Grinch Mode Reving Up!

 I'm often in Grinch mode at Christmas but this year I just wore the t-shirt once. That was more of a fun thing than me actually being Ginchy. Christmas has simplified a lot over the years, and I do appreciate that. it's not all good as I do miss my family gathering, but I am getting to an age where it can be more than I can handle.

The buying of gifts seems to be a bigger chore every year.  Not only do I have mostly men to buy for (and what do they want anyway?) but I don’t drive and hardly got to any stores this year.  I had to resort to online shopping.  Oh, and the post office decided to go on strike, just to make matters worse. (Oops, sorry. I seem to be slipping into my Grinch mode for some reason). 

I accidently found what I considered to be the perfect gift for my eldest grandson. I ordered it at what I thought was a good price and paid even more for expedited shipping.  The delivery date then turned out to be about three weeks away. That is certainly not my idea of expedited!  The delivery date came and went. Nothing arrived. I contacted the seller to express my concern and complain about paying so much for expedited shipping for nothing.  They offered me 15% off but when I asked if the product would arrive before Christmas, they could not guarantee that.  I looked on Amazon and found what I wanted there so I cancelled the original order.  

The Amazon version was going to cost me three times more but I really wanted this for my grandson and it was getting too late to dream up something else.  I put it in an order with 4 other things, all of which arrived in a timely manner.....except for this one elusive thing for my grandson.

A bug has hit our house now so there will be no more shopping in even the local stores.  When my son drove 2 hours to drop off gifts and pick up what I had for them, he didn't dare come in. The gift for his oldest son had still not arrived, though it was scheduled to show up that very day.  News flash!  It's still not here though tracking shows it left Etobicoke a few days ago.  Oh, and now Amazon is asking for a review before it even gets here!  The latest  estimate is that it will arrive December 24.  I'm not holding my breath, but you might notice I am starting to turn green. I cannot even blame that on my current illness.

I Surrender

 I am a bookaholic. I have admitted that before.  I love to read and have always preferred physical books over digital ones. At least that was how I felt up until this past week.

There was a little Kindle on sale on Amazon before Christmas.  It was calling to me and I was so tempted.  I had enough gift cards from the surveys I do to cover the cost but I talked myself out of it. I prefer real books, as I said, and can read Kindle books on my tablet anyway. The problem is, the tablet is not as comfortable to hold as a real book. A bigger problem is that my tablet is already overly full and though I dump the cache and clean it several times a day, it still malfunctions often. Downloading another book would only add to the problem.

It was only after that amazing sale price was gone that I regretted not taking advantage of it.  So, last week, when I saw the sale reappear I jumped on it.

This cute little Kindle arrived at my door a few days later. I wondered at first if I would be able to read such a tiny screen. My tablet is a 10-inch version and actually bigger than some books.

A friend suddenly sent me a link to a free e-book she thought I would enjoy. I figured it would be a good way to test out this new gadget.

The text was clear and easy to read with none of the glare a tablet screen produces. This Kindle has a matt screen that doesn't reflect light from my surroundings, and it's not backlit either. It's like reading a regular book page and very easy on the eyes. The Kindle weighs nothing and is easy to hold, even in bed.  It is small enough I can easily tuck it in my purse and take it anywhere. I used it while waiting in the car twice already this week.  I have already finished reading that first book and written the review. Now I have another one lined up and ready to go. I caught myself saying, "I love this thing!" more than once this week.

I still have a lot of physical paper books to read. I also realize that they are filling up my house just as apps and files are filling up my tablet. Buying the Kindle was a good decision after all, and I no longer hate e-books.

Five Star Reviews

 As most of my friends on social media know, I frequently do reviews on new products supplied to me by the manufacturers or through agencies such as Topbox, Shopper Army or Chickadvisor.   I always give my honest opinion.  While I have been introduced to many products that I have happily continued to purchase there have been others that I didn't like for one reason or another and said so in my reviews.

I also so surveys, not just for the mad money it brings in (I have collected $90 this month) but also because I am rather opinionated (cough, cough) and like having an outlet for that.  I have noticed one question has been popping up frequently in recent months about reviews.  They ask if I trust the reviews posted on Amazon or Walmart, etc.  Well, of course I do because I am one of the reviewers.  I always figured if I was provided with a product and told that a negative review would not affect my chance at getting others to test then anyone who bothers to review something they didn't get for free would also be truthful.  So yes  I trust the reviews but always read several because personal tastes and options vary.

The items I receive for free are often posted on my Instagram page.  This week I got a message on Instagram offering me more free stuff if I gave 5 Star reviews on Amazon. 

