This morning, as I was waking up, my last dream involved the school principal taking away my iPod.

It was terrible. I was inconsolable. I couldn't believe that it was gone - how was I going to run without my iPod? Of course, most of my life would be a wasteland without constant MP3 stimulation - but my running would be intolerable without music beating into my eardrums at 180 bpm :)
                         
....I've got my own playlists that approximate 180, 190 and 200+ BPM for easy, hard and stupidly-hard runs, but I've recently been turned onto (that's a 70s term that means "informed about") a site called podrunner.com that actually has techno exercise mixes that are exact and constant in BPM and last about an hour each.

I'm really enjoying them. They are pretty much content-free; just a nice hard beat and interesting music that allows me to run with a set turnover rate and let my mind wander. The above pic is their logo - it reminds me of Robby the Robot (whom Ethel says that she's never heard of - I desperately love Ethel, but it bothers me to think that I could be married to a woman who's never heard of Robby the Robot) except, of course, for the lack of twirling circular antennae, and the addition of iPod earbuds.

(Why would a robot wear earbuds? Why not just plug the jack in directly?)

For some reason, I haven't mentioned PodRunner to anybody, even though my friend Greg from the Daisy Mountain Running Club told me about it, and DJ SteveBoy (the PodRunner guy) asks us to spread the word. I think that it's because I haven't bought a PodRunner T-Shirt yet (that's how they fund this thing) and I'm afraid to ask Ethel for the necessary money, because she spent all of our excess funds shipping furniture from Indiana to fill up our garage.

See, the Chocolate House has a thousand-square-foot garage, and we had so much open space in there that Ethel couldn't stand it, so she made a special trip to the Midwest to have antiques (pronounced "anty-queues") out here to Phoenix to fill up the garage. Now that she can't get in or out of her car, she's much happier.

Anyway - I have no financial interest in Podrunner, other than to hope that it stays afloat so that I can keep getting music from there. AS SOON AS ETHEL LETS ME BUY A T SHIRT I'm gonna ask him why he doesn't do any music at all above 180 BPM - that's my slow-running turnover rate. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't liability issues - his lawyers probably told him that if he publishes any songs over 180 BPM, and somebody has a heart attack, he'll be open to a lawsuit.

(To quote Mr. Heinlein, "...straining at gnats and swallowing camels are required courses in law schools" : )

So I'll be out there tomorrow, running along to something from PodRunner.

Unless my principal takes my iPod away :)