Your mom has an ipod ???

You've left Home to come here to work and reside on this island as an expat, but you've never really left home. Have you heard that before? No? Well, that's because I just made it up. When I say you've never really left home, I mean that you still carry it with you. Your hangouts, your routes, roads that you know like the back of your hand. If you're a woman, malls that you know like the back of your hand, and not to mention mall timings that have been ingrained in your memory. Frequent or once a year trips made back home will only reaffirm how much you have not forgotten your hometown and how these yearly trips home never really let you forget as you revisit your favourite haunts.

My mother is probably the most technologically involved female of her generation. I'm talking about an MS Office Advanced+ user, who knows the difference between Explorer and Firefox, who owns more iPods than most and is on her way to acquiring the new iPhone (apparently she can't wait and funnily enough her brother, UncleTigerBeer doesn't seem to get what the big deal is). Surprising, yes? Perhaps I take it for granted now, but where was this hip cool mom 20 years ago? Could you imagine the gadgets we'd have had as toys? Anyway, I realise not every mom of her generation is as technologically inclined as she is.

Case in point: a few years ago when I first mentioned in passing to my brother-in-law about my mom's iPod Mini, he looked at me with this shocked expression on his face and said (I kid you not) THREE times:
"Your mom has an iPod?"
"Yes" (in a matter of fact tone)
"Your mom has an iPod?" (with slightly more emphasis)
"Yes" (a little more matter of fact)
"Your mom has an iPod?" (with maximum emphasis)
"Yessssssss"
"Why?" says he.
"To listen to music." says I. "You know music? The thing that everyone listens to."
"Yes. Yes." says he. And then, "Oh." Like she's one of those moms.

Yes I know, I do have the memory of an elephant! Now I'm not going to give out her exact age, because this blog will be shut down faster than any one can say, 'Your mom has an iPod?' But suffice to say she's of the baby boom era, the LATE LATE baby boom era. So here she is, very computer savvy, knows all about MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Google Maps...the works. Oh and I can't forget YouTube. That one's her favourite. Not to mention iTunes (for how else would she be able to update her ipods). My dad's catching upto to her quite nicely, too! I mean this is what I came home to one evening after a night out during Christmas week in Toronto. Yes, they both actually have their own laptops (who needs a built in intercom when you need to get a message across while on different floors of the house - that's what cell phones and chat programs are there for!). But that's not what they're doing here. Here they are working.
So, for all their tech savvyness (we can blame my brother for this one), there are some things my mother will still message me (here in Bermuda) about my hometown that is Toronto, bearing in mind I haven't lived in Toronto for the past three years not counting the yearly one week visits.

Questions like:
"What time does the mall close on Saturday." (Yes, she means the mall by her Toronto home, my former place of residence, which also has its own website - the mall not the house).
"What bus route do I take if I want to get to Place X". OR
"What subway stop should I get off at, if I want to get to Place Y."

It's not that Mom's lazy because lazy is not a word in her dictionary, it's just that she claims she busy with other things. Sometimes I'll give her the answers right away if I know them or I'll look them up. But sometimes, just sometimes, I'll tease her saying: "You know Mom, I don't live in Toronto anymore. I've been in Bermuda for like three years now. You can't expect me to remember all this stuff anymore."

And her response is, "Well look it up. I'm too busy to do it. Besides, what else are you there for? You're my secretary."

As you can see, she's also a funny one. And since she'll read about this sometime today, first thing she'll say is:
Stupid Girl (with a slight Indian accent) Why are you writing about me???

And Hubby reading this will laugh at my Mom calling me Stupid Girl, since he's heard her call me that before and thinks it's hilarious that my Mom addresses me so. He's even dared to repeat it as he laughs. The nerve!