Lots of reading and a little drama

Here's an interesting article from Kristine Kathryn Rusch about bookstores. I remember when I could go to a big chain bookstore and find an author's complete backlist, and I remember when that started to not be the case. It used to be that you could go to B&N or Borders and count on finding pretty much anything you wanted, but no more. It happened to B&N first, but now it's happened to Borders as well.

I used to spend hours at the bookstores--it was one of my weekend rituals to go to Borders and spend a couple of hours looking at books, discovering new writers and being reminded of favorite "old" ones. Now the big bookstores are more giftshops and less bookstores, and unless you want one of the half dozen current bestsellers, it's a pretty sad experience. I don't even go to the bookstores anymore. I do all of my book shopping on Amazon, both electronic and paper. It's not that I necessarily prefer it that way, but it seems like it's now the only way. After a few trips to the brick-and-mortar bookstore and walking away empty handed, I just gave up on it.

My local library is now offering ebooks; they only have a handful, but I'm sure that will increase. I enjoy reading on the iPad so much that I've pretty much stopped going to the library, also, except for checking out craft books and things like that. I find that I'm not much interested in reading fiction in paper anymore. It's so much easier to have my entire library on the iPad or Kindle, and not have to worry about returning a book.

I imagine I'm spending more on books now than I used to, but at some point I decided that was okay. I don't have a lot of indulgences, and I tend to think of books as necessities anyway.

My booklist for this year is testament to the fact that I've been reading more than ever -- at mid-June, it's up to 62 books.

Part of the reason for that is that I hurt my back toward the end of May. It was one of those things where I didn't do anything in particular--I was taking a shower actually--but I just suddenly got an excruciating pain in my lower back. It was all I could do to hobble out of the shower and gingerly lower myself onto the bed, then just lie there trying to figure out what to do. It was mid-afternoon on the Sunday before Labor Day, and Bob was working until 7:00. I figured if nothing else, he'd be back then.

Fortunately, I had the iPad upstairs next to the bed, and my phone, so I just tried to stay as still as possible, read, sleep, and wait for Bob to get home. He called when he got off and started home, like he always does, and I told him what had happened, and asked him if he could bring me something to eat. He brought tacos, and I was able to sit up and eat them, but I definitely wasn't going anywhere.

I spent the whole day Monday in bed, and decided to stay home from work on Tuesday also. By Wednesday I was functional, but still not 100%. We had planned to go down to the Lake of the Ozarks that next weekend, and I was taking Friday off, and by Thursday I was feeling pretty good, so we went ahead with the plans. We drove down on Thursday night, getting in pretty late, and went to bed. On Friday morning when I woke up, I could barely get out of bed. I don't know if it was the long drive down or the hard bed, but the pain was back.

I ended up sleeping on the couch the rest of the weekend; I don't know if the bed was the problem or not, but I was afraid to risk it.

I'm still being pretty careful of my back, but it seems to be okay now.

Bob's out of town this week on his annual fishing trip to Minnesota, and I've been trying to take good care of myself and get a lot of rest. Dinah and I have just been hanging out in the evenings, and going to bed early to read or play Scrabble online.

I hadn't expected to hear from Bob all week--there isn't any cell reception where he is--but he called on Monday to say that he was on the way to the emergency room. He had been trying to take a hook out of a fish, the fish jerked, and he drove the hook through one of his fingers. I'm sure that's not the first time it's happened, but this time it was bad enough that his doctor friend who is with him didn't want to risk taking it out himself, and said he needed to go to the hospital. So they were driving in to town to get it taken care of.

After seeing a doctor and getting the hook removed, he said they were going to go buy him a rubber glove so that he could continue fishing. It was, after all, only the second day of the trip.

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A couple of days off

Ever since my cancer scares a few years ago, I've been religious about my annual "woman's issues" appointments. Every year in the spring, I make my ob-gyn appointment and my mammogram appointment for sometime around the first of May. My doctors are close to where I live, and since I work so far away, I make both appointments for the same day, and take the whole day off. Also, it feels kind of yucky to go back to work after either one of those things . . .

So yesterday, Monday, was my doctors' appointments day. The ob-gyn was at noon, and the mammogram was at 1:45. On Sunday night it was really nice to know that I didn't have to get up and go to work the next morning, even though the reason for it wasn't exactly exciting. I really love my doctor. I didn't start going to him until after my surgery--he was the surgeon in the practice where I had been going for a long time, and my regular nurse-midwife had some health issues and took some time off around the same time.

