I Scream, You Scream, We all Sceam for I...pods

Not my best title. Granted.

The Boy has an Ipod Touch which he bought with his own money and is rightfully proud of. He's not super-possessive of it either. We all get time to mess around with the apps, run down the battery, and not charge it up again. He's cool with it.

He has it with him most of the time unless one of us has wandered away with it. Last year he would take it to school with him and listen to his tunes during art class (not to worry, though; that kind of deviant behavior has been cracked down on hard by the school this year!).

About a month ago, it stopped doing the number one thing it should do. It's an Ipod Touch and the touch part of it stopped working. It would come on, tell the correct time and that's about it. The touch screen was non-responsive.
Being the good mommy that I am, I diligently went through the "Troubleshooting Tips" on the Apple site and FIXED IT! That's right, me. I fixed it! I rock! Rename me Hero!

Last week though, it happened again. Same exact thing. Frozen screen. Nothing doing. This time the Tips failed. I went through them four stinking times and gave myself a splitting headache but the little gadget just wouldn't respond.

We picked up a warranty for the Ipod at the POS store when he bought it. What did our money get us? "Sucks to be you. Not our problem." Charming. Lesson learned.

Apple themselves wanted $30 to talk to them on the phone about it. Umm, no.

Or we could put it in the mail and wait and see. Again, no. Not liking the sound of that.

Or we could cruise to our nearest Apple store and talk to a real live human. That sounded good. The closest store was actually surprisingly close. It's in the hoity-toity shopping neighborhood only a short drive away. We made an appointment for 9 AM the next morning.

I can report it's very, very quiet and empty that early in the morning in Hoity-Toityville. Nothing is open. Nothing is moving except the street cleaner. The Man was predicting that we had made a 9 AM appointment in a store that wouldn't open until 10 AM. I had to agree. But as we came up on the door, it was unlocked, the lights were on and it had people in it. Quite a few people. I wouldn't call it bustling, but it certainly wasn't empty.

We were greeted at the door by people expecting us and directed to Lee the Genius, who would be taking care of us. It was like walking into heaven (that might be exaggerating just a bit, but it was extremely nice).

This story is already too long, so I'll wrap it up by saying that 10 minutes later we were leaving the store with a brand new shiny Ipod. The Boy's was really broken in a way that was nobody's fault and would be sent back to Apple for parts. It only cost us a car ride and a signature.

And since it was only 9:15, we went out to breakfast. Yay for stories with happy endings!

First Day as Sophomores

Okay, the first day was last week. But I took this picture on the first day, so at least I was on the ball for that.

Wonder Twin Sophomore Powers... ACTIVATE!

Lantern Awards

The Lantern Awards presented by The Lit were last night. It was a fairly fancy pants event at the Palace. Check out how cute I looked!

This is like the best picture taken of me in years!

Anyway, there were ten different categories, each with three nominees. The Man was up for "Poetry, Single Poem". It was cool to be nominated, but neither of us thought about it much in regards to winning or losing. It was an event to go to with free tickets that involved appetizers.

When we sat down in our seat, the awards themselves were sitting on the stage.
Each one was different and they had a flickering candle glow inside. That's when I wanted The Man to win because I wanted one of those lanterns!

Being a nominee for this award has kept The Man busy over the last month. He had to go to a photo shoot for the picture in the program.

He also had to go get videotaped talking and reading for the show they put up on the big screen.

Not a great picture, but that's really him talking away. The little lights underneath are the lanterns flickering.

He was really dreading the video parts, but he looked good and sounded smart.

And then he won his category. It was really cool when his name was announced. Since he wasn't planning on winning he had no idea what to say, but his acceptance speech was perfect.
Later on he had to accept the Lifetime Achievement award for Shelia Schwartz and that speech was even better. He had that one worked out a little bit in advance.
Dan Chaon won the award for Best Novel, but he couldn't be there and asked The Man to pick it up for him if he did win. So we ended up bringing three of the lovely little lanterns home.


Here's The Man's...

Here's Dan's...
Here's Shelia's...

Those are pages from her books wrapped around. Very cool.

Here's all three showing the side with their name and which award they won...
And all three lit up.I love that these awards are locally made pieces of art instead of something like a slab of polished wood with a brass plate or a block of etched glass. These little lanterns are just beautiful.

There's a nice write up of the event in today's Plain Dealer. It says that The Man is 43, which cracks me up, but he's not finding much humor in.

At the after party, he carried around the same plate of food all night but never ate because he kept talking to people. Not to worry, I put away enough appetizers for both of us.

No Love for Clean Streets

I've written in the past about how much I love the leaf sucker trucks. I love that they suck up and take away the mountains of leaves. I don't know where the leaves end up, but I do know that they don't have to be put in plastic bags and sit in a landfill for all eternity. What could be better than that?

(Well, what's better than that for me is the sound those trucks make. Knocks me right out. But that that is just a byproduct of a bigger thing. A happy bonus one could say.)

Here's my least favorite truck that the city sends around.

The street sweeper truck.

Is there a bigger waste of money and resources than this? For the most part, the street looks exactly the same before and after it does its thing. It's just wet afterward.Usually these guys run in pairs, one right behind the other. Times must be tough if we are down to just one truck spraying water and spinning dirt in a circle.

The guy running this truck didn't even notice I was taking pictures because he was too busying yakking away on his phone. That's the job I need. No, wait a minute. I didn't mean it!

Here's the News

Some of you already know this but I'm not going back to zombie sitting. It's my choice and I choose to treat myself better than that. It's time to try something new. What is the new thing? Not sure yet, but it's got to be better than the zombies.

How does it feel during this first week that school is open to not be going back? It feels like this...

Goodbye Summer!

We finished off summer the right way around here.

We took one more sunset trip to the beach.
We went to Taste of Cleveland and made pigs of ourselves.





We saw Weird Al rock the house.


That was the real end of summer because the next morning was cold and rainy, which can only mean that it was a Cross Country meet morning.

The Girl ran...and then The Boy.
They both ran amazing times despite staying up too late and eating a bunch of junk the night before.

Today we are having quite a wind storm out there. Dust clouds are being kicked up in the streets, doors are slamming and trees are being shook so they drop all that they have.

Like these.

I went outside to take some pictures of my poor sunflowers that have been knocked to the ground.

Isn't that just sad.

While I was out there the wind kept blowing and blowing and then the chestnuts started falling. I saw all of these guys hit the ground. That's as fresh as they get.
They are pretty when they first fall, cold and shiny, but they get ugly fast. They'll keep falling now for about a month. They'll disturb your sleep when they hit the roof, dent your car if you park in the wrong place and trip you up wherever you try to walk. If you are coming to visit, consider yourself warned.

Tomorrow the kiddos go back to school in their brand new building. If you have to go back, that's a cool way to go.