Cleaning And Listening

I read The Summer Without Men on the flight home. It was a long flight and a longish layover in Atlanta so I had plenty of time. And it was the perfect size book for the amount of time I had. There were interesting echos of my current life in the book. The main character spends some time with her mother who lives in a retirement home. Someone dies and someone makes a comment about how that happens when people of a certain age get together. Yep.
She sublets a house and there's some fairly detailed writing about the cleaning she does as a way of nesting. I loved it. Cleaning is a way of taking possession of a space. My apartment wasn't dirty when I came home. In fact there was some obvious cleaning that had been done for which I was grateful. But things were just off. after two weeks I have things mostly back to the way I like them. I am surrounded by my plants and books and at my computer. Home.
For a few years I've been trying to come up with a way to have all my music in one easily playable place. I have a nice collection of CDs and a few cassettes. I haven't bought much new in years. Once when I was still working I bought a small stack of new discs and I have five or six new songs in my phone. I never listen to them any more. My disc player doesn't work. It has a five disc capacity but doesn't shuffle and makes a loud thunk between each disc. I didn't want to rip everything into my computer because I didn't think I had enough space. I decided to get an IPod classic because it had the most space. I decided but I didn't act on it. It's not a lot of money but it's a lot for me. Well I came home from Mom's and made my move. I thought I could put music in it and by pass the computer. I was wrong. If I'm not wrong someone needs to tell me how to do that. I was bummed at first but it turns out I have a fair amount of space on my computer. So far it's working out.
I sort of hate ear buds. Decades ago I bought tiny Radio Shack speakers for a Sony Walkman. They've been in my back room buried under junk. Really they're so old I didn't think they'd work at all and I didn't think they'd work with the IPod. But they do.
Mom puts MSNBC on first thing every morning and it's on all day. I watch a fair amount myself but I listen to more radio. MSNBC is so repetitive. It's hours and hours of opinion about some aspect of political news. I like a few of the shows. Mostly Rachel, Chris and MHP. Some times Ed covers labor issues. But all day is brain numbing.
So now I'm home. Have I mentioned that? And every day I add more music to the IPod. I listen to it with the little speakers. My shuffle goes from Lester Young to Oingo Boingo to Barry White to Verdi. I lean heavily toward singer song writers and rhythm and blues but I have a variety. Today I'm adding all the Joni. Should make for fun listening tomorrow. It's been a really positive thing. There may have been better ways to go about it but it's doing what I wanted it to do. Making it easier to listen to music. I'm not sure when that became hard. It used to be reflexive.
I'm one Harper's away from being caught up on three months of those and New Yorkers. I'm caught up on random television shows. I did write the food blog. I was fooling around with the template and now there's no way to share it to Facebook or Twitter embedded on the post. I don't know why. I wanted to use a picture Kristina took but I can't get it to be where I want it to be. I'll keep tweaking.
I haven't walked out of my apartment. Which has been good. Something I needed.
Stevie Wonder is singing.
Picture me smiling.