A very cool mobile app!

My sister told me about a very cool app for my iPod Touch called "TuneIn Radio" that is basically a way to have Internet radio on your mobile device. I can find radio stations from all over the world and listen to whatever I am in the mood for at the moment. Right now, I am listening to a station out of Canada called "Ancient FM" that plays early music 24 hours a day. I have yet to do a bit more exploration of this app, but upon downloading it, I listened to a radio station out of Germany that played Classical music just so I could hear the German language and see how much I remember from being there so long ago, which turns out to be not much at all. Still, it was very cool to be listening to a radio station from halfway across the world. I remember when I was in elementary school, I had an old "transistor radio", something you younger folks not know about. It was a small portable radio that played only AM stations, but late at night, if weather conditions were just right, I could hear stations from far away. There was one in particular, but I do not remember which one it was, that I used to marvel that I could hear from so far away. Now, Internet radio allows us to hear stations from all around the world. Back in the day, you could do that with short wave radio, something I always wanted to have in the old days, but now I do not need such a thing with apps like this that allow me to hear radio stations from every corner of the earth as well as select what kind of music I want to hear. I have several radio apps that let me customize what I want to listen to and that will put together a mix of it for me to listen to. This one seems to be the best of those apps so far, but I am going to keep the others as well because they give me a variety of listening choices. I also have an iPod Nano that lets me construct playlists from downloaded music that I have stored on iTunes. I have quite a variety of music there, from early music to folk to classical to 60s rock. It's so nice to play DJ and choose the kind of music that I want to hear when I am in the mood for it.

MY FATHER'S 91st BIRTHDAY

Yesterday (December 11th) would have been my late father's 91st birthday. Sadly, he did not live to see the age of 40, but died as a result of automobile accident injuries in May of 1961. I often wonder how different my life might have been had he survived to see old age. Would he still be alive or would he have died sometime in his 70s or 80s? Would we have grown up in our hometown or would we have moved to another place instead had he not gotten tenure at the university where he was teaching at the time of his passing? So many questions that remain unanswered and it's no sense in torturing myself over them, but I do often wonder whether my life might have turned out very differently had he lived. Would I have married and had children instead of remaining steadfastly single? Where would I have lived, and where would I be living now? Would I be a grandmother, and if so, how many children might I have had? So many unanswered questions, but it's no sense in obsessing over the "what ifs". I am who I am, I live where I live and that's that. I guess I am happy with my life, although I do find myself occasionally feeling a bit lonely when I think about friends who are happily married in good solid long term relationships. I've been an abject failure at relationships and maybe it's just not meant for me to be with anyone. I grew up pining for privacy that I never had since I had to share a room with my older sister instead of having my own room that I sometimes craved. Living alone means that I do not have to worry about someone banging on the door when I have just stepped into the shower and demanding to have to use the toilet NOW because they have to go NOW. I can take as long a shower as I please without someone demanding that I turn off the water five minutes after I've turned it on. I can pretty much control my own environment and that feels so good to have that ability to do so. I guess I have become something of a control freak because there are so many other external factors that I cannot control, so I want some modicum of control over my private life. I just don't think that there's anyone with whom I could live that would want to put up with my cravings for personal space and privacy and need to control my situation and do what I want  and when I want to do it. Well, so be it. That's my life in a nutshell, and for the most part, I am content to live as I do. I just wonder what might have changed had I grown up in a normal nuclear family of two parents instead of one. That will be my question for the rest of my life, as it is for anyone who has lost a parent at a very young age. I guess it's just the nature of things when your life has been so altered like that.