I spend a lot of time not getting as much done as I’d hoped to get done. Sometimes the schedule gets thrown off-kilter by big piles of snow, for example. Or a sick kid. Or whatever.
The latest was the other day when I was typing and suddenly my M key was stuck. What the hell? While the letter M isn’t as essential to typing as, say, the letter E, well, the alphabet works best as a team, and the team’s only as strong as its weakest link.
I did a little investigating, and check this out:
Eeeewwwwwwww.
Right?
I may not be the tidiest person ever, but I’m not, like, a sloven. My desk area looks decent. But yuck o’mighty, that’s disgusting. I knew that there was a little dust, but this was like that one time when you watched that film in science and found out that there are tons of microscopic bugs living on your skin. Seriously, I started out scraping the end of a paperclip between the keys, and next thing you know I had devoted an hour to popping off keys and wiping everything down with alcohol.
Incidentally, let’s take another look at that keyboard, shall we?
Notice how I’ve literally typed the letters off a bunch of my keys? Honestly, I don’t know how my kids even use the damn thing, since as far as I know they never took typing like I did, way back in the olden days, and so they never learned to chant “A-S-D-F, J-K-L-;” like we old people did. And yes, perhaps it’s foolish spending an our disassembling and cleaning and reassembling a keyboard when I could have bought a replacement for ten or twelve bucks. But I’ll console myself that I’ve avoided the landfill. For now, at least.
Anyway, just another eventful day at our house.
On the brighter side of electronics, allow me to share the joy of my latest favorite gadget: these SoundPEATS Bluetooth headphones I got for Christmas.
I am normally not-so-into gadgets, but this is almost as life-changing as upgrading to an electric toothbrush. Especially since I happen to be pretty much terrible with headphones, like that time that I accidentally cut my headphone wire with kitchen shears while attempting to tame a huge bunch of kale or another time I just closed the car door on another set of headphones (with an equally destructive outcome).
With these headphones, there’s hardly any wire going on. That means you can be listening to something and pull a sweatshirt over your head and all hell doesn’t break loose. It also means that they don’t get tangled. At all. Like, at all. They’ve got little magnets in them, so they’re just happily inclined to stick to each other in a non-tangle-y way.
Oh, my gosh, you guys. I am such a dork. Because I was contemplating the delightfulness of the magnet situation, and I went back to that Amazon page to see if there was a picture of the magnetism, and I saw this image:
All along, I could have been wearing these as a necklace and rocking a sporty look! I’ve barely been sporty at all with these things! I have mostly been washing-the-dishes-y and wiping-down-the-cabinets-y, but I can be sporty and necklace-wearing! It didn’t occur to me to just wear these like a necklace, and now I am super-excited to accessorize while enhancing my convenience. So, yay!
It is really delightful. It is kind of like acquiring your first keyless ignition car, and you think, “Well, putting a key into the ignition is not exactly taxing, so I don’t need this.” And then you experience a life in which you don’t have to rummage around in your purse for your keys, and you realize that Something Was Missing In Your Life and you didn’t even know it.
The only mild drawback with the Bluetooth headphones is. . . they’re Bluetooth headphones. That means that sometimes I’ll put the phone that’s playing my podcast down on the kitchen counter while I’m cleaning, and then 20 minutes later I walk up the stairs and suddenly my podcast cuts out because I’ve forgotten the phone and walked out of range. And sometimes my headphones and my car are both vying for the opportunity to present my sound experience to me, and I’ll have to pause and turn something off and on and choose my devices and such. But it’s a small price to pay for the fabulous convenience. And my new sporty look!
