It always makes it easier to do boring stuff like folding laundry or washing the dishes if you can do it while watching a movie, but what about when you have to get up and put the clothes away, or get ambitious and want(!) to do more cleaning all around the house after tidying up the sink area?
One word – audiobooks.
I’ve used the mp3 player on my phone before to play music, but it’s a little clunky to use for listening to podcasts or audiobooks, because it doesn’t have a bookmarking feature. Every time I would stop playing a file, I’d have to start all over at the beginning when I came back to it. So a little while ago a coworker recommended to me a small mp3 player which works very well to play audiobooks and podcasts as well as music. You can clip it on your collar or throw it in your pocket, and when you stop it and turn it off (or pause it and let it turn itself off), next time you turn it on again it remembers what audiobook you were listening to and asks if you want to resume or start over. The player I got also plays FM radio, and has a MicroSD expandable card slot to add memory. It feels like it weighs as much as a paperclip (actually, 0.8 oz. – probably more like 16 paperclips). Anyway, enough about the player. The point is I can pop the earbuds in and be entertained while being able to move freely all about the house.
I recently downloaded a bunch of audiobooks and full-cast radio plays of the two British sci-fi shows Torchwood and Doctor Who (both stuffed full of action and adventure) and started one up while doing the dishes.
If you’re worried about spending a lot of money keeping yourself in audiobooks just to get the floor clean, don’t think you have to buy all the audiobooks you listen to – there’s plenty of stuff out there for free (and legal). First, go get a library card. Your library will more than likely have audiobooks on CD, which you can check out and rip to your computer, then transfer to your mp3 player. They may also have an e-audiobook service, which skips the CD format and lets you download e-audiobooks from the library website. It’s all free with a library card, but there may be a limited selection of titles as well as a waiting list for high-demand titles (even for the e-audiobooks, because of licensing restrictions). Check with your library for more information on what they’ve got. You can also download free podcasts from iTunes on almost any topic. I’ve started with some language-learning podcasts (French, German, and Hindi, with a sampling of Swedish and Turkish so far), Bollywood movie discussions (Masala Zindabad!), and NPR shows.
Finally, one last random audiobook tidbit: if you were to listen to all seven books of the Harry Potter series (narrated by the awesome Jim Dale, 134 different voices in one audiobook!) it would take at least 115.5 hours, or in other words, 14.5 eight-hour days. Your house would be spotless by the time you were done.
