Growing Up

In every parent's life, there comes a moment when their 17-nearly-18-year-old child makes an inevitable, utterly palpable and conspicuous move towards independence and adulthood. You may shed a tear of pensive melancholy, proud joy and the shocking realization that reading glasses and a colonoscopy are right around the corner for you. Yesterday was that moment here...

Lauren got her own iTunes account.

Yes. It's true. No more sharing our library. No more individual syncs of two iPhones on my computer. She's got all her own songs and apps on her own computer and her credit card on her account. She loves it! I think one last annoying hiccup during a sync between the new iTunes 10.5 and iOS 4, which she still had, frustrated her into finally making the move. She has been talking about it for a while. Now her stuff is her own.

A funny (mis)step in the process- the first thing I did was copy all the non-DRM music files from our playlist of all "her" songs to a folder on a shared drive. At least that is what I thought I was doing. What I did was copy all the music files from the entire iTunes library to my DESKTOP. 3000 songs. I was toodling along, doing other things while it was copying, and closed one of my windows and saw all the icons splattered across my screen on the desktop. I thought, WTF is happening?!

It was something to see. I did manage to stop it before all the songs were copied.

Anyway, now our iTunes separation is officially done. Awwwwww...

I forgot to mention Monday that Gumbo's has the best calamari ever!! I am a huge fan of calamari, and good fried calamari is pretty difficult to find. It can get rubbery in a New York minute, and there is a whole breading-to-squid ratio that has to be maintained. Gumbo's calamari is cut into huge fried-cheese-stick-sized sticks, rather than the typical skinny circles and legs. (Although legs rock, and are best for freaking out people at the table who won't touch squid with a ten foot pole.) The taste and texture of the calamari itself is to die for. They taste almost like scallops when they are prepared as these thick chunks.

The breading is a thicker consistency than the typically wispy coating of little calamari slices, which matches perfectly with the slabs. Theirs has a fabulous seasoning, providing perfect flavor for the otherwise naturally bland seafood. I convinced the people at the next table to get an order and they ooh-ed and ahh-ed over it as much as we did!