kindle Love

On this day in 2007, Amazon released the first Kindle e-reader, allowing users to download, browse, and ‪‎read ‎ebooks, newspapers, magazines, and other digital media.How has the e-reader affected the way that you read ‪‎books?

From the Writer's Relief facebook page

I saw this post in my facebook feed this morning and stared at the picture for a while. The first kindle I ever held looked exactly like this one, only instead of gray it was white. It had belonged to my husband’s best friend, and he had cracked one corner of the screen (a small crack). So he offered it to us after he ordered a new one. It was still attached to his amazon account, though, and he had all the Dresden Files novels. Since I had already borrowed another friend’s collection of paperbacks to read them the first time, I read them again, and didn’t mind the screen’s cracked corner one bit. I enjoyed highlighting things, getting the definition of a word immediately, and adding notes (the full keyboard was very helpful for this). I’m sure JR enjoys his Tricia-annotated kindle versions of those books now.

Eventually, my husband and I went ahead and purchased our own kindles, to buy ebooks on our own amazon account. We got the cheapest versions, sans-keyboard, and I immediately re-read everything we owned by Jim Butcher so that our versions would have all my highlights and notes. It’s definitely harder to get my thoughts down when I only have an arrow key and “enter,” but the keyboardless version is more compact, and therefore less apt to get its screen cracked if you forgot it was in your back pocket. They’re still pretty delicate, and back-pocket storage is definitely not recommended. I can proudly say that I’m still using my first kindle, while my husband is on his third (admittedly, I was the one who cracked the screen of his first one. The second was all him).

These days, I use my kindle every single day. I reread old favorites and new favorites. I find free versions of classic books and enjoy those for the first time. My favorite thing to do is read a stack of books all at once, a chapter at a time. This is something I definitely can’t do with a hardback; there’s a copy of the Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy next to my bed, but I’d never think of thumbing through it to find the next bit, reading only one chapter, and then putting it down so that I could read a chapter of something else. A tome that heavy has to stay in your lap.

I don’t think I would trade my kindle out for a newer version, unless it was going to be the paperwhite, or something that came with a light attached to the top so I could read it in the dark and not bother my light sensitive husband if I wanted to enjoy books late into the night. I don’t think I’ll ever need a device with a touch screen; buttons suit me just fine. And while it might be nice to have something small to watch movies on while I crochet from the comfort of my own bed, I really enjoy the way I use my kindle now: for books, and only for books.

Party

About ten years ago, I was able to go out with my friends to various places, drinking various drinks and staying out late into the evening. I had various jobs that kept me working past midnight, sometimes past 3 AM. I had no problem with this. I could get up the next morning around eleven or noon, and be ready to stay up late again.

Today, I require a certain amount of introverted relaxing time after the activities of the day are over. The kids go to bed, and I crochet or read (or try to crochet and read at the same time) or I do puzzles and read (or try to do puzzles and read at the same time). My husband also requires this introverted relaxing time, and usually we sit in the same room, engaged in our separate activities but still able to spend our time together.

If the day runs long, I still need that certain amount of relaxing time, whether we get the kids to bed right at 8 o’clock or come home from family activities late and have to put extra tired fussy kids to bed. No matter when my relaxing time starts, I don’t sleep until it has lasted the sufficient amount of time. So if it’s 9 pm when I fall asleep with my kindle in my hand, it’s 9 pm. If it’s midnight when my husband shuts the lights off and demands I go to sleep, then it’s midnight. But the days are gone when I can sleep until eleven or noon. And even if I could, I’d still be exhausted and growly when I woke up.

I like that times have changed, but sometimes I wish I could bring some of that 21 year old energy to my 31 year old day. Especially when I’ve stayed up late partying.

Somebody buy me this shirt.

Birthday List

It’s my birthday. Today I will:

Hang out with my kids

Play video games

High five my mom

Go out to dinner with my husband

Read

Crochet

Be amused by the number of people leaving birthday messages on my facebook wall who have not communicated with me since the last time they left a birthday message on my facebook wall

Be awesome (as usual)

Mist in the Morning

My husband drives the same drive every day, back and forth to work: once in the morning, and once in the evening. It’s a lovely drive, but he doesn’t see it anymore. To him, it’s just the commute. Yeah, there are lovely rolling hills and beautiful river views, but he’s become immune to their breathtakingness.

