We are! Mem­bers of Min­nesota Pub­lic Radio that is. When our TV took a turn for the worse last month, we found that there was sig­nif­i­cantly more time to lis­ten to the radio. Nei­ther Jason nor I are hooked on one type of music. We both have pretty eclec­tic tastes. Because of that, we find it hard to find a sta­tion that sat­is­fies all of our tastes. We end up using iTunes or our iPods for get­ting our fix of music. When we’re lis­ten­ing to the radio though, we are usu­ally lis­ten­ing to MPR.

Jason started lis­ten­ing to MPR a while back. I resisted, because at the time I was hard-cord Repub­li­can, and I felt like there was too much lefty lib­eral stuff on there. I’m not sure if that was true or if I just heard what I wanted to hear. I’m guess­ing it was more likely the lat­ter. As time went on, I noticed that I was more and more inter­ested in what I heard while he was lis­ten­ing to MPR, and I noticed that less and less of what I heard was polit­i­cal. It was just inter­est­ing stuff.

Off the top of my head, I can think of sev­eral pro­grams that we reg­u­larly lis­ten to. Instead of TiVo’ing the lat­est TV shows, we are often down­load­ing the lat­est pod­casts of our favorite pro­grams. My favorites are Mid­morn­ing with Kerry Miller, Mid­day with Gary Eichten, Speak­ing of Faith with Krista Tip­pett, and the Sun­day Morn­ing Puz­zler. Some of Jason’s favorites are Sci­ence Fri­day and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!

One of the things that I like about lis­ten­ing to MPR is how I feel after I’ve lis­tened to it. I feel like I used my time wisely. I feel smarter. I feel more inter­est­ing myself. I like the fact the vari­ety of top­ics and per­spec­tives I get. It took me a while to believe Jason when he told me about it, but now that I’m lis­ten­ing reg­u­larly, I’m hooked! Lots of other kids can sing the lyrics of songs they hear on the radio in the car, what will my kids take away from our time in the car? I can only imag­ine!