Information Age

I have entered the world of technology. Yesterday, unexpectedly, my dad tossed a bag from RadioShack at me and told me, "Merry birthday." I looked inside. It was an mp3 player: a SanDisk sansa. I'm naming it Gregor. Catch the pun? (No?) I finished playing a game of Egyptian Ratscrew with Micah and then loaded some stuff onto it. Some Grieg stuff. What I need now is a way to put CD stuff on--we just used a trial version of a thing Dad downloaded, and it expires on Thursday. Also I want a file that converts RealPlayer files into mp3s. A lot of my favorite music comes from the internet, and everything is Real there. Hmm. Gregor complicates my life a little. Now I can do more than one thing at once, so I'm more prone to trying to multitask. This might have repercussions at some point, like decreased productivity. I'll try to control things. Also I have to move around less to keep the earbuds from falling out. Hmm.
-My watch is in for repairs; the crown was stripped. I'm using an old pocketwatch in the interim. It's nice, but it gains about a minute per day. It only gives a sort of notion of what time it is. I'm anxious to have my watch back.
-Its getting spring out there. We've had a very wet year so far. It's rained a whole lot. We had six straight days of rain in March, and then about 50% of the rest of the month was also rainy, and so far in April we've already had a very enthusiastic storm, which is still going on right now. It seems like thunderstorms now that I'm older are always farther off and more lethargic than when I was young. I used to sit at the living room window and watch the lightning have an animated conversation with the ground just beyond the trees. Now, I look and listen, but the lightning is always somewhere in the next town, and the thunder only occasionally happens at all. The only exception is those storms that are really loud and wake me up at about 0300. Those ones are always really excited, but I generally have to go back to sleep, and I have no time to sit at the window and watch it. I wish the storms would come back. Incidentally, the best thunderstorms I've seen were at Crowduck last year. The one produced the beginnings of a tornado, which chased a couple of our boats onto the shore. The other one was the last night. I was sitting on the screen porch. The storm came in from around Whiteshell. It was really talking. The sky was lit up more often than not, and it was silhouetting the pine forest with an erratic strobe. The thunder came in the sharp cracks that let you know it's happening close by; there was one of these about once every two seconds, and the rest of the time was filled up with the low, grumbling reverberation through the dense forest.
-I ought to get to bed.