Ungrounded Outlet

I finally hooked my stereo up. I’ve only been in my apartment for seven months, so I don’t think I procrastinated too badly on that.

I was going to hook it up a month or two ago and couldn’t find the needed cables and sort of lost interest. I found the cables today and decided to go ahead and do it. Especially since I now have an iPod to plug into it. No fancy docks for me, though. Just a ghetto cable plugged into the headphone jack. Lacking a charger, the battery is draining, but so what? It’ll recharge the next time I sync up to get the latest DNDS.

I did discover that the iPod pauses itself when the headphones come unplugged. I’m sure this is old news to everyone else, but I thought it was a nice touch. I also have no idea if other MP3 players do that (having never owned one). If they don’t, they should. If they do…well, good for them. Because I’m an Apple Fan Boy, I’ll pretend that Apple did it first and ignore any evidence to the contrary.

I also discovered that, at some point in the distant past, my stereo’s bass was turned all the way up and its treble turned all the way down. That’s almost the exact opposite of how I listen to music (I prefer to have the treble turned up higher than the bass, though never to those extremes). I wonder how that happened. One of life’s great mysteries.

I went to Georgia to visit my grandparents yesterday. It was a nice trip.

While there, I was reminded of a Christmas from the distant past. Well, actually, it may have been my birthday; gifts were involved and if it were my birthday, then this story would not be particularly applicable. For the sake of argument, we’ll call it Christmas.

Many years ago when I was just a little tike, I went to spend some time with my grandparents. Perhaps it was a week; I don’t remember. But I was there and I guess I had fun. There were two kids my age next door so I spent a lot of time playing with them. Anyway, while there, I discovered the box for a Sesame Street playhouse under my grandparents’ carport!

Oh joy! My brother and I are their only grandchildren, so I deduced that were were going to get a Sesame Street playhouse for Christmas! I was very happy! I was so excited, in fact, that I must have mentioned it to my grandmother.

She told me that sometimes, she gets boxes and puts completely unrelated things in those boxes to throw little boys off the gift trail; just because I saw a Sesame Street playhouse box doesn’t mean that the playhouse was actually in there. In fact, she said, it was something else entirely.

Oh noes! I spent weeks afterwards trying to figure out just what my grandmother could be hiding in that box. I couldn’t guess. It was such a big box, but what could it be?

It turns out that my grandmother is a liar. It was the very playhouse pictured on the side of the box. I was so surprised! Using her cunning deception (and other stunts, like distracting me with fruitcake), she had ensured my surprise and saved Christmas!

Anyway, this year, I’m giving my mother a gift which I have put in an entirely unrelated box to throw her off the trail. I’m not sure if deception is the lesson my grandmother meant to teach me all those years ago, but deception is the only thing I took away from it.