I went to the surgeon for the after-surgery appointments, and when the time came for my regular appointments, I just stuck with him. So while not exactly pleasant, the appointments aren't bad, and it's always nice to see and talk with him. And the mammogram isn't usually bad, either. I go to an imaging center, and they're always very kind, and make it as pleasant as possible.

This year when I scheduled my day off, I decided I could really use some actual time off, i.e., time that wasn't spent at the doctor's office, so I took an additional two days of vacation. I wanted to do a little bit of sewing, maybe clean out a drawer or two (probably not going to happen), just have a little more time to myself. So yesterday when I left the imaging center, I thought, now I'm free for two days!

I haven't exactly taken the time off completely -- I've been checking email and coordinating stuff from afar, corresponding with clients and being sure that things are done -- but as Bob said, I can do it in my pajamas.

I can't tell you how much I love the iPad! I, along with one of the other guys at work, have been trying as hard as I can to get completely paperless at the office. I no longer carry a notebook and pen to meetings, I carry the iPad. And a stylus, if I remember. It's not as seamless, or as easy, as paper and pen, but I feel like I need to do it.

The other things I've been doing with it are playing "Words With Friends" constantly with one of my nieces, playing Scrabble with people at work, and reading. A LOT of reading. The ease of using the Kindle app on the iPad is, of course, a blessing and a curse. When I was out at my parents' house on Mother's Day, I took the iPad along so I could show my folks some photographs. My brother and sister-in-law came by while I was there, and we got into a discussion of books and ereaders. My sister-in-law is a big reader, too, and gets most of her books from the library, as did I until I started using the Kindle.

I don't know I if she would like an ereader or not--she wasn't sure about it--but I love it. With the Kindle, or the Kindle app, you can download a preview of a book--usually a couple of chapters--to see if it's something that you want to buy. If it isn't, just delete it, and you've spent nothing but a little bit of time. If you want to continue reading it, you just click the "buy this book" link, and within seconds, you can just keep on reading. And, of course, buy the rest of a series, or the rest of an author's backlist, in most cases.

I still use SwagBucks as my search engine, and earn Amazon gift cards that way--I've been doing it a little less than a year, and have earned $275, which buys a lot of eBooks! I also pay attention to the free and bargain ebook blogs, such as Pixel of Ink, and pick up quite a few books that way. You can also get ebook news by signing up for mailing lists from your favorite authors. I got an email this morning that Kim Harrison's first "Avery Madison" book, Once Dead, Twice Shy, was available for a promotional price of $1.99 because the third book in the series is coming out soon.

On Sunday my brother said, "I guess it's only a matter of time before the library has ebooks to lend," and I told him that it has already happened. It took awhile for them to available on the Mac platform, but my library has recently--within the last month or so--started making ebooks available. Once the lending period has passed, the ebook is either removed from your device or you can no longer open it--I'm not sure about that part yet--so no late fees. The selection doesn't seem to be that great so far, but I'm sure that will improve.

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Quiet Sunday

I've been reading quite a bit lately, mostly in my favorite genre, urban fantasy. Last night I finished "Vicious Grace," by M.L.N. Hanover, the third in a series, which I've read all the way through. I love when I can do that, i.e., discover a new series of books and read them all right in a row. That way it's like a REALLY long book, which is my favorite thing. The series is 1) Unclean Spirits, 2) Darker Angels, and 3) Vicious Grace. Basically, the books are about a young woman, a college dropout, who finds out that her black sheep uncle has named her in his will. Not only has he named her in his will, but he has left everything to her, everything being multiple homes everywhere in the world, many corporations, and enough money to run a small country.

There's a downside, though--he also leaves her his legacy of fighting evil in the form of spirits ("riders") who possess people and cause them to commit hellacious crimes. She quickly gets together a band of sidekicks including a former Jesuit priest, a Buddhist, a gorgeous, geeky parasitologist and a vampire. In the first book they are devoted to taking out the demonic spirit who cursed the vampire.

The second book, Darker Angels, is set in New Orleans amid voodoo rituals, tourist museums, and a lot of local color. THe third book, Vicious Grace, is set in Chicago, mostly in a pretty creepy hospital. this one is much more like a horror novel than the others, and frankly, left me feeling a little odd. There is an event at the end that I couldn't be entirely happy with, but I did enjoy the book, for the most part.

