Gadget food

Thanks to our recent tax return I treated myself to a new gadget today: A 30GB iPod in black. I would have liked to have gotten the 60GB version, but for $100 more it really didn't seem worth it.

My initial excitement was soon replaced with irritation at iTunes. It has been refusing to cooperate.

I am annoyed to say that I've had a load of hassle getting songs onto the iPod. The first load of songs copied over OK - ones that I ripped to mp3 ages ago and that iTunes already had in its list. Then I ripped a few more CDs using iTunes. It would go through the motion of copying the files, but afterwards the iPod would still be displaying the "Do not disconnect" screen. Pulling the plug on it and checking the songs showed that the list of songs had not changed. Furthermore, after this happening the PC would not shut down correctly - it kept hanging.

I tend to get impatient when these things happen, and then make rash decisions that I regret later. This time the rash decision was to format the iPod's hard drive. iTunes claims that it is copying files again....we'll see.

Dinner this evening was excellent. A home-cooked affair of bread and soup. No ordinary bread and soup though. Emily makes excellent bread, and I wove about half of it into a plait. This makes it very easy to tear off into soup-scooping pieces when cooked.

For the soup we closely followed a recipe from the book "S.O.U.P.S: Seattle's Own Undeniably Perfect Soups". I bought this book at Seattle airport last year when I was up there with work. It contains a good percentage of veggie soups, and we've made about four of them so far. All have been quite strange, but very tasty. The only one that was not a roaring success was the one where we used the wrong sort of chilies and almost blew our heads off.

This time we chose Butternut Squash Soup with Pears and Cranberries, having purchased the ingredients earlier in the day. Yum, and yum again. There's loads left so it should make a nice lunch tomorrow and probably Monday as well.