As promised, I have a photo of all the family lined up (with identifying tags). They are: McPod, a first generation 6GB iPod, Dopi, a second generation 40GB iPod, Jack, a third generation 20GB iPod, Bob, a first generation green iPod mini, and Tom Thumb, a 512MB iPod shuffle (bought the very day they were announced!). Aren’t they cute? They all do different things: McPod is semi-retired now as his battery doesn’t hold a charge for very long. Dopi is used mostly as a portable hard drive because it’s so large. Jack is Chuck’s ipod-of-all-trades – but mostly he plans on using it to hold audio books (he just got it at the SF Apple Store). Bob the iPod mini is my symbols for facebook” title=”music symbols for facebook”>music player, and can be used in both cars. Last but not least is Tom Thumb, who has become my favorite sports player as it is so small and light, the best player for running I’ve ever seen (but a good addition for it is the sport case that is coming out soon – the only accessory you’d need for this little guy as I can see it getting damaged if it got too wet or sweated on). So there you go: it takes four iPods to meet this family’s needs.
On an unrelated note, I have to bitch and complain for a moment about how frigging long it took us to drive home yesterday from No Cal. We took I5 as we had heard reports that US101 was still closed from the awful mudslides of last week. All went well until we were a few miles south of the Grapevine, where we ran into road construction delays. The signs said two hours – we wished! We sat there for FOUR hours!!! People were actually walking faster than we were driving (we also saw an amazing number of people watching DVDs in their cars – front and back seat!) Man oh man, did we ever have to go to the bathroom by the time we finally got out of the traffic backup (us, and about five hundred other people, all stampeding into a little Chevron gas station just this side of the mountains). Our sanity was saved by the fact that we were listening to a really good audio book (on the iPod mini, of course) – Michael Crichton’s latest ouvre, State of Fear. Vastly entertaining (if a bit over-explanatory at points), where the bad guys are the environmentalists (I don’t expect Crichton to be invited to any Greenpeace events any time soon!). We nearly made it to the end of the book, we sat on I5 for so long. Towards the end of the ordeal there was a very funny road sign (funny as our max speed for four hours was around 5MPH) – “Max Speed 45MPH in Construction Zone” – which I tried to take a picture of. Unfortunately, by the time I scrambled into the backseat, found the camera, and took the shot, all I got is what you see here. An interesting image of nothing, I thought.