What? They want me to jeopardize my integrity?  No way!  I looked into this further and found that small companies and knock-off artists wanted good ratings to help boost their sales. I want no part of that.  I will continue to give my honest opinion in my reviews but now I will be suspicious of any actual 5 Star ratings.  Personally, I seldom go higher than 4 Stars as I believe there is almost always room for improvement. Now I will be very wary of 5 Star reviews!

No Mail Guarantee this Christmas

Canada Post says it can't guarantee your mail will get delivered in time for Christmas this year. We had a postal strike, after all.  Mail had piled sky high at major distributing sites even before people started ordering gifts online or adding to the pile by mailing early cards and long distance parcels.

I seem to have been caught in this mess too as I ordered something from Amazon back in November. It got shipped out on November 27, and I was given a tracking number. I have been able to watch this parcel since it left Amazon.

Even though it said there was a delay in delivery due to weather or natural disaster it got to Ottawa quickly enough. I went to the post office the day after it arrived there, expecting to pick it up. It wasn't there. It didn't come the next day either so I used the tracking number and discovered an amazing thing. My parcel had gone to Winnipeg!

Why would my parcel go to Winnipeg when it got so close to me so quickly?  It had to be a mistake, I thought, and it somehow got into the wrong pile. Then it came back to Ottawa. Each day the message continued to say that there was a delay due to weather or natural disaster, but we all know this was a man made disaster created at the post office due to failed negotiations or poor timing by the government as to when to order the postal workers back to work. True, the postal workers have every right to strike. If the government wanted to mess with that, and put them back to work, they should have done it before the piles became so unmanageable that the postal workers not only didn't get what they were after but also had to work so much overtime to try and clear out the mountains that have accumulated at the busiest time of the year.

The next time I looked, my parcel was in Montreal!  What???  How could that happen?  Why was my parcel getting to Ottawa, and then moving on again?  Could it be the mountains there were already so high the workers just waved at the trucks and said, "No way are you unloading here! We don't have room for any more!"  I don't know but what other reason could there be?

Meanwhile two of my friends ordered something from Amazon and their orders arrived in less than a week. I'm wondering if they have an Amazon Prime membership. It's Christmas and you can have that for free for 30 days, so why didn't I think of that?  It would likely have meant my parcel would have been sent by priority post. Why else would theirs get here before mine?


I just checked again on Tuesday and it's finally gotten closer to me. It actually traveled in the right direction this time! It seems it got stuck again though as it spent 4 days just 12 miles away before
finally showing up here today.  Oh, and look, they did stick a priority post label on it.  Can you imagine how long it would have taken if they had not done that? 

What ever happened to  "Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"?  Oh ya, I forgot, that's the American creed not ours. Ours is simply, “From anywhere … to anyone.”  It doesn't promise a quick delivery, or even a direct route.

Buried Alive.....But What a Way to Go!

When I was growing up, I heard my mother say, more than once, "I'm afraid I'll die before I read all the books." 

Now, that sounds crazy, I know, and I didn't understand what she meant at the time. I'm getting a much clearer picture of it now though. 

My name is Karen and I'm a bookaholic.  I love books, not just to read, but to have and to hold. I like to own them.  I cannot seem to pass up a good book or a good bargain on books.

It used to just be magazines. I would subscribe to as many as 7, maybe 9 different publications all at the same time.  I read them in the order they came in, stacking them on a specific shelf in my office, so I'd know which one to read next.  No cheating allowed.  

I had no time to read real books because if I stopped to read one, (as I did as a treat from time to time) I'd fall behind in the magazines. I hate reading magazines that are a month in arrears, especially if there is a holiday involved.  There would always be some craft or recipe that I would have loved to have made, but found it too late. 

If I bought books, (and I was always buying books), they were non-fiction on the topic of whatever I was interested in at the time. I have a library full of books on Writing,  Photography, Tai Chi, and Painting.  This is fine as it's not necessary to read all of these books from cover to cover. They can be accessed when you want to solve a problem or learn something new. I likely have too many painting books now, but will often put sticky notes as flags on various pages in 3 or 4 at a time, to give me hints on how to handle whatever I'm thinking of trying next. I'm never sorry to have invested in books. 

I promised myself that I would stop subscribing to magazines for a while, as I really do enjoy reading a good story that lasts for a few days....or sometimes weeks, depending on how busy I am.  The library had moved to a new location clear across town, so I started gathering ones I'd like to read at home.  I belonged to a club where they would mail you four new ones each month. Sometimes I wasn't keeping up with those very well, so I'd quit, but they would offer me a "Welcome back" package that I just couldn't resist, so I ended up with a box full that are waiting to be read.

