I do applaud their blackout on January 18, 2012.

Every Category in this blog system is applied to this post, therefore, and every TAG … it’s just not reasonable to list every tag, so I’ve used ‘Everything’ and ‘Nothing’ as my TAGS.

I’m needing something, something good to read, good to build, good to make.

Books: I want to keep going with the Jim Butcher “Dresden Files” series. I had book one Storm Front this summer. I asked my hubby to pick up the next 2 or 3 books, but he only finally did so last weekend, and couldn’t find any in the stores he tried.

I could order them, but they wouldn’t arrive until yesterday at the earliest if I used my B&N membership. I probably could have just gotten them from Amazon, maybe. I know recently that getting books delivered cheaply and in reasonable time is nigh impossible.

Get books from online delivered to you that you aren’t anxious to devour. That’s about the only rule I know. I messed up on that one for two books recently, Lee Child The Affair and John Sandford Shock Wave. Pre-order “free member express shipping” from B&N.

So my “pre-oder” is in for long enough time for it to seem to mean something. Nothing at all though. Books available everywhere on Tuesdays. THEY DIDN’T start sending it until the next day. Then it didn’t arrive until Friday.

That is NOT express shipping on a pre-order. Maybe THEY think it is, but I don’t care what they think about it, it’s what I, the CUSTOMER thinks about it. My membership is up at the end of this month. Just might go to Amazon for books from now on, Costco, used books stores still as well. Maybe I’ll use Albris more. Who knows.

So that whole time I could have been reading those books in my B&N app on my tablet. I don’t like the books I LOVE reading in that format. I’m not desperate enough for that. I really have a hard time considering never turning a real page in a real book again. All NEW books are digital … no, can’t do that. Can’t go there.

As for building, LEGO fits the bill. I do have the Winter Toy Shop and Winter Village Post Office on there way, or on their way soon. That will complete my Christmas under the tree scene for this year, minus a train. I hope LEGO keeps up with this theme for quite awhile.

As for making something. That’s crafting something with paper, ink, etc.I’m trying to wrap my head around doing an art journal, making the actual journal first. I do have some parchment cardstock cut for such a thing with a few tab pages (I hand cut all that stuff.) I need to construct a cover, I have coils for my Bind-It-All that I can use. I have grunge paper, some chipboard covers, not necessarily the right size, but the grunge stuff is OK cause I’d cut it to size, it’s big.

I have to make those decisions and get it done. So the big one is, do I ink the edges of some of the pages, all of the pages, some of the sections, …. or not. I think I will. Then if I want that different, other things: ink, paint, paper will cover it as needed per page later.

That will be my 1st true art journal. For doodling, and way more than that. I want to really get my style down, get my artsy stuff out of my soul, but for that I need to get some extra things eventually. (I’ll have this when I’m in a crafty mood, or when I’m needing to craft and feeling stuck. Always something to be able to do, start a new page or work on an old one. Cool.)

Ah, I know what I need, vellum. Good thick vellum to go between pages. Darn, I’m out of that. Need to get to a store.

Writing things out makes them clearer, sometimes helps you decide a lot. Today, this sure has.

Recently I got the Sibley app for my HTC EVO. I love it. It’s my favorite bird books in my phone, with added function, bird songs! I really love the way it works too, with a map for viewing with the key right there on every bird profile (easier than the books!) It’s great searching for birds and more. The audio for bird songs is awesome, it really made it super easy to absolutely identify the Cedar Waxwings without having a super closeup view of them.

Unfortunately I have had several force close errors, but I can get it right back up working. Hopefully something will work better with it in the future. (most notable when trying to “edit” My List. Unable to do so. Force Close.)

My plan is to eventually get a Nook Color, root it, and get this app on there to work. I hope I can do that soon, and I hope it’ll work!

I have to remember to leave a comment on the Android Market about my experience with force close with this app.

I have a picture of Geo. Taylor (5x Great-Grandfather), a profile of him looking to the right, with his sig. below. Looks awesome.

A picture of my Maternal Grandfather that is very long, taken in France while in WWI Army (78th Div. 308 F. A.) I cropped it to show head to down whatever 600×800 would allow. It looks awesome.

Then I have an old cell phone picture of my now dead cat Princess from some years ago on the floor sitting in an area of light from a window. Really cool.

I have a picture of Radio City Music Hall in NYC that I took with my cell phone a couple of years ago when we were there.

They are all great in gray scale, except one of a  painting I took in 2009. It’s too even in coloring\light\dark to work. I’ll need to change something about it to look better.

