Secondly, I sent my father a birthday card, and included some homemade fudge and a hula girl air freshener. Here is the e-mail I got today ("the weavers" is their square dancing group/cult):

Hello monique,I did receive your special birthday package,it was very interesting and to top it off it also tasted delicious very rich but very good.I did not know you could do all those things .Who did teach you all those things ?[Bruce] or is it your own creation Mam tasted it also ,we had Mary from the weavers over for mom"s cookie exchange and she brought some fudge but it does not compare with yours .Your is much better.What make you think my car smells that bad that i need airfreshner ? But it is appriciated okay? So my little girl became a good cook,that is very good to know. We looking forward to seeing you on friday,on your trip down drive safely,there are a lot of crazy peopple on the road .Love Mam and Dad.

I am glad he was impressed with the fudge--I got the recipe off of a jar of Kraft Marshmallow Fluff. Because that's the kind of "good cook" I am!

Anyway, I am totally embarrassed about this, but I signed up for freeipods.com* to try and get a free iPod. And my friends all mocked me because they thought my iPod was being mailed straight from "the magical land of my imagination" instead of from the real-life magical land of Grawn, Michigan.

[*I did not include my own referral link, because once I get an iPod I cannot get a second one. Instead, I included a link for the first person who signed up for an offer for me. I'll change the link if he gets his iPod!]

But then, some fabulous people signed up for the offers. (The way it works is by signing up for offers. Like a trial subscription to Blockbuster or the New York Times. I did a one-week free trial to Bargainhomes.com, and it cost me exactly as much as my iPod cost, which is NOTHING. But the offers change and have different requirements, so be wary.)

By this point, I had started to refer to it as my FREE IPOD in all capital letters, and I believed in it the way a five-year-old believes in Santa Claus. "It is cute that you believe," said my friends. "FREE IPOD," I replied.

Then they started to hedge their bets, once they saw the vehemence of my faith in the FREE IPOD. The back of it was going to say "EYE-Pod," they said. It would be made of chicken feathers and baling wire, they said. It would be an empty box with a note that said, all Kit Kincaid, "Gotcha, sucker!!"

But then I found a tracking number (I had to Google "11-digit tracking number" to find out it was from DHL) and with that tracking number, I began tracking my FREE IPOD.

First it was in Grawn, Michigan: Birthplace of the iPod. Then it went to South Bend, Indiana: Waystation of the iPod. Then it was in Where Is It: I Want My iPod.

Then it was here.

OooooooOOOOooooh. It is 20 GB. It works. It is pretty. It is real.

Okay, before you run out and get your own FREE IPOD, here is my warning to you.

It was kind of a pain in the ass signing up for the offers and I ran into some problems. One of my friends had to write customer service four times to get credit for his offer. Another friend didn't get credit for his first offer, and signed up for a second one. I got credit for my offer immediately, but I didn't get my "validation" email and had to write customer service a bunch of times before they just validated me anyway. The good news is that persistence does seem to pay off eventually... but caveat emptor.

Some of the offers require you to stay past the free trial, some have a longer trial period, and some are more straightforward. Overall, I think Freeipods.com makes it as difficult as possible, counting on you to give up before you're done, so that they collect the bonus on you without having to send you the iPod, and then they come out ahead.

But it doesn't mean I'm not going to go for the free computer or the free Xbox. (I only need four referrals for the Xbox. Or I can get a Playstation!)

I am now going to go make out with the five people who signed up for offers and got me my FREE IPOD, because they are excellent people who somehow did not doubt the legitimacy of this whole semi-shady deal. And then I am going to go buy Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in audiobook form. Hooray!