I think we all get that way, sometimes.

This morning I rode along with my husband to work. We discussed normal, everyday things: future plans, what we were planning to give our children for Christmas. Except for when I interrupted everything with remarks about how gorgeous the scenery was. Mist was clinging to the ground, refusing to be chased away by the light of the rising sun. At one point we went down a hill and under a cloud lying low in the valley of a field. It was awesome. “Is it always like this?” I asked my husband as we pushed through a bank of cloud that obliterated the trees, clouds, and river. He shrugged. “Sometimes... A lot of the time, I guess.”

I wondered how often that sort of thing happens to me. Not that I’m often oblivious to lovely scenery, but it made me think about how often I might be failing to recognize and appreciate wonderful things in my life. I’m not the type of person who overexaggerates every disappointing moment that I experience, but I do have those times when I feel like stomping off to shout, “EVERYTHING IS THE WORST.”

But someone else “riding along” with me might be able to more easily point out the wonderful things in my life: my adorable children, my supportive parents, my awesome brothers (and their families), and my hilarious, hardworking husband. When I’m annoyed or stressed or frustrated, it’s easy for me to miss noticing that not every moment, not everything in my life is annoying or stress-inducing or frustrating. When I feel that way, I need to stop, look around, and notice the wonderful things that are always there, things that I might be too distracted or too used to having that I don’t actually see them.

My life will always have its hills and valleys, its good times and bad. But I hope that I never forget the beautiful things about it: the family I have been blessed with, friends who love me, and breathtaking views of mist in the morning.

Writing About Writing

It’s very easy for me, especially on the days that I can’t immediately think of something to write about, to let my attention wander on the internet. Sometimes it’s a good thing, because I will occasionally get inspired by a news article, or an argument about something random, or by the contents of a webcomic. Other times I will spend several hours reading the webcomic’s archives and floating in a state of non-working bliss.

Usually it’s the guilty thought of “I HAVEN’T WRITTEN ANYTHING TODAY” that pulls me back to doing what I actually should be doing, but occasionally I come across things like this.

Image property of The Oatmeal.

Earlier today I thought several witty things and amused myself, and found myself thinking, “if only I could draw, I wouldn’t have to write everything down; it would be less work.” Then I read this comic and realized that when you can draw, not only do you have to do the drawing part, but you also have to do the writing part. So really, not being able to draw is a good thing (if I’m looking at the less/more work scale).

Sometimes the only thing you can do when you’re in a state of “I’ve got nothin’” is to write about writing. You might think that “writing about writing” is the same thing as “writing about nothing,” but it’s surprising how stepping back to take a look at what you do will produce a wonderful piece. This comic, like most by The Oatmeal, is endearingly rude and half full of swears, but makes amazing and inspiring points.

As a writer, I get to make my own schedule. For me, this means that once I write something sufficiently amusing, I can do whatever I want for the rest of the day. Play video games, ignore housework, nap, whatever. Once I click that ‘publish’ button, my day is my own.

Every job has its faults, and even though this is my dream job, I still feel like complaining about it sometimes… just not to my wonderful husband who actually has real reasons to complain about his job. “I couldn’t think of anything to write” is such a lame thing to whine about in the face of his actual hardships that I’d rather write something I wasn’t happy with than admit that aloud to him. My husband is awesome.

I love the freedom of being able to write whatever I want. I remember being in school and chafing at ridiculous assignments that I had no interesting creative ideas for, and then feeling like I was set free to romp in a field whenever the assignment happened to be “write whatever you want.” Today it seems like it’s almost opposite. A day full of hours of promise, glistening with the freedom of writing whatever I want seems like oppression, but an interesting phrase, a few words, or an inspiring image can give me the structure I need to creatively produce something amazing.

Sometimes I wish there was an idea generator for the days I when can’t think of anything, a machine without feelings capable of being hurt that I could just push a button as many times as I needed to find something that inspired me. It would be better than playing the writing equivalent of “what do you want for dinner” with my friends. “What should I write about?” “Um, how about…?” “No, that sounds boring.” I suspect that when I inflict that sort of thing on myself and others that deep down I really just want to tell someone else that “your ideas are bad and you should feel bad.” Maybe it somehow makes me feel better? After all, when that situation comes up, I can’t think of anything good, so I suppose it comforts me to know that no one else can either.

