I was overwhelmed with an amazing thank you from one of my coolest friends today.

My walking buddy, Anne, is so much smarter than I am. She knows that I appreciate the conveniences of technology, but she also knows that I have a low aptitude for manuals and instruction booklets. Maybe it's not a low aptitude as much as a bad attitude. I just hate reading through those boring things. For example, my relatively new microwave supposedly will brown a chicken to a crispy perfection in 20 minutes. All I have to do is read the manual to figure out how (and feel like cooking real food.) My palm pilot is the original graphite version: 3x5 card and a pencil. I do buy colored 3x5 cards. Sometimes I even date them because I'll find various lists lying around and not know if it is today's list or yesterday's, hence the colored cards.

Well, Anne is a big iPod fan. She has a great iPod story that you may have read about in the paper or seen when she was interviewed on the Wolf Blitzer portion of CNN last year. Maybe I can convince her to tell that story on her blog. (There's a link on my page to hers. She helped me figure out how to do that too.)

Anyway, as a thank you for watching Fern after school this year, she bought me an iPod! Wow, huh?! AND, she has offered to load it up for me. She will probably even show me how to use it so I don't have to read through all the instructions. Isn't she the coolest? I need my technology to come with a person, not a manual.

So she was trying to figure out something clever to have engraved on the back without me knowing what she was up to. On one morning walk we were discussing mantras. I had one when I was going through the divorce, but that one I have kind of set aside. I told her that my mantra these days matched my 3x5 cards. I often find myself repeating something like, "turn on the sprinkler, start the coffee, vac the pool." I keep repeating it until I either get it done or find a 3x5 card.

I'm glad she didn't engrave that on the iPod. She kept it to a simple "thanks."

Do you have a mantra or saying that you would engrave on your iPod?