Back on the road again

As I guess a lot of you have found, last weekend Blogger was essentially unavailable. I wrote a post from home, but as I am now at work, I guess I'll just try to remember what I wrote.

I spent a fair amount of time this weekend ripping my CDs to mp3 files, to go on my new player. In the bad old days, I used to download tracks from Napster, but as far as I remember, I only did so for tracks for which I owned the CD anyway; I just didn't have the software (or maybe the know-how) to rip songs from an audio CD back then. This weekend I realized how very many CDs I have in which I only want to listen to one or two tracks. When we had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, I would copy LPs to it one or two tracks at a time, because however much I may like an artist, I really don't want to hear 90 minutes of them, uninterrupted. Eventually I would memorize the order of the tunes, I played them that way so often. The 'shuffle' feature of the mp3 players is great, you never know what will be next, and if you turn it off mid-song, it resumes at the start of that song, too. But it still doesn't change the fact that a CD, costing around $15 or more, is 90% crud and 10% listenable. Unfortunately, when ripping I pretty much had to listen to the whole CD to find what I wanted. Or at least the first minute of the tune, and that certainly slowed up the process. I calculate I will finish the task in 2008, but only if I stop buying CDs right now. Which isn't too likely. I also plan to make CDs with these selections, so I can play them in the car. The mp3 player, with its earbuds, is too much of a distraction when I'm driving, I can't hear traffic noises like sirens or horns. And if they get ripped off (in a convertible, access is only a fingernail file away), I can always burn another.

Actually, speaking of rag tops, I rarely lock my car anyway. I would rather a thief took whatever they want inside, but leave the friggin' top intact. A new top, the last I checked, runs around $1500, and believe me, there's nothing inside worth that much. And if they steal the whole car, well, that's what insurance is for. Plus, of course, this is a small town (I think; there are those from truly little towns in WV who think Morgantown is 'the big city') and it's harder than you would think to get away with stuff. When we first moved here from San Francisco, I was caught by this when I would be telling a funny story about, say, the babysitter, and someone would ask, who is she? And I'd give her name and they would say, oh yeah, she goes to church with me, or, I went to school with her brother, or the like. Even in a town of 25,000, you can't count on anonymity at all; the guy in the Lexus you give the bird to will turn out to be the new youth pastor or whatever. It takes some getting used to. The place where I go every two weeks to get my nails done is a fount of information; between the two of them, they know the history of everyone in town, who is running around on who, who has a drinking problem, everything. I just listen, I seldom know any of these people (despite having lived here 25 years), but the wealth of gossip just leaves me breathless. There must be an underground telegraph somewhere. I wonder if everyone in town is aware of how transparent their lives are? This must be part of the appeal of living in a real big city.

Well I'm off to see the new psychiatrist (you have to be off, otherwise you wouldn't need a psychiatrist, right?) who will maybe have some magic pill that will make me cheerful, lose weight, be smarter, and sleep sounder. Riiiiight.