MindSpinner

I discovered today that my sun oven will heat pre-baked rolls for dinner even when its 5:30 p.m. and partly cloudy out. On sunny or partly sunny weekends, I can slow-cook a meal or bake brownies, muffins, or cookies - these things I have done. This weekend I will try baking my little loaf of bread out on the deck. If the bread is good, I will be pleased and relieved.

When the kitchen oven burns out less than a week after the clothes dryer does, it seems best to consider the situation an invitation to experiment and adventure. Perhaps I am ultimately to pursue Thoreau’s quest to live simply, and my appliances are giving me a nudge. It has to be said, however, that the simple life, however romanticized, is not actually simple.

I have coveted an iPod for years - as many years as there have been iPods. Of course, I have coveted the 30 GB model with video (though I hardly turn on the TV) and, more recently, I have coveted the iPhone, without expectation and simply as a matter of technological aesthetic appreciation for a thing beautifully designed and realized.

But this past week, fate landed a $50 Best Buy store credit in my hands, such that buying a clip-style 1 GB iPod Shuffle suddenly became a matter of $30 additional spending, not $80. I couldn’t think of a good enough reason not to buy an iPod for $30. I walked around the store twice and looked at everything else Best Buy had to offer. There was nothing I wanted or needed besides that tiny iPod. And so it has come to pass that I actually have one for my own at last, and I have done this week what I always longed to do - load an audiobook (American Theocracy, at the moment) and listen while I pick up clutter or cook a meal or drive here and there.

The only drawback I can see is that my literary choices do not alway coincide with selections offered at Audible.com, where I have fifteen legacy book credits. Indeed, of the eight or ten books that have languished in my Amazon cart for a year under “Save for Later,” only The Omnivore’s Dilemma can be found on Audible. Now it can also be found on my hard drive, waiting in line for its turn on the iPod. However, for every title that isn’t available at Audible, there is another that interests me. I do not anticipate running out of delectable possibilities.

Nothing could be easier than clipping the little Shuffle to my pocket or my shirt and listening as long as I’d like. Less iPod turns out to be all the iPod I need or want and ever so much more than no iPod at all.

Every once in a while, someone writes to me at the address associated with this domain - mindspin at mindspinner dot net, and every once in a while, I check that mailbox through Web mail. But, for some time now, I haven’t been able to get to that mailbox at all; it has evaporated into cyberspace. At first I thought the email program Horde just wasn’t loading properly on a consistent basis (the format loads incorrectly much of the time), but I’ve since determined that my mailbox and all my mail are truly lost. I’m finally getting around to emailing my hosting service about the matter, and I want to apologize to anyone who might have written and not received a reply.

I’ve updated the version of WordPress I’m using, installed the Akismet plug-in to help me manage spam (much faster zapping possible), and turned off the log-in requirement for commenting, since I’ve been told it effectively prevented commenting altogether. (Sorry - my loss!) Updating WordPress inexplicably changed the font I had to look at in Firefox. I didn’t like the result and have switched to another simple but palatable visual theme called “veryplaintxt.” I like that un-ostentatious title. Whether you see the new look as utterly dull or elegantly simple is a matter of taste.

I like “elegantly simple” better than “idiosyncratically designed by somebody else,” and I am admittedly uninvested in the notion of spending days designing somethat that truly suits. Boy is that wordy. I’m too lazy. It’s summertime.

I’ve had to change my WordPress options today to require registration and log-in before readers can comment here. I usually have to delete 50-100 comments a day queued fairly harmlessly in “moderation,” but when I get 2365 instances of comment spam in a day, such that my browser crashes in the attempt to select them for deletion, measures must be taken :->. Those who occasionally post genuine comments, know that your responses are always appreciated here. I hate to have to put up an extra hurdle for you to jump through in order to make a comment, but the only other alternative right now is turning off comments altogether.