Come back to me

I almost had a serious mental and emotional breakdown this week. Monday afternoon my friend Kevin stopped by my desk to see how iTunes works. I hooked up my iPod and waited for the system to connect. All of the sudden, a message popped up that there was a problem and the iPod was reverted back to the factory defaults. Umm, excuse me? I disconnected and sure enough, to my horror, EVERYTHING on my iPod was GONE. Over 5,900 songs and videos, more than 30 gigs of multimedia, simply GONE. Poof. No more.

I could feel the tears of rage and frustration welling in my eyes. It took every ounce of self-control to not erupt right then and there. After that, my iPod just completely stopped working. I couldn’t even get it to turn on. I frantically started calling my friends to find out what I could do. In the end, I logged onto the Apple website and signed up to have it serviced. I’ll mail it back to Apple tomorrow and hopefully have it back in a few weeks. Please come back fully functional little iPod!

When all this happened, all I could think was “Thank God I still have my shuffle, so I’m not completely without music.” That is, until my shuffle died on Tuesday. I worked out at lunch and the battery died at the end of my work-out. I brought the shuffle upstairs to my desk to charge it on my computer. After I plugged it in, it never worked again. Apparently my work computer has the iPod kiss of death. I’ll never plug another iPod into it again! This has been an expensive lesson learned.

Tuesday night I went out and bought a new shuffle, because there is no way I could make it a couple weeks without a shuffle or iPod. Yes, I am that dependent on music. I listen to music my entire commute to and from work, all day long at my desk and a lot of the evenings at home.

Other than this disaster, life has been good. I am almost completely settled into my new place and I love it. I’ve decided living alone is the best thing for me. It is so great to come home from a shitty day at work and just decompress.

I’ve already hosted my first small gathering of people and it was a moderate success. Even though I don’t have a very large space, I think it was big enough for the twelve of us to all be in there and not feel crowded. I’m looking forward to having an official house-warming once I’ve had a chance to hang the paintings and other small things that I haven’t finished yet.

As I was writing this, we had a fire-drill here at work. What a genius way to waste an hour of my day. After we all walk down a block to our official meeting spot, it then time to turn around and head back to the building. Of course my friends and I stand outside for another 20 minutes. When we got back inside, they had Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream set up for us. Sweet. I have now done absolutely NOTHING since I left for lunch at noon.