Noise and numbers

I'd lent Heidi some DVDs to help her through the boredom of a broken wrist and we were talking about them the other day.  She commented that it sounded like Stuart and I usually have a movie playing.  And it's true - whatever else we may be doing, there's often music or a movie or tv show on.  While eating or crafting or cleaning or relaxing, we like to have something in the background.

I'm sure that my father would say that it's symptomatic of something - which I intuitively understand but I'm not sure if I feel like trying to articulate just now.  I expect it involves comfort with self and quiet, consumerism, sensory overload and attention span.  And I'm pretty sure he's right too, but hey, I have no ambitions towards perfection. 

My ipod that is devoted to music holds 30GB, which seemed like a lot when I bought it, but is now not quite half of our total music library.  Granted some of that is Stuart's contribution, which I'm not interested in for work listening - I don't really understand his desire to listen to orchestral movie soundtracks for instance, but even discounting that kind of stuff there's far more than 30GB to choose from.

I forget where I was going with this, actually, but it does bring up a related thought.  I read an interesting thing yesterday (as part of my duties as editor of The Trumpeter) where she talked about modern day hermits having computers and internet connections as a viable interpretation of the role.  I rather like that thought, since, with a big enough hard drive, I could live in the middle of nowhere and still have my gigabytes of music, movies and books.  In fact, if I can bring Stuart and Ursa, it sounds downright appealing!

I am glad to live in an era that makes access to media so easy and so portable.  Although, I'm not sure that I'm 100% sold on e-books - there's a visceral pleasure to holding and smelling a paper book that may be integral to the whole experience.  Of course, just because a live band is better doesn't make my ipod awful - maybe it'll be the same?  I'll borrow Mike's Kindle some day and report back.

Some of you may have noticed that I put a site visitor counter at the bottom of the blog.  I did it out of curiosity - I figured that I maybe had 8 regular readers, most of them related to me, but I was surprised to discover recently that I had at least one reader of whom I was completely unaware.  (I mean totally unknown, unrelated, one of the teeming masses that teemed along without any help or hindrance from me!)  I wondered if there might be more... but I went with a pretty basic counter, so now I know that I've had about 75 hits in the last month.  But no idea if that's the same 9 people coming back over and over or what.

None of you ever comment, so that's no help.  I am kinda curious who's out there though, so if you would take a moment to say hi and maybe introduce yourself, if we haven't met - well, that would be really cool.