So I realize I’m the last person in America to experience this, but I just got a new-to-me used iPod and well, I’m besotted. Many years ago, my Beloved Stepmother gave me an original 10GB iPod as a delightfully extravagent birthday present, and I’d been pretty happy with it, although I was always running out of room. Then when she was here a few weeks ago, she traded me the iPod Touch she’d replaced with an iPhone for an older MacBook — she’d never really used a Mac so I gave her an old one of mine to see whether she liked it before switching from a PC. Anyhow, the iPod Touch was cool, but it didn’t have any memory at all — I couldn’t get it to load podcasts or my new music and I grew increasingly frustrated, especially now that I’m working at home on the kinds of tasks that I really need music to concentrate on.

So I finally took the plunge and upgraded to a 120GB used iPod I found on Amazon. It was about half the price of a new one and the seller was great and sent it to me right away, in the box and everything.

This is where I sound like a geezer because 120 GB!? That’s more memory than I think every computer combined that I owned for the first 20 years of my working life. That’s a LOT of memory.

And so I’ve been loading CDs onto it since it arrived. CDs that I haven’t listened to in a long time. CDs that I missed. I’m a huge fan of Shuffle, and the idea that I can have all my music in one place, and set it going, and it’ll just shuffle around for hours. Love it. Plus, Apple finally fixed the problem with classical music — for a long time the albums didn’t sort right — the movements were all out of order. It was a gigantic pain in the neck.

So here I am, with my shiny new toy, that was kind of extravagant, but sometimes, even when money is tight, it’s worth it for something that will make your everyday life so much more pleasant.