The day the music died…

Last Saturday, Independence Day, something I was very dependent on was abruptly taken away from me. My iPod touch.

Sometime that afternoon, while waiting for the daytime fireworks to start at Mount Vernon, one of my girls threw an open bottle of water in my bag. Upside down. One of those mini 12-oz bottles with the safety cap, you know? Over the next half hour the water slowly dripped… dripped… dripped… until the bottle was practically empty.

Completely unaware of what had happened, I reached in my bag to grab my chapstick and all I felt was a pool of water. My immediate reaction was to take out my new Us Weekly that I hadn’t yet read and pat it down with my toddler’s sun hat. It didn’t hit me that my iPod touch was sitting at the bottom of my bag that entire time until I dumped the contents out onto the grass.

I think I was blinded by the glare from the sun reflecting on it, and didn’t see the iPod right away. I grabbed my wallet, Metro card, a banana, and dried it all off on my shirt. That’s when I saw it. Water was trickling down its beautiful screen.

I picked it up and it felt incredibly hot to the touch, which caught me off-guard. In hindsight, I figure the heat came from something short circuiting inside. I wiped it off and put it inside a (clean) diaper. That’s the only thing I could think of to absorb the moisture! When I got home, I Googled the problem and was disappointed to find out that the Apple warranty doesn’t cover water damage. Taking advice from many a message board, I buried it deep in a tub of rice. That’s where it’s been sitting for almost a week.

Lesson learned? Buy a good case for your iPod and USE it. I have a fantastic Otterbox Defender case but for some reason was too lazy to put it on that day. It’s not completely waterproof so I’m not sure if it would’ve saved my iPod, but it couldn’t have hurt to have it on.

I plugged the iPod in this morning. Nothing happened. I left it to charge for several hours. Nada. I haven’t completely given up hope, but I’m 99% sure it’s dead. So my period of mourning has begun.

When I first bought it I thought that perhaps the 8GB memory wouldn’t be enough for me, having used a 60GB iPod Video before, but it wasn’t a problem at all. If I got tired of listening to the same songs over and over, I’d just put on Pandora or I Heart Radio for something fresh and new. If that didn’t do it for me, I’d just sync it with my Macbook, select a new playlist or two, and in minutes would have hundreds of other songs to listen to. If there was a new single out that I absolutely had to have, I could download it directly from iTunes, right onto my iPod. Dangerously simple.

But my iPod touch was much more than a music player. It was my calendar. My little Black Book. My alarm clock. My weatherman. My recipe book. My kitchen timer. My calculator. My nightlight. My translator. My dictionary. My grocery list.

I could browse the Internet. Update my blog. Say goodnight to my mom before bed via AIM. Even text message my sister with an app called Textfree.

At one glance I could see all my email accounts. The Mail app is fabulous. In fact, every morning I’d wake up and before getting out of bed would check my email to see if there was anything important I had to tend to right away. Not that anything important was ever sent to me overnight, but it didn’t hurt to check.

It was an instant source of information. While watching TV, my husband would see some random actor – “He looks familiar; where have I seen him before?” And I would pull out my iPod touch and have an answer for him in seconds.

It was the perfect source of entertainment for my 4-year-old. If she got antsy in line at the grocery store, I’d just whip it out of my purse and like magic, she’d be instantly engaged. With countless videos, podcasts, and children’s games, there was always something different for her to explore.

What I miss the most is falling asleep with my iPod touch in my hands every night, either reading blogs through Google Reader or playing mindless games of Solitaire and Tripeaks.

Now I have to resort to reading a book {gasp}.

Maybe I was a little obsessed. Or maybe this is completely normal because the iPod touch really is beyond fabulous. What do you think? Have you ever been this attached to a gadget?