"All Shook Up" - Elvis Presley, 1957

I'm loading even more music onto my laptop today, for two reasons. One is so that it'll help fill up my 40 gig iPod. I don't know how I'd travel without it to keep me company. The other reason is because of my Netgear MP101. I have to admit that I actually have two of them...one upstairs and one downstairs here in the house...each connected to a different stereo system. Using the Netgear box, I can play music from the laptop through the stereo. It's incredible! I'll bet John would agree that it's our best discovery of 2004.

Through both the iPod and Netgear box, I've discovered the pleasures of using "shuffle". I never used to listen to music like that. I was a musical purist, you know, preferring to experience music the way the artist intended...songs all in the correct order, throughout an album, even if it wasn't a concept album in the first place.

But through shuffle, I've discovered that sometimes you can hear a song in a whole new way. It's out of context. It's highlighted. It's presented to you against a completely different background. Sometimes I even find myself hearing something that I could swear I don't even own. But I do. It's coming from my own laptop. So I must have put it there!

Sometimes shaking up things in life can make them look and sound fresh and new. And that can't hurt. And it can yield some nice surprises.

Janet