The New Year is almost upon us. How this year has flown! It was a very good year for us, all things considered. We became grandparents for the first time, our family members have all lived through the past year, Attila and I are both employed and provided with health benefits, we have enough fuel to heat our home for the winter and we are settling into our home more comfortably as time goes by. May the coming year be as good to us as this year has been!

We have a dusting of snow this morning. Temperatures are now well below freezing during the day and night. The indoor temperatures are cool but comfortable with suitable clothing. The living room was 15 degrees centigrade when we arose this morning. The bedroom temperature was 11 degrees centigrade. I sleep much more soundly when the temperature in the bedroom is below 15 degrees and so am quite happy with our present heating arrangements.

The heat in our home is supplied entirely by wood fuel. Heating with wood is a labour intensive endeavor. The wood must be obtained, split, and carried to the main floor of the building. Then a fire must be built at regular intervals to maintain livable temperatures in the house. At present we are firing twice a day, once in the morning before we leave for work and once again in the evening when we return from work. A third firing would raise the temperature in the house significantly, to about 18 degrees centigrade. However, it is not practical for us to have a fire in the middle of the night, or in the middle of the day. When the temperatures get really cold, minus 20 degrees centigrade and below, we will have to have that third fire daily. We will have to find a way.

For Christmas this year I received an MP3 Player, Voice Recorder. I have been thinking that it would be lovely to have a voice recorder for quite some time now. In the days when I did field interviews for my research I employed a tape cassette player with an attached microphone. This worked well at the time, but the microphone sitting on the desk or table did emphasize an "interview" atmosphere. My new unit can sit quietly in my shirt pocket and do its thing unobtrusively.

The unit is a Sansa e260 by SanDisk. I spent the entire Boxing Day trying to load music onto the unit from my Macintosh computers. First I tried connecting it directly to both the desktop and the laptop computers, with no luck, the device did not show up on the desktop.

Then I decided to fire up Windows XP on my desktop computer. After hours and hours of downloading operating system updates, firewall and antivirus software for Windows XP, I discovered the USB port on the desktop is not the high-speed hardware needed by the device.

Not daunted, I began the laborious task of installing Windows XP on the Macintosh laptop, a newer computer with high-speed USB ports. Again, hours and hours of installing operating system updates, firewalls and antivirus software. Again, Windows XP could not detect the device. As I explored the issue I discovered that there are two USB modes on the device. I switched modes, but still Windows XP could not detect the device.

The project was abandoned as I returned to work, and my schedule ceased to allow for "play time".

This morning I was giving the whole issue a rethink. I realized that when I had tested the device on the laptop with high speed USB, I had not known there were two USB modes. Knowing that the default mode did not work, I wondered if the alternative mode would work?

It did. MTP mode does not work on the Mac, but MSC mode does work. I spent fifteen minutes dragging and dropping my favorite music into the e260 folder. So simple when you know how!

The second toy I received was a Belkin TunCast II Mobile FM Transmitter, so that we can listen to our favorite music through the car radio while traveling. I have it up and running on an old FM radio in the corner of the living room. It seems to work well, but the real test will come on our first road trip.

Today we are spending our time sorting through our "stuff", and packing more unused items into boxes for donation to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. Our living space, on the main floor of the house, is now working nicely for us. The bathroom, on the main floor of the house, is now working nicely for us. That is two rooms that please and sooth us. Slowly but surely, as we shed our mountains of may-need-this-someday items, collected over decades, we will transform more and more of our living space into our idea of comfort.