I'm typing this on an Apple wireless Bluetooth keyboard, using the iPad, which I've got sitting on a book holder on the coffee table. I had kind of a hard time convincing myself to buy the keyboard, but I decided that I would get a lot of good out of it, and I can see a lot of uses for it. I love the iPad and the iPhone onscreen keyboards, but even with the larger iPad keyboard, it's pretty hard to actually touch type. I can, but what I found was that even though I could type the letters, I couldn't access keys like the apostrophe without changing keyboards, and it just wasn't working very well.

It's been kind of a weird day. Bob was out with some friends last night, and I went upstairs to bed at about 8:00 with the iPad to read. Bob came home shortly thereafter, and he was tired, so he laid down to take a nap, and I fell asleep, too. I slept until about midnight, woke up and read for awhile, fell back asleep, woke up around 6:00, read some more, fell back asleep, and finally got up around 11:00.

I spent the afternoon watching television shows about the upcoming royal wedding, doing laundry, and just puttering around. I never left the house or even got dressed!

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New toy

After having an iPad for a couple of weeks, here's my take on it.

My boss bought a stack of the new ones for the office when they came out on March 11th, and he kept one of the new ones and gave me his old one, the original iPad. I wouldn't exactly consider it "old," though, of course, since it's less than a year old. It's the top of the line model--64 GB, WIFI and 3G. And I LOVE it.

I have some kind of problem with the WIFI at my house, but I've never really cared enough to get Time Warner out to figure it out. Bob can get WIFI upstairs for his PC, but for whatever reason, I can't get it on my Mac. But it's not a big deal, I just plug in, and it's fine. But of course, I wouldn't be able to do that with an iPad. So I was thrilled to get the 3G iPad. I can sit upstairs now and play Scrabble with the guys at work, shop at Amazon, read and answer email, read a book, all the things I can do on the computer, but I don't have to be tied to any particular place.

It's pretty much the same stuff I can do on the iPhone (I got the new iPhone 4 recently, too), but a lot more comfortable with the larger screen. And what a screen! It's big, beautiful, and sharp. Photos look wonderful on it. The on-screen keyboard takes some getting used to, but I'm getting pretty fast on it. With the touchscreen, you can also take notes by writing; I got a stylus and I've been using that some, it's easier than using a finger.

I haven't tried using a wireless keyboard yet, but I have one at work, so at some point I plan on figuring that out. With an external keyboard, there's almost nothing that I can't do on the iPad that I can do on the computer. Well, Photoshop, I guess. But pretty much anything text-based. I've spent hours on the iTunes stores looking at software, trying out free versions, and figuring out what I need.

My favorites right now are:

For work:

• Penultimate ($1.99) - for taking handwritten notes or making drawings with stylus or finger
• Todo ($4.99) - syncs with iCal task lists
• Pages ($9.99) - (Apple official app) for viewing and editing Word docs
• Notebooks ($8.99) - for taking and organizing text-based notes using the keyboard
• Photosync ($1.99) - wirelessly transfers photos from desktop to iPad and vice versa
• Dragon Dictation (Free) - converts spoken word recordings into text
• Printer Pro ($6.99 - try Printer Pro Lite (Free) first to be sure it will work for you) - wirelessly print documents from the iPad
• Dropbox (Free) - Invaluable. A cloud storage service that you can access from anywhere, with any device
• Readdle Docs ($4.99) - connects to Dropbox, iDisk, Google Docs and FTP accounts; allows you to read PDFs and MS Office files
• Terra (Free) - a tabbed browser that I prefer to Safari
• Sugar Sync (Free) - Creates a folder on your desktop computer that instantly syncs anything in that folder over wifi. And I mean instantly. It's crazy! You can watch it happen.

For news and weather:

• The Daily ($.99/week) - I subscribed to this for $.99/week, mostly because I love the daily crossword and Sudoku
• AccuWeather (Free) - Just the weather. Simple. What's the temperature, is it raining or not? That's mostly what I want/need to know. I also have The Weather Channel app, and use them both.

