What I need is time, what I get is...

business, I guess. I've been too busy with trying to get ready to take the GRE and other things in life that I haven't been able to blog. I'm sorry.

I'm hoping to be able to put up entries about Dragon*con, as well as other things of interest, but I don't know when I'll have the time.

Maybe on Wednesday, after I get back from Brook Park and my *gulp* court date.

Instead, I'll briefly regale you with the story of the missing mp3 player.

I was asked to participate in a quartet for church last week, and I went to rehearsal on Thursday (unknowingly) with my Sansa 2gig mp3 player attached to my belt by my Hello Kitty pouch. The snap closure had been acting funny lately, so it must have come loose when I was driving to the church. I was looking for a way in when the choir director's boyfriend opened one of the side doors at the bottom of a hill to let me in. It is at that point that the pouch fell off, but I didn't notice because I didn't know I had even brought it with me and (which was probably my biggest mistake) I had taken off my headphones, which would've jerked around my neck to let me know I had dropped it.

Well, I assumed that the player was on my living room table with the headphones and I didn't look for it until I was leaving for the UNCF walk on Saturday. I was supposed to meet my team at 9:00am for the group photo. I didn't leave the house until 9:45 tearing it apart for the player. I finally asked my husband to call the church and to call the interim pastor. I figured that if I lost it there, maybe they would know something about it. I ended up doing the walk with my old, reliable, Memorex mp3 player, but I still fretted about my Sansa.

We got calls back from the interim pastor saying that a member of the church found a gray item and gave it to her. Unfortunately, she got it on Friday and proceeded to leave it on a table where it could've been during the BREAD meeting [some interfaith bible study that was meeting at our church], and I figured someone took it during that meeting and that I would never see the mp3 player again. I was upset over the loss of money for the player, but I was a little more upset about losing the Hello Kitty thing, because it was a one-of-a-kind, handmade item I bought on eBay that couldn't be replaced. We then get a call from the son of the person who found it in the first place and told us that it was in the church safe.

After trying in vain to get the item back earlier this week, I finally got it back on Thursday evening after choir rehearsal.

Funny enough, though, I haven't used it for more than 5 minutes since I got it back. My head hurts and I have a terrible cold, and I really shouldn't have come in to work today, but I'm here and I'm trying to get some work done...or at least keep my eyes open.

This is insane...

I'm going to have to send a letter to the manufacturer of my mp3 player to demand that they make it possible to save playlists with music from the mini-SD card that I have inserted in the machine; I'm in need of this so that I can make playlists where I exclude all of the music that triggers a 'negative emotional response' [read: makes me cry in public when depressed] so that I can still listen to music without replaying an emotional song repeatedly because I want to keep hearing it until I've beat myself up enough to move on.

I could, in theory, just skip those songs in my playlist, but I'm getting through the list for the first time and I refuse to skip songs. What about I just listen to it once and move on to the next song? No good: once a response has been triggered, I need to hear the song a few more times to give myself a way to 'come down' gently. Besides, some of the music I hear is just so beautiful that I don't want the experience of the sound to end. And it's fun to hear a song that has a color I can see [My husband says that I have Illio-optic disorder, but since I'm not exactly suffering from it, it's not that bad], so I'm not exactly sure what else I can do. Well, other than find out how to spell that disorder.

At least I'm listening to something at this moment that doesn't have a trigger (The Pink Panther Theme), so I'll be able to get back to work now.