Plugged In

Anyone who knows me knows that I am very reluctantly a member of 21st century society. I would rather walk on a dirt road than drive a car and I prefer a fiddle to an iPod. My mother-in-law bought a TV for us ten years ago and it sat in a box on the floor for several months as we walked past it every day, feeling guilty for not wanting to plug it in. Zane and I took the plunge a couple of years ago and got...cable TV! And that wasn't because we felt we needed more pop culture in our lives, it was mainly so we could watch baseball more often than just during the World Series when it is broadcast on one of the four channels we were getting. I have realized that while we are light years behind most people in the tech department, we are slowly catching up.

This past weekend I took my kids to Utah for Spring Break and I was laughing to myself as I was packing because it seems that every year I have more...things...to take. The clothes, shampoo, and books to read in the car are the same, but I have more things with cords now.

First, it was cell phones. I would bring my phone and, if I remembered, a charger for when I got to my destination. Then I got a car charger. That was a big deal for us. Next came a DVD player. My sister and her husband bought it for us, presumably because they felt sorry for our kids and knew that we were too resistant to high-tech progress for our children to ever enjoy this luxury without their help. (Thank you Carly and Levi!) The first time we used it, the batteries died in about an hour. So here came the DVD plug for the car charger.

Pretty quickly Zane and I realized that we hated having Nanny McPhee and the Madagascar characters screaming in our ears (the DVD player is strung up with bungee cords between the two front seats) so we were off to Wal-Mart to get headphones for the kids. A second trip solved the problem of two heads and one plug-in. Two kids+one headphone jack=a cord splitter. Hmm. Never knew that little doohickey existed.

The next round of cord-buying came last week when I was trying to burn a few new CDs for the long drive. After changing hard drives last month, our iTunes is what I call "broken". The guy on the phone at iTunes support couldn't tell me otherwise, so I'm sticking with "broken". After I complained to Mr. Tech Support that I was just about to go on a nine hour drive with no new mixes to listen to he asked me, slowly and in what I believe to be a patronizing tone, if I had the means to play my iPod in the car. I didn't. I had heard that this technology was available but assumed that it was too expensive because of how cool and unattainable it sounded to be able to hook up my iPod in the car. The guy on the phone assured me that it was not expensive at all. A call to Levi confirmed that I could indeed listen to all four thousand (kidding) songs in my car for as little as twenty bucks. I was sold.

So now I have my iPod plugged into a radio frequency thingy, which came with another cord to plug into the car charger and I splurged and got a different thingy that I can use to charge my iPod without plugging it into my computer.

So I have lots of luxurious ways to be entertained at my disposal, and have realized that I now need to go out and buy some kind of a cute bag in which to keep these cords. Maybe I'll hand quilt one to keep myself from feeling too high-falutin'.