Sunday, September 12, 2010

Holy Guacamole!

I took my kids to the library yesterday, for the first time in ages. Going to the library used to be a 3x/wk adventure for the family, but we haven't been there since probably May. Let me explain.

I am the proud owner of a Sony PRS-505. Knowing just how much I love reading (you cannot pry a book from my hand much of the time), my husband decided to surprise me almost 2 years ago with a digital reader. My initial reaction? Dismay. 
"But I like *real* books!" 
"I only use the library, now I have to *buy* books?" 
"Books are meant to be enjoyed in paper format, not on a computer screen!" 

Well, I put on my game face and decided to give it a go. I quickly discovered MobileRead and their forums, and I found out all sorts of wonderful things. There are tons of ebooks out there! I could actually "check out" ebooks from my library! There were a ton of FREE ebooks out there! Independent authors have some great stuff! 

Pretty soon, I had branched out to have ebooks on my reader (about 350 at last count, ones I've read have been deleted from my device, but remain on my computer, probably only 30 of them were actually purchased with money, the rest were freebies), and ebooks on my blackberry (about 10 right now, mostly from smashwords or the library), and ebooks on my new ipod touch (kindle and ibooks app, almost all freebies, probably about 40 books total). I went from having virtually no paper library at my house (I've never been a book collector, just a voracious library patron!) to having around 400 ebooks at my disposal any minute of the day. 

My library visits become more and more infrequent. It was inconvenient, the hours didn't match up with my availability, my kids got books from the school library, I got books from the internet... all was good and happy. But not. My oldest son had been begging me to take him to the library. He had his eye on some books that weren't available at his school. So we managed to find time to go between play practice and soccer games. The kids joyfully picked out a few books each, and I wandered through the stacks, not really looking for anything in particular. I browsed the spines of the entire fiction section (we don't live in a big city or anything, didn't take that long) and chose books that looked interesting. I totally and utterly judged the books by their covers... their spines to be exact. If the spine looked interesting, I pulled it out to look at the cover. If the cover kept my interest, I read the blurb and flipped through a few pages. 16 books make the cut this time. This time, I really was only looking for light-hearted "brain candy." So my husband, who doesn't read books at all, usually, had to help me carry a nice big stack. He was understandably confused "uh, were you looking for books? Don't you have like 10,000 books on your sony?" I just smiled. Some things are hard to explain.

So what does this have to do with guacamole, you ask? Well, I started reading one of the books this morning after finishing my latest smashwords pick ("Radium Halos"- great book by Shelley Stout). I'm reading Laura Levine's "The PMS Murder." In it, guacamole plays a bit of a role, and I felt the urge to make some. So I took a little break, grabbed an avocado (if you read any of my ooooold postings, I don't live on that coffee farm anymore, but I do have access to great avocados regularly!) and some guac mix (too lazy to make from scratch this morning! It's Sunday--day of rest!) and mixed myself up some guac. Ahhhhhhh.......

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