An inspiration isn’t something you can control. When I get inspired (usually by a writing prompt of some kind), I can’t turn it off or walk away from it. If I sleep on an idea (or a story), it’s really hard to get that inspiration back. Several times I have ended up working late into the night on something because I knew that if I stopped, I would never be able to come back to it. “What? You want dinner? Well, I started thawing some chicken a couple of hours ago and the recipe I was going to use is sitting on the kitchen counter. Good luck with that; hope the kids like it.”

Cultivating seeds of ideas is sometimes difficult for me. Something funny will happen, or I’ll start pondering a situation and see the interesting or amusing things about it. The smart thing to do, you’d think, would be to write these ideas down somewhere so that later I can come back and use them when I needed to. And I’ve got one of those ‘somewhere’s, a google doc named “stuff to blog about” or some such. But I’ve found that sometimes, writing down that idea before it’s ready can kill it (or make me lose interest in it), just like planting a seedling in the ground ground outside too early. If it’s really a great idea, it will tumble around in my brain for long enough that eventually it will make its way out.

“Make a new friend,” The Oatmeal encourages near the end. “Learn to chainsaw juggle. Read a book. Go hang gliding in your underpants. If you have done all these things and you still don’t have anything to write about, then you shouldn’t be a writer. ...if you don’t have anything to say, then you shouldn’t be talking. And if you don’t have anything to write about, don’t write.”

It’s not like I don’t have things to write about. It’s just one of those moods you get in sometimes, like when you’re eleven and sitting in the middle of your room, surrounded by toys, and whining at your mom: “I’m bored.” I’ve got stuff to write about. I just started reading that cool Rothfuss series (Name of the Wind); there’s a rad spider who’s been living on our front porch for a week or so (I’ve been thinking about ways to start charging him rent, but I’m not sure how I’d monetize slightly digested insect carcasses); and my kids constantly pretend to be dinosaurs. There’s a wealth of stuff going on around here.

It’s hard to get rid of that mood, when you feel uninspired and that there’s nothing interesting enough going on in your life to share with your readers. So when in doubt, write about writing. You may discover that you’ve got quite a bit to write about after all.

Only One

Ever lost a sock in the dryer? It's a pain to do the laundry afterward, because you’re like, “why do I only have one orange sock? What happened to the other one?” Not to mention the awkward looks you get at parties when you’re wearing two different socks. And don’t even try to pass it off as the new craze; everyone can see that you just lost one and won’t give up wearing the one you still have.

But what can you do when this happens?

I like to drive with my shoes off sometimes. But I’d never be able to get inside without putting them back on. So this situation was not an accident. Either someone was changing their shoes in the car and left this one by the door and it fell out, or a drunk passenger didn’t notice she’d lost some footwear, or someone’s boyfriend thought he’d be cute and threw it out the window (it can happen; though the worst my husband has ever done is toss my shoe a retrievable distance away under a nearby table at Outback Steakhouse). This street/shoe scene was completely human-at-fault and therefore the previous owner of the shoe does not deserve your pity. Feel free to take as many pictures of the shoe as you want.

It’s not like the street is going to start absorbing shoes anytime soon. It’s not nearly as sneaky as the dryer.

Traffic Light Speculation

I’m pretty good at spinning fiction on the fly. I’m not bragging about being an amazing liar, but rather saying that I enjoy coming up with plausible reasons for the behavior of others, such as: “Maybe she wore those six inch banana yellow heels because she needed the height so that her dress wouldn’t drag on the floor and figured that its length would cover them up.” My husband is hardly ever curious enough about the thought processes of others to formulate theories, and so I was surprised last week on our way home from our Labor Day vacation when he explained why another motorist ran a red light.

The intersection at 17th and O Street is not the place to blast through a very very red light. 17th isn’t as busy as O, but it’s got a fair amount of traffic. That’s why I was baffled when a guy in a red car just nonchalantly zipped through the intersection down O Street. “What’s his problem?” I asked rhetorically, as I watched the several other cars that had been going down 17th Street carefully avoid him.

