Listening

This has been a strange and terrible week, but then on the other hand I spent a lot of time with family and we took our first road trip with the kids (it was torture going one way, not so bad coming back).

Being out of the mix in the middle of the week — and not during a holiday — was weird and made me feel dislocated. It was the week of the Consumer Electronics Show and I found myself completely out of that news bubble for a few days and then struggling to catch up days later.

On Monday, I had a column published which was basically a review of Ultimate Ears custom earbuds. I spent a few weeks thinking about it (the fitting I describe in the column happened, I believe, back in November) and was really happy with the way the piece turned out right after I wrote it. Then a few days later, it was completely forgotten as I had other things to deal with and I barely noticed when it ran in the paper. (I got a few really nice emails about it, but nothing like the reaction we got with the Dyson vacuum piece.)

As it happened, the Klipsch earbuds I describe in the article broke right as I was wrapping the column up and sending it to my editor. They were still under warranty so the company sent me a brand new pair,after I called tech support, then emailed them a copy of the gift receipt and described what went wrong. The package arrived today — brand new earbuds, new packaging, everything. I was super impressed; it’s a two year warranty and I’m still only six months into owning them. I didn’t even have to send in the broken pair of buds.

The other thing that ran in the paper this week of mine was a reverse-publish of the blog post I previously mentioned, my tech resolutions for 2012.

I haven’t really written anything yet about my grandmother, but I’ve been thinking about her a lot and trying to wrap my memories together somehow into some thoughts that make sense. But it’s hard; I don’t really know where to begin.