I also changed the “desktop” of the reading screen when no functions are being used. I made a quick file in Photoshop Elements, used a texture and a maple leave shape to put a bunch of leaves like falling down the page randomly. Kind of a pebble texture, a greenish color, so it shows up on my Nook really nice, various grays. Unfortunately I seem to have moved the original only copy of it to my Nook. So I can’t upload it to this spot until later when I connect my Nook next time. I remember that I didn’t save the original photoshop file I was working on since I was thinking I would make something else, not keep that file. Oops. I liked it a lot when it loaded on my Nook. Anyhow, I WILL make something else sometime anyhow.

I also got a cover for it, went on Monday to see what else B&N had and stuck with the cover my husband had picked out. I wanted a stand to use it with and they didn’t have anything for the Nook particularly except for one cover that can do that natively. I didn’t like that cover.

The cover I have is dark brown leather. It wraps around the Nook & snaps to protect it when closed, and wraps the opposite way to keep it like a one piece device with the cover snapped behind the Nook when in use.

The B&N employee that helped us looked at the regular book stands they sell and I looked at one and thought it would work, plus it was all metal and finished in a manner I love, love, love. It’s the Book Hug and it works well with my Nook in it’s cover. It sits perfectly inside it. If I want it there when plugged in, it just sits a big higher and one edge of the Nook rests in the upper front lip of the Book Hug stand. It doesn’t need charged very often, so it’s not a big deal to use it like that.

What started it for me was looking for books on audible.com I found the first book, Twilight and liked how it was described and the audio sample was interesting enough, so I purchased it. I was listening to it when I had my older phone, the Palm Treo 755p, using Audible Air, but never finished it, deciding I loved it as an audio book but wanted to read it first, then listen to it again, finishing it that way.

Since June 6 I’ve had a Palm Pre instead of my Palm Treo, and the Pre isn’t capable of using Audible Air, I have been hooked on using that program and can’t stand the thought of having to use another device and be married to loading from a computer hook-up or listening via my computer … ugh.

For some reason I haven’t figured out, I just never picked up the book to start the reading of Twilight until just the other day. It was nice to read it, even though I listened to the audio book about 3/4 of the way through before, and found it very read-able and getting to the ‘new to me’ part was great.

I know it’s categorized as a Young Adult book. I tend to enjoy many books in that category, and also feel the need to read some of them before allowing my children to possibly read them. Like this series, I haven’t let them yet read The Golden Compass, etc. or Maximum Ride … books I really like, but feel they aren’t “old enough” to appreciate what needs to be considered while reading them. I guess I’m mostly taking this from a perspective of Young Adult being something that has an older young adult and a younger young adult categorization-able-ness. (My children being homeschooled and shielded from some things that many children may not be.)

I know, for instance, I would have loved to read something like Twilight when I was 11, but I won’t even let my 13 year old son consider reading it. I see 16 to 18 more-so a better age for that. My daughter is 10, nearly 11, she also I would prefer to wait to read these types of books. I was in public school and knew things at 7 years of age that my children, three of who are older than that, have no clue about. Thankfully. There is time enough for many ideas to be understood, maturity can bring much information to it. It doesn’t need to be given out throughout childhood. Like any subject, don’t teach it until the child is ready to really receive it, forcing math concepts on a child, for instance, when they don’t get it and pressuring them when they aren’t ready, when waiting for signs of maturity in that receptive area would bring about an ease in understanding and receiving said information. So it goes in everything, allowing what is right for each child as they grow, when they are ready, and books are highly subjective. My idea about the ones above I mentioned are that they have some good themes to talk about, but shouldn’t go into a child’s mind until some level of maturity is evident, and if it means they don’t read them until they are adults, there is no harm. Better no harm than harm. Amen.

So then, I really do like many sorts of literature, and haven’t read a lot of vampire stuff, though I have held a fascination with the subject matter since I was small. I am not widely read in any area, just a smattering of this and that, but I can say I find the Twilight vampires to be very interesting, even though some people online think it totally out-of-line that they sparkle in sunlight, and aren’t burnt up, like other vampire stories make them out to be like. :Rolleyes:

I started reading The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly recently. I asked my husband if there was anything I could read (he buys books all the time) and he gave me that one, telling me “it’s a stand-alone book” which is a big thing for me to understand if it is or not first, before delving into it.

So I started reading it the other night and found references to a characters past life and just haven’t read much of it, falling asleep fast when I read at night time in bed. The references bugged me, and today I added the book to my sidebar since I hadn’t done so yet, and googled the book to get the authors name since I couldn’t remember it and just wanted to “copy & paste” it, being lazy, I guess you could call it.

I didn’t close the page I opened on the author’s site, and later coming back to my laptop I noticed it and clicked around and read some on his site, and quickly gleaned the information that incensed my emotive base of what I read and why.

