Hands Off, Ladies, This One's Mine

I will save the sentimental post for the big 1-3 next month, but I wanted to take today to talk about why Devoted Partner rocks. Big time!

In 2005, devoted partner bought me my first iPod. It was a terrific toy that kept me company in the kitchen and was also invaluable for long trips both as a music delivery system and as a place to offload photos to free up memory cards. Sadly, and I will give Apple some blame, in 2008 the thing started acting wonky: freezing in the middle of songs, turning on with the sad Mac face, being generally temperamental. Generally a hard restart gave it back some mojo, but it was not the iPod it once was. Yet I was damned if I was going to buy another one - these things aren't cheap.

When the new nano colors came out, you might remember I had avarice in my heart. Until I saw them and realized they were shiny pieces of junk, not nearly as hot as their photos. So temperamental iPod stayed. Friday, he finally gave up the ghost: no sad Mac face, no ability to reset, just a formerly $300 paperweight. I even tried dropping it on the floor (I can't be the only one who remembers that this was a nearly foolproof way to fix a broken walkman; though I also blow into my cd/dvd drives when they're acting up, so maybe I'm a creepy relic from 80sland). Devoted partner, who has offered up a replacement for several gift-giving holidays running, yet again offered a shiny new iPod of my choice for the upcoming Valentine's Day, saying it would actually help him out because it would be a good present and he wouldn't have to agonize over whether or not his other ideas were good ones. And he almost had me too. I figured I would get a red or pink nano and be festive. But then I remembered the price. $200. For a machine I'm sure will also last three years before its planned obsolescence kicks in. I know he meant well and I told him so, but I then reminded him that $200 could take us parasailing in Turkey and that there was another iOption.

Jamie, dear friend and total Apple fanboy, sold us his not 3G iPhone (it would have killed you to have left the sim card? see below) before he moved west. I opened it, learned that it wanted me to sign up for an AT&T contract in order to use it (even as just an iPod, mind you), tried inserting other sim cards into it, read a little on the internet before realizing this was not my bag, and returned it to the shelf where it remained an attractive $500 paperweight. I asked devoted partner to use his skills in a) things computerish and b) deciphering the ramblings of people computerish to see if we could make the iPhone into an iPod substitute without needing to buy a mobile plan I don't want or a new machine altogether.

And damned if he didn't spend most of Saturday messing with the thing, going out to buy a prepaid AT&T sim card, reading the ramblings of those way way geekier than he, and finally, around 5:00pm, presenting me with a fully functioning iPod Touch in an iPhone body. I mean it works. I put music on it, I downloaded the flickr app, I tweeted from the thing. It works. And I think the total investment was $25 for the sim card.

But more than the toy itself, devoted partner spent a number of his precious weekend hours, the hours he has to himself to read a good book, and he donated them to me. I know he didn't want to monkey about with the iPhone and would probably have been happier to just buy me a new iSomething, but he didn't. In the spirit of our new attempts at frugality, he sat down and worked at the problem and solved it. And he did it for me. Just because.

We're a couple like any other, and we do our share of "raised voice conversations." I worry that I don't tell him enough how much I like him - the love I hope he knows is boundless, the like, the day-to-day like is both harder and less acknowledged - because he's one of the good ones. The least I could do is broadcast his qualities a little wider.