Oh Yeah...My Birthday

Forgot to mention that it was my birthday yesterday. I'm now 36. I only mention that because I wanted to crow over my gifts.

The hubby and kids gave me two things: chocolates and an MP3 player.

Chocolates - These came from a local shop and were primarily irish cream truffles and ginger jelly things covered in milk chocolate. Oh. My. God. I have never eaten chocolates so slowly on my life. Both were fantastic but I has to say, the ginger is my forever and ever favourite. It's often said that women prefer chocolate to sex but these ginger chocolates pretty much are sex. I kid you not.

MP3 player - I dind't want one of these. I find most earphones and buds irritating. But hubby was tired of me carting his clock radio around the house so I could listen to CBC Radio One. Off he went to an electronics store and came back with a Sansa Fuze.

I was sort of not-thrilled when I first saw it but the geek in me soon couldn't resist the idea of 4 gigs of storage in something the size of a credit card. I opened it and turned it on. Okay, MP3 player yes. Only 4 gigs of storage but will take micro SD cards to dramatically expand the storage. Nice. Plays audiobooks and a ton of different audio formats (mp3, wma, ogg, flac) that cultish iPod Nanos can't handle. Also plays video and stores pictures (you can make a slideshow!). Interesting. Also receives FM (another things stinky iPods can't do). Ah! Now I see the husband's clever plan.

But two features have made me fall head-over-heels with this wonderful little device and promote it to the ranks of One-of-the-Best-Gifts-EVAR(along with Rowlf).

1) It's also a voice recorder! That means I can make up grocery list on the fly and transcribe them later. I can read my course text aloud and then listen to it later while washing dishes. I can record my choir songs and listen to my singing critically. I can record songs I know and then play them back and sing in harmony with myself! And yes, embarrassingly enough it's the last activity that's consumes huge amounts of my time. But isn't that cool!

2) It records radio!!!! That means mean that if I'm in the middle of an in-depth Van Morrison interview or an Ideas episode where philosophers are discussing democracy and the dog throws up or the kids decide to scream at each other I can just press "record", take off the ear buds, go deal with the problem and then come back and enjoy the recording at my leisure, preferably with a ginger chocolate or two or four! THIS IS FANTASTIC! THIS IS GROUNDBREAKING! THIS IS UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME!!!

That feature alone has changed my life.

So I end this with two recomendations. Get yourself some ginger chocolates and get yourself a Sansa Fuze (which is also less then half the price of one of those dorky iPod Nanos - Can you tell I've been fully inducted into the tribe of Sansa?)