April 5, 2006
MP3s for Maple Syrup ::
personal, vermont — No Tags
10:15 pm
So, last week marked the height of sugaring season here in Vermont, and that meant that everywhere you drove in the state you could find smoke billowing from the sides of mountains, where it before seemd impossible that houses even existed. As I rode my bike to school last week, I could swear I could smell cooking sap mixed with woodsmoke everywhere. That was was quite nice. And for my part, since neither Jessamyn nor I have a sugaring operation of our own, this time of year means doing little tech jobs for others, which usually results in us getting paid in syrup.
This year was quite easy. Back in January I was talking to one of the attorneys over at the clinic, who had gotten his wife an iPod Nano for the holidays. The problem was that she didn’t have a computer, so she had no way of loading songs onto the thing. So, as a temporary solution, I offered to rip down a bunch of her CDs to MP3’s onto my computer, then load them onto her Nano from my machine. Of course, that meant that her nano would be mated to my machine, and that she would lose all of her music once she got a new computer. The attorney was cool with that, he said. But after that conversation we didn’t talk about it again.
Fast forward to last week, when the sap was flowing and the truly hard core Vermonters were boiling down their crops into syrup. He approached me again with the same offer, and said he would pay me for my efforts. No, I said, how about syrup instead (he’d mentioned earlier that he had a small operation which wasn’t going all that well because of the tepid winter and recent spate of cool weather). He said it was a great idea. So last Wednesday I got the iPod and the CD’s, ripped down the tracks, and handed back the whole package by Friday (I even included an MP3 CD with all her CD tracks on it so they wouldn’t have to go through the process of ripping down the music again).
And the coolest part wasn’t even getting the syrup. Instead, it was having the attorney’s wife thank me for what I’d done. She of course had the iPod around her neck as she thanked me.
And this is why I so love living in this state.