“He’s probably color blind,” my husband explained immediately. “The lights in this city are horizontal, and he’s probably from out of town.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“If he’s color blind and from out of town, there’s no way for him to know whether the light is green or red. This town should have vertical traffic lights.”

I frowned and googled it.

Traffic light perception (from inovasolutions.com)

Lincoln does have a few intersections with vertical traffic lights (red on the top, yellow in the middle, green on the bottom), but many of them are horizontal. In some of the newer ones, the green lights are a little bluer, which helps those who are color blind differentiate more easily, but city workers aren’t running around replacing all the green lights with blue/green ones. Apparently changing every traffic light in the city to make them safer for around ten percent of the population would be expensive.

Halifax horizontal traffic light
(by Sprocket, via wikipedia)

Other cities primarily use vertical traffic lights. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, the lights on a horizontal traffic light are different shapes. The red is a square, the yellow a diamond, and the green a circle. In countries where we drive on the right side of the road, horizontal traffic lights go from left to right: red on the left, yellow in the middle, green on the right. Red and green are swapped where they drive on the left side of the road. So if that guy ran the red light on O Street because he was color blind and thought it was green, he was from way, way out of town.

Or, maybe he was a professional low-speed daredevil who specialized in stunts of this nature, and this one was just the newest in a series of disregarded red lights to get in the Guinness Book of World Records for Most Red Lights Run Without Causing An Accident.

Labor Daybor Vacation Distractions

Most people take vacations during the summer. That’s what we did when I was a kid. We took trips to Kansas City to go to Worlds of Fun/Oceans of Fun, went to Iowa to the State Fair and Adventureland, road tripped across Colorado and Utah to visit my aunt, and traveled to South Dakota to see Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore.

But since my kids are little enough that we can still take a trip after Back-to-School season, there’s no good reason not to. So this week my family is going on a Labor Day Vacation. And I’m going to take a blog vacation.

I always hated it when my favorite internet things went on break. And while I realize that this blog might not make your top ten staple websites, there is a small chance that you might miss it, so I am willing to provide you with a few distractions.

Strong Bad went on vacation once, and sent postcards to his fans. You can pretend they’re from me if you want. (I sing “It’s that Clock” pretty frequently, though I usually substitute my husband’s name in for the clock. “I can’t believe it!”)

I was going to list a few different websites, but I think all the content on homestarrunner.com will probably keep you busy for at least a week. A few of my favorites include Lookin at a Thing in a  Bag and Bug in Mouth Disease.

And next Monday you can celebrate the holiday with SB’s Labor Day email. I, myself, will be sitting on a cooler saying stuff to people as they walk by.

Mawwiage

I saw this on facebook ages ago, but it turns out
that it comes from a blog called CraftSnark.

My husband has put up with eight years of messy house and forgotten dinner preparations, but I guess he still likes me anyway. I love you, Husband!

p.s. I did laundry today! Happy Anniversary!

Adventures in Ice Cream: Reading the Fine Print

If I allow my husband to go to the grocery store alone without a list of four things that he absolutely must come home with, one of the things he brings back is ice cream. But he’s not selfish about it; there’s always one for him and one for me.

Going out for ice cream (to Coldstone or Dairy Queen) means chocolate with cherries for him and vanilla with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for me. Bringing it home from the grocery store, for him, means cherry ice cream with chunks of chocolate in it (the closest he can find to his favorite), which he then immediately smothers in more chocolate syrup. But for me, it’s a little trickier.

In the past, Breyer’s has teamed up with Reese’s to make actual Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup ice cream. But they’ve never been able to get it exactly right (in my opinion, anyway). They’ve tried chocolate ice cream with ribbons of peanut butter sprinkled with chunks of peanut butter cups. They’ve tried peanut butter ice cream (I mean, I like peanut butter, but peanut butter ice cream? Yuck) with ribbons of fudge, sprinkled with chunks of peanut butter cups. The only one who gets it right is Denali’s Original Moose Tracks. Denali (which isn’t located anywhere near Alaska but is instead headquartered in a small town just south of Grand Rapids, Michigan) teams up with various ice cream brands to get their product out to the world, so depending on your location, it could be Kemp’s, Meadow Gold, Dean’s, or any other ice cream maker you can think of. (But luckily there’s a handy locator on their website.)

