Listening to HDRadio

My mother loves me. For this I am very blessed. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed when I try to be her caregiver because sometimes taking care of older parents can be horrendous.

My mother suffers with "age related" macular degeneration and basically has lost all but 11% of the vision in her left eye but still has 20/30 vision in her right eye. Technically her retina specialist says she could drive but she hasn't decided if that is a challenge she's ready for yet. To which I secretly rejoice because I would prolly have already died a 1000 deaths just knowing she's "out and about" on Rt. 19 (major highway we must travel to get from "here" to "there"). So she relies on me to take her places and I have NO problem with that.

She still has a car, pays insurance on it, never drives it. Complains EVERY winter that the battery MUST be shot because, the car won't start...sigh...so last year my husband and I decided to see if she'd let me drive her car (when gas was over $4/gal, this car still gets amazing mileage to be a 1995 model!) to work. She was elated! She did want our mechanic to look it over just in case there was a problem, didn't want me getting stranded (told ya I was very blessed!). That was accomplished so I go ahead and dropped my minivan off and got into this "low to the ground" Mazda 626 that is painted the most hidious colour of green I've ever seen (it's so old the clear coat finish has peeled off the hood).

I drove that little car all over the place last summer and it didn't take me very long to realize that my beloved daddy had worn out the radio. Honestly I think I could have sat directly next to a radio antenna and gotten static! And with building a house, we had no money for a new radio. Thankfully I did have an "XM" satellite radio I could use but even that got old, I wanted to listen to my "morning commute" FM station and missed it terribly.

So this spring when the topic came up ( and yes Mom just knew the battery was shot and would have to be replaced (it didn't)) and Mom ask if I was going to drive her car this summer (can't drive it in the winter, roads demand AWD or 4WD) I settled into my "XM" routine. I became an avid "Oprah Radio" fan during the month of May and most of June. But I still really, REALLY missed my morning FM station.

One day, I did something totally out of the ordinary, I actually perused a "buy.com" email and found a HDRadio WITH ANTENNAs for under $40!!! I immediately shot an email to my hubby asking if we could at all possible swing this expense and knowing how desperate I had been for my FM station (that btw, had converted to HDRadio) he said we could.

Today, with the help of coworkers, I hooked that little radio in and...am in FM heaven...

I can't WAIT til tomorrow morning...