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on Christmas day in the morning
Dec. 25th, 2010 11:02 pmI arose early today to ferry my mother to the airport. This is my brother's free week, and since neither he nor she has any particular reason to celebrate Christmas, it seemed a better day for her to travel than the surrounding days.
Then back home to prepare our contributions for B's family gathering, including gingerbread sweetened with Sweet'n Low, for which I found a mix - I'm not trying to make something like that from scratch. Cast of characters at the meet: 14 adults, 2 children (all the other former children have grown up, and most of them have gone out of town), 2 resident cats, 1 visiting dog, and 1 malevolent fish.
B's presents from me included two books on music: a history of the folk mass, a topic of interest to her, which I had to order by mail from the publishers as the local Catholic bookstore, whose staff are kindly but helpless, had never heard of it, and Amazon was fresh out; and a book of perhaps more general interest here, the memoirs of Christine Lavin. Yes! A long, chatty book full of brutally honest anecdotes about the peripatetic folk-singing life.
My big, er tiny, er big present is a portable MP3 player. Coby model MP707, it says in tiny print on the back. So far I've charged it and peered at the menu without installing the recommended file-management program, and tried out the one sample track included. I haven't tried ripping any files to it yet, and indeed I've discovered that I don't actually have a program on my computer that can make MP3s. I can make MP4s; I wonder if it will take those? I can also make WMAs (the default Windows Media Player format); it does say it will play those, so OK. I have to decide whether I want to fill it with classical or folk; I want to use it on random play as I'm out walking and don't want to juxtapose the two. I like them both, but they go together like two other things I like, chocolate and peanut butter: i.e., for me, not at all.
Then back home to prepare our contributions for B's family gathering, including gingerbread sweetened with Sweet'n Low, for which I found a mix - I'm not trying to make something like that from scratch. Cast of characters at the meet: 14 adults, 2 children (all the other former children have grown up, and most of them have gone out of town), 2 resident cats, 1 visiting dog, and 1 malevolent fish.
B's presents from me included two books on music: a history of the folk mass, a topic of interest to her, which I had to order by mail from the publishers as the local Catholic bookstore, whose staff are kindly but helpless, had never heard of it, and Amazon was fresh out; and a book of perhaps more general interest here, the memoirs of Christine Lavin. Yes! A long, chatty book full of brutally honest anecdotes about the peripatetic folk-singing life.
My big, er tiny, er big present is a portable MP3 player. Coby model MP707, it says in tiny print on the back. So far I've charged it and peered at the menu without installing the recommended file-management program, and tried out the one sample track included. I haven't tried ripping any files to it yet, and indeed I've discovered that I don't actually have a program on my computer that can make MP3s. I can make MP4s; I wonder if it will take those? I can also make WMAs (the default Windows Media Player format); it does say it will play those, so OK. I have to decide whether I want to fill it with classical or folk; I want to use it on random play as I'm out walking and don't want to juxtapose the two. I like them both, but they go together like two other things I like, chocolate and peanut butter: i.e., for me, not at all.