Denali’s Original Moose Tracks ice cream is vanilla (As God Intended) with ripples of Moose Tracks fudge, with little peanut butter cups sprinkled through it. Sure, they’re not brand name Reese’s, but they’re just as good. And no one is trying to make me eat peanut butter ice cream.

I’m not sure if Blue Bunny was ever one of those privileged brands that were honored to sell Denali Original Moose Tracks and then had a falling out, or if they just got jealous of Denali’s success and decided to copycat.

In what I can only imagine was a super sneaky meeting involving all the creative bigwigs, Blue Bunny decided to call their version "Bunny Tracks." And none would be the wiser. It is also vanilla ice cream with ripples of fudge, but you have to be careful when buying. The 1.75 quart paper carton contains the above in addition to little bunny-shaped peanut butter cups. The 1.75 quart plastic tub, however, will try to foist a caramel ripple off on you alongside the fudge, and some kind of cheap chocolate covered peanuts. Not a single peanut butter cup to be found.

Now, don't get me wrong, caramel and chocolate covered peanuts are all well and good in their own particular... idiom, but their place is certainly not in my ice cream. And I think it's a pretty shabby trick boxing two completely different ice cream flavors in exactly the same wrapping but in slightly different shaped containers. But I guess you can’t expect much from a company that is copying coincidentally making a very similar product to that of Denali’s Original Moose Tracks.

So if you ever want to try my favorite kind of delicious ice cream, make sure your husband grabs whatever brand is partnering with Denali in your area. Or give him strict instructions to read the fine print on the Blue Bunny box. Or just send him to the grocery store alone enough times that he knows what to come home with.

That’s what I do.

Back to Normal?

Ahh. Time to get back to normal after a busy weekend.

But “normal” isn’t the same for everyone. For me, it’s an organized mess. A disorganized mess is intolerable. If it’s messy, but I can find everything, I’m good. If there are boxes of old baby clothes next to my desk and I don’t know where the air mattress is, I’ll go crazy.

Among many other things that happened this weekend, all of the furniture in the two most furniture-laden rooms in our house had to be moved so that the floors could be refinished. The results vary depending on how you look at it: if you’re into gorgeous hardwood floors, then you’d say that the work was a success, while if you’re one of those people who is into meticulously clean households, you’d shake your head in disappointment.

The floors do look great. And eventually I’ll find everything and put it in a place that I can find it again. But for now, I think I’ll relax.

Maybe I’ll look for the air mattress later.

Chewbacca for Legislature, 2014

This weekend, I sat down in a chair in my parents' living room and grabbed a bit of newspaper off the side table. My mother is one of the remaining hundred or so people in the world who still subscribes. (Or, in the words of Liz Lemon, "Suck it, I do read the paper!")

The section in question happened to be a very interesting Voter's Guide 2014, in which candidates for today's primary had been invited to contribute. I immersed myself in it, and soon was arguing aloud with the answers some had given. 

"You didn't fully answer the question, sweetcheeks," I said to the picture of the distinguished gentleman hoping to serve our great state. My husband, the only other person in the room, knows my strange ways and so ignored me, dividing his attention between his phone and The Empire Strikes Back, which my father had placed in the DVD player as a special Mother's Day treat.

My brother then entered the room with a plateful of pizza and attempted a spirited impression of Captain Solo's furry sidekick. At the same moment, I finished reading a candidate's answer, one which I disagreed with. "No," I said loudly to the newspaper, as I shook my head. "No."

Glancing at me, my brother tried again, this time actually saying something in Wookie (I don't speak it, though, so I'm not sure what it was). My husband took pity on him and informed him that I was arguing with my reading material. My brother laughed and said he knew, but figured he should give the impression another shot anyway.

I took the Voter's Guide home when the movie was over, to argue one-sidedly with the candidates and decide which to vote for. I suppose it could be said that I should have been doing my own research into the people I hope to trust to run the government, but I would answer that a candidate who doesn't have enough time to answer five questions for the Lincoln Journal Star may have trouble prioritizing their time when in office. (Seriously? It's five questions about stuff you already talk about all the time.)

Don't forget to vote today, Nebraska. I don't know about you, but the thing that will be making me giggle when I head over to vote tonight (aside from the memory of my brother's excellent Chewbacca impersonation) is the fact that I may have referred to a future governor of Nebraska as "sweetcheeks."