The Scarecrow may be a “stand-alone book” –sort of. Not really. The Poet by Michael Connelly from 1996. That was all I had to read about to know I have read too much of The Scarecrow already. In my opinion, that is

Audible.com has added two of my favorite books recently:
1. Jamaica Inn
2. My Cousin Rachel

I’ve occasionally searched audible for these, and was frustrated by the lack of Daphne du Maurier content available. So I have inspiration now to get a bonus of $10 from Audible. I had another book in my cart for some weeks, without checking out, so now I just have to get one more book, and get a bonus (now through March 17, 2008.) In December there was a nicer bonus available, but I wasn’t inspired to purchase, not wanting to stroll through the virtual aisles, until it was too late (the very day after the bonus ended. )

I took the thing apart then, since I had to check and see if it was something inside that could be fixed. There were descriptions of possible problem/fix solutions online here and there, but it ended up that nothing helped. I eventually disconnected the speaker wires, not on purpose, by accident, but that was ok, since it allowed me to distance myself from the device, I put it in a box and out of my attention span. Some months later I came across it a few times and finally ended up chucking it into the garbage.

So I had no Audible device, except my computer, and that isn’t why I got Audible, I got it for super-mobility. My Palm Vx was still active and working fine, it just has a grey-scale screen and just it’s own self ability for simple normal Palm apps. I eventually got a little SanDisk m230 player for Audible use. I never was able to “get into” my Palm Vx since the Zire incident, the “color screen” deal made the Palm Vx so undesireable to me, though it’s a great little device, I admire it still, as always, but find it non-productive for me in normal life.

Our cell phones were little Sanyo 8300′s and finally we came to the “upgrade point” for the highest amount in our contract recently. Hubby and I agreed that we’d get Blackberry’s … then as the time grew closer to actually being able to something, Palm came out with a new “smartphone” the Centro, and I thought that would be nice to have, since it was easier to get into, much cheaper than a Blackberry, by far.

The more we looked at it online, the more we looked for it in stores, and finally saw an actual device and said, nah. Too small. Too limited.

So we looked at the Blackberry’s again, and Hubby wanted one of them, and then I looked at the Treo’s and that became something do-able … so finally the day came and I was able to get one. I love it. It’s so cool. Unlimited data service. Which means it’s a wireless internet device, with a phone, and a Palm platform. It’s an audible.com device too. Even better, since it’s Audible on a wireless device, AudibleAir works. I love that even more. AudibleAir allows me to connect my device to my Audible Library online, and download books in the right Audible format for my device, in whatever segment length I want, on the fly. Subscriptions can be auto-matically downloaded. That works great. The thing I’m thrilled at then is the ability to bookmark and such again. A visual reference available to what I’m listening to.

Another thing about the phone is the Sprint service we have, Sprint TV has interesting content streamable, and premium features, that are given to new contracts for a couple of months free, are even better. Now these things were available on our little Sanyo phones, but did work like they do on this Treo. Also, we didn’t even thoroughly understand that both our phones had unlimited data just because of the Pictures package we had, didn’t start out with, but got later, and we didn’t use it much, just some. If only we’d looked into it and understood, but then we wouldn’t have liked the stuff much either, with the teeny little screen those flip phones have, and the different “experience” through a “phone” — compared to what it’s like on the Treo, which is closer to a “computer” experience than a “phone” experience.

Now then, this blog, as well as my either ones, have the wp-mobile plugin installed and activated. If one is trying to comment and runs into a problem, hopefully you’ll see you can view the “full website page” which would use the full CSS, the wp-mobile plugin being just a simple CSS served as the webpage.

My Treo does bring this site in as a “mobile” page. I have a Playstation Portable, and it doesn’t register as a mobile device when I go to my blogs with it (it can connect to a wireless network, isn’t a mobile wireless device on it’s own.) It is said (on the web elsewhere here and there) to have a “full browser” … it’s browser does have three settings for Display … the “normal” one displays ugly mixed up-esh-ness for my blogs, the “Just …” whatever it is setting is OK, but the “Smart-Fit” setting is the best. It re-orders the sections to make it fully readable, nicely.

Of course the wp-mobile plugin is nice for “mobile” browsers since it shows a reduced site automatically to devices registering as a mobile device to the plugin’s list. Since beginning to write this post I have gotten my “comments” sections to play nice with wp-mobile … basically I had to add stuff to that theme’s comments page, “just like” I have to do to my regular theme comment pages.

If anyone has problems with the “wp-mobile edition” of this blog, just click the text link “Exit the Mobile Edition (view the standard browser version) beneath each post.

When on a mobile device and you have exited the Mobile Edition, you can re-gain access to the Mobile Edition by finding the text link “Return to the Mobile Edition” beneath each post.

I have an old edition of Bryant’s poems, dedicated to someone from someone as a gift on 1.1.1886. This poem begins on page 80 of that volume.

It’s interesting to note the differences in travel today, how a man far from home usually will have a cell phone, records indicate where he used credit cards, or had reservations, etc. [He's trackable in the case of going missing, in other words.]

Below the author-of-the-poem’s name is a statement that I authored, btw.