Kindle app

5 Things — I Don’t Buy Anymore

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Dr. Tanya, over at Salted Caramel, has this prompt called “5 Things,” where she asks us to list five things about a particular topic. For this week’s topic, she wants to know what are five things we don’t buy anymore.

Suits and Ties — I retired at the end of 2016 and kept only one suit, a few ties, and one sports coat for those just-in-case situations where I need to “dress up.” But since my retirement I have not bought a new suit or any new ties, and I cannot imagine why I would ever again.

Leather “dress shoes” — when I used to wear a suit and tie for work, or even on business casual days, I couldn’t get by with sneakers, even black leather sneakers. So I had one pair of black leather dress shoes. I still have them, but I’m certainly not going to be buying another pair.

Hardback or Paperback Books — I’ve gone electronic, baby. Any book purchases I make are made on Kindle and I download the books to the Kindle app on my iPhone.

CDs and DVDs — Alas, I no longer have either a CD or DVD drive attached to my laptop or TV. Between flash drives, downloads, and streaming services, who needs CDs or DVDs anymore?

Razor Blades — I have a beard, which I keep neatly trimmed using an electric beard and hair trimmer. The only part of my facial hair that I shave is my neck, just below my beard trim line, and I can use my electric beard trimmer for that. So bye bye to buying razorblades.

Tale Weaver — Getting Lucky

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EC71AA2B-2C6C-44DF-B3DF-BA0D37C40C64Steven was pleasantly surprised when Annie agreed to come up to his apartment after only their second date. Maybe tonight I’ll get lucky, he thought. They arrived at Steven’s second floor walk up and he unlocked the door, opened it up, and gestured for her to go in. “It’s cozy,” he warned her.

“Oh, it’s a studio apartment,” Annie said, looking around the single room.

“I told you it was cozy,” Steven said, letting out a nervous chuckle. He noticed a confused look on Annie’s face. “Is there something wrong?” he asked her.

“I’m a little surprised,” she said. “You told me that you’re an avid reader, yet I don’t see any bookshelves in your apartment and there’s not a single book in sight.”

“Yeah, well, when you have a small place, you have to make certain accommodations,” Steven said, a bit defensively. “I obviously don’t have room to store hundreds of books in this small apartment.”

“So do you get your books from the library?” Annie asked.

Steven took out his iPhone, pulled up his home screen, and then handed it to her, pointing out the Kindle app.D30B5B1E-7817-4965-B898-920211493549“I download all of my books to my Kindle app,” he said. “It’s great because I have hundreds of books on the app and they take up no physical space whatsoever. It’s really convenient, you know.”

“It’s not the same,” Annie said. “I like the feel of physical books, the heft, the smell. Reading ebooks on a device like a smartphone or tablet is not the same experience.”

“Are you that much of a purest that it bothers you that my book collection is on my phone instead of on bookshelves in my small apartment?” Steven asked.

“Actually it does,” she said. She picked up her phone, tapped her screen, and said, “I just ordered an Uber. I think we have a compatibility issue.”

“Gee, for someone who thinks that reading on a smartphone is bothersome, I’m surprise you’d use your smartphone to arrange for a ride rather than going out onto the street to hail a taxi the old fashioned way,” Steven sarcastically said.

Annie gave Steven a dirty look and exited his apartment. Well, I guess I’m not going to get lucky tonight, he thought.

Written for the Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver prompt.

Fandango’s Friday Flashback — January 3

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Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of you earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember?

Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 3rd) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on January 3, 2013 on my old blog.

Reading is Fundamental

6D858B2A-593D-49FF-A0C9-FBE09D6B6E32Here’s something few people know about me. I once was a voracious reader. Yeah, I know. Looking at how I spend my discretionary time these days, that’s hard to believe. I bet my own kids have never seen me pick up a book and read it unless it had something to do with my job.

Seriously, though, back in the day, when I was an avid reader, I immersed myself in suspense and conspiracy as I devoured books by authors such as Robert Ludlam and Ken Follett. James Clavell transported me to the intrigues of feudal Japan and the early days of Hong Kong, while James Michner guided me on exotic adventures across the globe spanning eons.

Robin Cook thrilled me with medical mysteries and John Gresham and Scott Turow got me all tangled up in legal shenanigans and courtroom chicanery. Stephen King and Dean Koontz sent chills of horror up and down my spine.

Philip Roth, JD Salinger, and John Irving helped me put into perspective the angst of growing up and the struggles and challenges of being a flawed human being. Issac Asimov, Ray Bradury, and Frank Herbert launched me through the time and space continuum to worlds beyond my imagination. And JRR Tolkein introduced me to Bilbo and Frodo Baggins and the Middle Earth.

During my reading days I would leverage the 30 to 60 minutes on the commuter trains each way between home and work to travel to far away places. On flights for business I would spend my time not only getting to my reality destination, but also being carried away to other times, other worlds, and even other identities. And rather than automatically turning on the TV each night, I would pick up a book and read myself to sleep. I typically got through maybe two to three novels a week back then.

Who Has Time to Read Fiction These Days?

But that was before myriad cable channels beckoned and DVRs turned us all into time-shifters. That was before the proliferation of laptops, netbooks, and tablets that you carry with you instead of leaving behind at the office or at home. That was before BlackBerrys, iPhones, and Android devices transformed us into always-connected workaholics or gossip-mongers needing to know what every one of our hundreds of “friends” is doing in real-time via our addictions to Facebook and Twitter.