After a Long Day...

The best thing after a long day of work is having a serious heart to heart with your four year old during the car ride home.
The best thing after a long day of work is coming home to find your awesome husband making a delicious meal for you.
The best thing after a long day of work is heading to bed early to curl up with several good books.
The best thing about today was all of those things happened to me.

2014 State of the Blog Address

I know it’s a little late, but I was looking at my 2013 State of the Blog and decided I wanted to do another one this year. It’s nice having all of my accomplishments (and disappointments) up in one place so they’re easy to find.

Stuff I did:

Posted every weekday, except that one Friday that I forgot and posted the next morning but it says I posted it on Friday even though I didn’t. Found out that I apparently write poetry when I’m sick. I took Thanksgiving off and about a week off for Christmas. Two hundred sixty six posts in all, 187 in 2013 (since my last State of the Blog, that is) and 79 so far in 2014. Altogether, blogger says I’ve posted… five hundred one times. So that’s awesome! Yay me!

Stuff I wrote about:

My childhood memories. Stories that I love. My wonderful family. Games that are fun to play! Holding my published works in my own hands. CRAFTING!! Sports. The internet. History!

Stuff I was pleased with:

Most/all of my writing prompts! I never realized how fun it was to write a super short story (known in some circles as flash fiction)! I love to take a quote, a picture, or an idea and make up something about it. I’ve always loved doing that! I’m not sure why it took me this long to realize it. Specifically, I enjoyed writing Finding Fantasyland, which was meant to be super short but just kept getting longer… and longer… I loved writing it and couldn’t stop! The Tale of Lady Wolfsbane wrote itself. And I enjoyed The Girl from the Floating Forest so much that every time I look at it, I want to write more of it.

I actually gave in and joined tumblr a month or so ago just for writing prompts. I’m still using the tried and true prompts from writingprompts.tumblr.com, which is full of awesome things. But I’m also following a few other prompting tumblrs (is that what you call them? tumblrs? or is it tumbls? Only youths know). I haven’t delved too deep into the frightening black hole of the internet that is tumblr because I don’t want to get sucked in. But hopefully I’ll find more fun prompts there, and write some more cool stuff.

Stuff I was displeased with:

The many hours that I wasted whining internally about writing or not knowing what to write. Also probably a few things that I wrote, but going back and searching for them isn’t going to make me feel very good about myself, even though pointing out what was bad and talking about how to improve it is sometimes beneficial.

Stuff I accomplished:

Last year I wanted to promote myself more, gain more readers, get published, and get paid.

I did join twitter, which I used mostly to follow web cartoonists around and be silly with them, but I also made the acquaintance of a few awesome bloggers, who have helped me a lot. (Especially Jen, who answered my questions about work for hire! You can find her blogs here.)

By sharing things on google+, I got quite a few follows, but I’m still not sure I can trust blogger’s hit stats, so I’m not terribly sure how many people read my blog. I’m not too worried about it; the number is most likely higher than it was last year.

I got published. Twice. If you’d like to have a copy to hold in your own hands, you can get your very own Being a Grown Up: A User’s Manual for the Real World, they are available on bigcartel.com, and you can find Forge 7.3 on lulu.com.

Well, maybe I got published three times. But the third wasn’t a book. It was an amazingly fun project for my boss that let me hear a whole bunch of hilarious stories from the awesome DJs that I work with. If you’re in the Lincoln area and need a DJ, my words will help you pick one out!

I think I accomplished the goals I set for myself last year. I had a pretty awesome time working toward them!

Stuff I didn’t do:

I didn’t submit things for publication often enough. I stopped posting links to what I’d written on facebook and google+ and twitter around Christmas time; at first it was because I myself didn’t like what I’d written, and then it was just because I got lazy. I didn’t want twitter consuming my life (and believe me, you can lose hours and days staring at the inane things people put up on twitter), and so I didn’t want to log on just to tweet a link to some writing that I didn’t think was very good. If that sounds like an excuse, that’s because it is.

Stuff I plan to do:

Submit things I’m proud of. Find an artist or publisher or someone to help me put together a book. Keep writing daily. Be awesome.