat out of hell, but nobody except your mom listened to 11 of them. starship: we built this city on rock and roll is a black sheep in your otherwise lame flock of warbling, whiney “anthems” and “ballads.”) and then, even more fun, going through the itunes store to find that some of my favorite artists had put out several new albums since i was last aware of the music scene (not surprisingly, this roughly coincides with the time i started having kids.) so i spent my wad of christmas cash on a stack of albums from the jesus lizard, deana carter, and blues traveler (and not from itunes. fuck 99cents per song when i can get the album from half.com for $4 shipped.)
so i finally came up with something to tell PRM to get me for a (belated) christmas gift (thus sparing him any further crap from coworkers who ask what he got me for christmas, and replying “nothing.”) he covered my new toy in a pink skin from ifrogz, got a screen for it that came with custom clickwheel artwork (a black field with a white skull on it, which matches my belt buckle. i thought the juxtapostion of girly powder-pink and black/skull was really cool, until PRM told me it just made me look like a gay pirate. well, screw him and the 512 MB creative muvo he rode in on, anyway! it’s not my fault he asked for brewing equipment instead of a sweet, sweet ipod for christmas!)) then, i went to aldi. for those of you who don’t have one nearby, aldi is a scary ghetto market that is so cheap you have to wonder if they didn’t replace the actual food in the packages with soylent green and ratmeat to keep their costs down. you know how store brands sometimes kinda suck? the store brand at aldi is downright terrifying. i have never seen canned foods so un-food-like in my life. they even sell honest-to-god gubmint cheeze – huge orange blocks of purported processed dairy mess wrapped in a plain white wrapper stamped with “USDA.” they only take cash, you have to pay for the plastic bags, deposit a quarter to even get a cart, and old people LOVE IT. good luck getting in and out of there in under an hour on social security day, but hey, bananas are only 15 cents a pound!
anyway, there are two reasons i occasionally go to aldi: 1) they have this brand of chicken wings there that i can’t find anywhere else that seriously rock. one bag of tequila lime flavor, and one bag of spicy garlic buffalo flavor at $8 a bag, and we can feed a party of a dozen people. 2) aldi is a german chain. so, especially around christmas, you can find really, really good german food for about as cheap as it was in germany. also, they carry a couple of brands of german beer that are obscure enough that the local beer emporium, which has drool-worthy walls of hundreds of kinds of beer, doesn’t stock them.
now, aldi also has one small aisle devoted to the big lots principle: “we take a truckload of crap that real stores got sick of stocking and sell it for at least 75% off.” right after christmas, this apparently involves lots of toys. so i got a HUGE megabloks pyrates playset for the twits (and that $15 bought me a three hour nap that afternoon… beyond worth it!) a spongebob squarepants boardgame for EG (you roll a die to try to make it from point a to point b without hitting any “you lose” spots on the board. it involves no skill or thinking whatsoever, making it the perfect vehicle for EG’s endless stream of trash-talk.) and i got myself an idog for $10 (amazon’s after-christmas clearance price on and idog is $29.)
okay, the idog is dumb as hell. it’s so stupid i had to have one. it’s a tiny little robot dog with shitty built-in speakers. you plug your ipod into it, it plays your music, dances, and its face lights up in a multi-colored display in time to the beat. if you pet it, it barks happily, if you fuck with its tail, it growls at you. if you ignore it, it gets annoying. it has no off button.
so of course the twits fell in love with it immediately. dramaqueen actually took it out of my hands as i was opening the manual, unplugged the earbuds from my ipod, plugged the idog cable into the idog and the ipod, and turned the ipod on. holy crap, that boy is competent sometimes. makes me very, very sorry that i’ve ever allowed him to see me light matches. then the idog started grooving to some nirvana, and spazmonkey got very excited. they spent the next hour yelling at the puppy when it barked, dancing along, and occasionally smacking the clickwheel on the ipod to make it do something that required fixing.
when they were done, i tried to put it away, and was told, “HEY! that’s MYYYYYYYY robot puppy!” i did manage to convince them that the “pink music computer” was NOT theirs, but apparently i didn’t make the point stongly enough, because while i was making dinner, one of them pulled it out of my coat pocket and took it to their bedroom to hook back up to the idog. i came upon them later happily singing along to the uncensored version of adam sandler’s “ode to my car,” a song with such heartwarming and preschool-friendly lines as “i’ve got a piece of shit car” and “he never ever get the pussy!” yep. 5755 songs to choose from, most of them perfectly child-friendly, and that’s the one they found.
dammit, i am NOT sanitizing my playlists. it’s mine, i tell you, MINE! THEY CAN’T TAKE IT FROM ME!!!!
