Happy Birthday, Kiddo.

Yes, today my little Kiddo turns 8 -- halfway to her learner's license (not that she wants to drive) and heading into "tween" territory (she already watches Hannah Montanah and similar shows).

This morning, she opened her gifts, had breakfast, then had a meltdown that quickly ramped up the terror level in the house to ochre. And what caused the meltdown? Her discomfort with the telephone. Her cousin phoned to wish her a happy birthday and she accidentally replied, "Happy Birthday to you too!" which made her angry with herself and angry enough to put down the phone and run off. Sigh.

Among her gifts was a much-wanted hand-held game system. She loves my iPod Touch as much as I do but we wanted to get her something more durable. Initially we were looking at the PSP but after standing in the aisle at an electronics store, we realized that the number of titles and more importantly the number of age-appropriate titles were far greater for the NintendoDS -- so that's what we got for her. We also got her a few games (it came in a bundle with two; we bought one more) and she will be getting other titles soon (her uncle works for a major game developer). As if that weren't enough, we also got her two GBA Video cartoon cartridges an item created for GameBoy Advance that play on the NintendoDS (thank you, Wikipedia for the info and Amazon.ca for the seller!)

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In other Kiddo-related news, yesterday evening we had "student-led conferences" at the school -- somewhere between parent-teacher meetings and show and tell. The highlight of the evening was her artwork: one piece was in the form of a Lite-Brite classic display with rainbow stripes on each corner and "[her name]'s work of art" in the middle; the other was a 3D giraffe (all the kids did a version) but, she explained, hers had "mad cow disease" which manifested as a tongue hanging out and limbs stuck out in all directions. Hee Hee :)

I've got a crush on my iPod.

I do! I luuuuuuv my iPod Touch -- and I never, ever thought I would say that about any Apple product but I there it is. I think I have used it every day since I got it for Christmas (thanks again, Hubby!) -- it makes the morning (and afternoon) transit much more bearable and it is a pretty good bribe for Kiddo, too.

Of course, I personalized it. After packing it with music, I discovered video podcasts. Educational, entertaining, esoteric -- little bursts of eye candy! I love being able to watch clips of The Hour or science tidbits from NASA or whatever other weirdness there is to offer. I downloaded some games, too -- Bejeweled2 and a cute little Eye-Spy type game called Little Shop of Treasures. (The only drawback is that the videos and games are quick to drain the battery).

However, the best application I found has to be Stanza, an e-book reader. When there's a wireless connection you can download books from a dozen different sites, many of which are free. (Hubby even uploaded one of his books to Smashwords, one of the catalogues supported by Stanza.) I've been reading like crazy -- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald (good story, pity they had to make a movie), I, Robot by Cory Doctorow (well written but somewhat cliched), the Smashwords publishing and marketing guides, and The Public Domain by James Boyle (still in the midst of this one). I've got 23 items (books, stories and collections) in my Stanza library right now, including a couple for Kiddo, some classics (Heart of Darkness, Call of Cthulhu, The Picture of Dorian Gray...), fiction and non-fiction. I love that Stanza remembers my page and is so easy to hold and use that I can read with one hand!