For entertainment:

• Kindle (Free) - a really great reading experience, I unexpectedly like it more than the Kindle itself
• Netflix (App is free, but requires a Netflix account to watch) - so much fun to watch streaming movies!
• Zinio - magazines are a lot of fun to read on the iPad

Games:

• Scrabble ($9.99) - I have a couple of constantly ongoing games with people at work
• Sudoku2 Pro HD ($2.99) - I've just recently started playing Sudoku, and love this app
• Angry Birds Rio ($2.99, free version available also) - yes, it's everywhere, but for good reason

Miscellaneous:

• Min to Go (Free) - A timer that shows the "minutes to go" as an icon badge
• Remote (Free) - Control iTunes remotely, i.e., I can be playing something--music or a video--on my desktop computer and conrol it using Remove on the iPad (or iPhone)
• Fluid Monkey (Free) - Love this! It reminds me of . . . I'm not sure what. I used to have a little notebook that had a squishy liquid cover, I guess it's like that. Very soothing, anyway.

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Kansas Troubles

A couple of weeks ago we went down to the Lake of the Ozarks for the weekend. Bob has a friend who has a place down there, and he goes down there quite often, but I'd never been. But this time, when Bob invited me along, I went. He always tells me that I can do the same things down there that I do here--mess around on the computer, read, knit, eat--which is true. I didn't even take the computer, though. I took the Kindle, my iPhone, a couple of skeins of Noro Silk Garden, and I put together a traveling sewing/quilting kit.

I've started sewing again, after probably a couple of decades away from it. I've always enjoyed sewing, but it's a messy hobby, and once the sewing machine is put away, it's hard for me to get it back out, with all the attendant fabric, thread, cutting board, etc.

But awhile ago, when I was out at my folks' house, my mother asked me if I could hem up a pair of jeans for her, and of course, I said yes. So I got out the machine and set it up, and I enjoyed having it out so much that I've kept it out. I sewed gifts for almost all of the women that I gave Christmas gifts to this year--reusable shopping bags in their own little zippered pouches.

I've also made a bunch of cotton "produce bags"--I haven't used them for that, though. I've used them as lunch bags, knitting bags, Christmas gift bags, the uses are many. The pattern says they're produce bags, so that's what I'm calling them. (I asked for permission to make the bags for sale, and paid a licensing fee.)

Oh, so anyway, back to the quilting. I had picked up a quilting magazine recently that had a project for making a pincushion out of fabric selvages, the tightly woven edge of the fabric that is usually printed with details like the name of the fabric line, the designer and/or the mill, and registration marks and dots of color that I assume are used by the printer.

I absolutely loved that idea, so I started going through my boxes of fabric and cutting off selvages. I quickly amassed enough to make a few pincushions, then I decided to make a small quilt with some of them. I didn't like the quilts I had seen that were made completely of selvages, they were way too busy, but I did like the look of them when used as blocks. In my reading about selvages, I had discovered that the Moda fabric company was selling "scrap bags," which were fabric strips left over from cutting their pre-cut fabric squares. I ordered a bag, and I thought that the fabric line that I got (all of the "scraps" in one bag will be the same line) went well with the selvages. It was called "Summer's End by Kansas Troubles Quilters," which I thought was very appropriate!

So I cut the selvages off of the scrap strips, and sewed up 12 squares. I love the sewing part; I don't like the cutting part nearly as much. It's tedious, and it's hard on my back, and it's hard to get motivated to do it. But I thought, hey, I'll take my stuff with me on the weekend, and lay it out when I have less distractions.

So I packed up a plastic box with my rotary cutter, shears, pins and needles, and bought a small rotary cutting mat and plastic ruler. I put my selvage squares in a plastic bag, and brought along the strips from the scrap bag. When we got down to the Lake, Bob went out fishing on Saturday, and I laid out the quilt top. Once I had arranged everything to my liking, I cut out the strips and squares so that it was ready to sew.

I didn't actually sit down and sew it together until the next weekend, and it wasn't until yesterday that I built the quilt "sandwich" (quilt top, batting and backing) and started quilting it. I don't really know what I'm doing, and it's FAR from perfect, but I figure it's better just to do something that to spend forever studying and worrying about it. Anything takes practice, it's not going to perfect the first time, but I enjoy doing it, and really, that's the whole point.

It's a small quilt, probably about 2 x 3 feet, and I'm planning to hang it on the wall in the bedroom. I'm already planning another one that I think would look great on the wall of my office. It's just a matter of doing it. In the winter it's very hard for me to want to do anything when I get home from work, but I think I'll be more energetic and motivated once it starts staying light longer. I'd better be--I need to do something with all the fabric I've bought!

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