Oh no! I forgot to “check in” at the place we ate dinner last night.

Now, as a telecommuter, I work from home, so I no longer have time to kill (and read) on commuter trains. When my job requires me to spend hours on an airplane, most of it is spent on my laptop, preparing for the meeting I’m about to attend, or documenting my notes from the one I just attended. Rather than picking up a book in my “down time” at home, I catch up on all of those TV shows we recorded on our DVR.

Reading for pleasure seems like a distant memory to me. And yet, in the far reaches of my mind, I have this vague recollection of delightful escapism when I sat down with a novel that transported me to times, places, and events far and wide; that introduced me to all kinds of wonderful (and sometimes not so wonderful, but certainly colorful) characters.

New Year’s Readolutions

As it’s that time of the year to make resolutions, I have decided to resolve to read no less than 24 books this year. A wide variety of books, but mostly novels of all kinds — historical, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, thrillers, humorous, whatever.

To that end, I downloaded the free Kindle app on my iPad and, being the cheap son-of-a-bitch that I am, immediately went to the “free books” section.

I “bought” two books, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and a murder mystery by an author I’d never previously heard of, L.L. Bartlett, called Murder on the Mind.

I admit that I could barely make it through the first few pages of Hugo’s sweeping novel that served as the inspiration for my favorite stage musical. I decided to shift gears and try something a little less formidable for my initial reentry into reading for fun, and the Bartlett novel was perfect…a quick, engaging read.

So let’s see if I can manage to read at least two books a month this new year. I’m feeling pretty confident. And maybe I’ll even be able to get through Les Mis before the year is over.

SoCS — No Lack of Options

Fandango7 Comments

3BA9B1F3-0E9D-4B9E-AAE9-D7EDC49C0123For today’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, Linda G. Hill instructed us to “pick up the closest book to you when you sit down to write your post. Close your eyes, open the book, and place your finger on the page. Whatever word or phrase your finger lands on, write about it.”

These instructions for me are easier said than done. You see, the truth is that these days, the only books I read are ebooks on my Kindle app for my iPhone. Thus, picking up my iPhone, going to my Kindle app, closing my eyes, selecting and opening an ebook, and placing my finger on a word or a phrase on a page in that ebook is pretty close to impossible.

2B8F3844-9CD3-4E49-B615-22478763AC8DThe good news, though, is that my wife is reading a physical book, The View From Flyover Country, by Sarah Kendzior. So I reached over to my wife’s side of the bed, grabbed the book, closed my eyes, opened up the book, and placed my finger on a random page. When I opened my eyes, I saw that my finger was either pointing to the phrase, “Being a responsible parent means” or a section header that says, “Lack of Options.” I suppose that means that rather than having a lack of options, I actually have two options.

With that said, I shall now, as Linda instructed, write about how “being a responsible parent means” that you have a “lack of options.”

But wait. I don’t actually believe that. Do you? I think that there are plenty of options available to a responsible parent. For example, a responsible parent can help a kid with his or her homework, therein providing support and encourage as well as helping the kid to understand the concepts the homework is attempting to teach.

Conversely, a responsible parent can refuse to help a kid with his or her homework, in which case the parent is teaching self-reliance, independence, and taking personal responsibility for one’s assigned tasks. This option is especially useful when the homework involves higher mathematics that is well beyond anything the parent could possibly understand, much less assist with.

So what this exercise has proven to me is that being a responsible parent means that you just try and do the best you can and hope that your kids will live through whatever responsible parenting options you choose and will, at the end of the day, thrive.

SoCS — Point Taken

Fandango14 Comments

CBDA963C-B68B-40D0-B4B5-97B4219E0024Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt this week is less of a word than an action.  She wrote, “Your prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is ‘point.’ Open a book on your lap, close your eyes, and put your finger on the page. Whatever you land on, whether it be a word, a phrase, or a sentence, write about it.”

This challenge proved, um, challenging for me because I no longer have any physical books. Every book I currently own is an ebook that is in my Kindle app on my iPhone. So I couldn’t exactly open a book on my lap, close my eyes, and put a finger on the page, could I?

Instead, I opened up the Kindle app, handed my iPhone to my wife, and asked her to randomly pick a book, open it up, pick a page in that book, and then pick a word, phrase, or sentence on that page, highlight it, and copy it. She did, and I pasted it below:

“One day he rose from his arm-chair, and went to his library in search of a book.”

This sentence came from the Victor Hugo classic, Les Misérables. It can be found in “loc 442 of 27004.” That means it’s fairly early in the book. In the first one percent, actually. I can’t tell you what the page number equivalent would be in the print edition because I don’t have a print edition of the book.

I asked my wife why she chose that particular sentence to copy. She told me that she thought it was apropos for the prompt that asked us to select a book and to choose a line from it. And she also thought that it held some irony in that I don’t have a physical library with actual books, but instead have a virtual library with electric books. Very clever, my wife is.

As to the context of the specific sentence she selected from the book, I have no idea. It’s been quite a few years since I read Les Misérables, and I’m pretty sure I’d have to go back and read at least a chapter or two before that sentence to figure out who “he” is and why he went in search of a book.

But I don’t want to do that. So instead, I am writing about the process of finding a random sentence in a random book so that I can respond Linda’s rather random prompt in a randomly stream of consciousness way.