In recent years I've been winning a few books each year from either Goodreads.com or the publishers themselves. This year I've been extremely lucky and have won a lot more books than usual. I do get those read as I tend to review books I win. The thing is, in the meantime, I have picked up a few that I wanted to read at yard sales, and then one of the local churches held a huge book sale and I got a whole lot more. Well hey, they were selling them for a dollar or so. How could I pass up a bargain like that?  Books can entertain me for quite a while for that small investment.  Besides, have you seen the price of books in the stores today?  I'd have to mortgage the house to feed my habit!

Then I discovered that Amazon and other sites sometimes offer digital books for free. I downloaded a few of them.  I now have several of those stored too, waiting to be read. Luckily I also discovered that I'd really much rather read books with real pages, so I've pretty well stopped accumulating the digital ones.

Suddenly I realize I have a problem.  I've become a book hoarder.  I have more books now than I can handle, even if I sat and did nothing but read for an entire year. I have not even started these ones I got from the church book sale.

I finally understand how my mother felt.  I'm going to die before I read all the books.....likely even just the ones I've accumulated here.

Digital Books, Not My Thing!

Some people seem to think that books printed on paper will disappear.  I sure hope not.

I'm currently reading my third book in digital format and I can't say that I like the experience.  Other than the fact that I can read in low light, without using additional electricity, I don't see much of an advantage.  In fact, it seems that just as I get to an exciting part, I have to plug the darn thing in and recharge it.  Or often, the unit is recharging at the end of the day, when I'd like to settle down and read for a while.  Not convenient.  I'd like to pick up my book whenever I like, not just when it has enough juice to accommodate me.

I find I really have to pay attention to what chapter I'm on, because a finger can slip and cause the pages to scroll by.  One time I ended up at the end of the book, when really I wasn't even halfway through it. Since page numbers don't automatically show up on the page, it was hard to find my way back to where I was. I quickly learned to make some mental note of at least what chapter I an reading.

Then today I got a scare.  I'm reading "George, a Gentleman of the Road" by P.A. Davies.  This is a talented British writer that I actually met on Facebook.  He offered me to send me one of his digital books, totally free of charge.  I even got to choose which one.  When I had trouble opening the file he sent me, he pointed out when Amazon was offering the book for free about a month later. I got it then.  I have been thoroughly enjoying it, but I thought I lost it today. 

 

I have a tablet that has a few different apps for books on it, including Kindle. Every time I have opened Kindle lately, it has told me that I have an unauthorized book in there, and asked if I want to delete it.  I have several books in there and this notification was not telling me which of them I was about to lose, so no, I did not want to delete it.  Some of them I paid for, and the free ones would no longer be free.  I seemed to be able to continue reading the one I was in the middle of, with no problem, so I continued to dismiss this notice.  Until today.  I got distracted and hit the wrong button. The book that disappeared was the one I was reading. I groaned so loud you could hear me all over the house!  I'm well into this book.  In fact, I've read 82% now, and as much as I'm enjoying it, I wouldn't want to have to buy the book with so little left to read. 

I went to Amazon, and saw it offered for a price, so I started to wonder if I could get it through inter library loan. I doubted our local library would have it.  I checked my Amazon account and it just showed that I had been looking at the book recently, but it did not show up amoung my orders.  I just happened across a spot where Amazon had a button that said "Manage Your Kindle"   so I clicked on that.  There it was, George, listed among my other Kindle books.  I clicked on that and it had an option to send it to my device, so I chose that. I was able to breath a major sigh of relief when the book showed up on my tablet again, among my collection.  I can finish reading it now, and I'm very grateful for that. I had just reached a part of the story where there was a major turn of events, and I wanted to know what would happen next.  Now I can go find out. 

Apparently Amazon keeps a record of every book you buy in case you need to re-download them for any reason. If you delete or lose a book, or purchase a new Kindle, you can simply connect to Amazon's servers and begin rebuilding your library.  I won't panic next time this happens.  But I still hope there will never be a next time. 

I've taken the tablet outdoors on a nice summer day, thinking I could relax and read for a while.  I had to come back in as I couldn't see the screen in all that sunlight.  Maybe real e-readers can handle that.  I don't know.  I just know my tablet cannot, and I certainly have not been convinced to give up my paper books for one of those yet.

Though I have been using a computer since the days of the Commodore 64, I find I am strangely not ready to turn to technology when it comes to reading.  In fact, when faced with a page full of text on my computer, I generally turn on Read Please, and sit and listen while the page is read to me. My eyes don't seem to like to track all those words across a screen.  Reading a book on the tablet is at least better than that.

I have a pile of old fashioned non-digital books waiting for me, and I'll happily turn to them when I simply want to read and relax in the future.

As for the rest of you, if you haven't read George, A Gentleman of the Road, I urge you to seek it out. It's a heartwarming and often amusing story I'm sure you will enjoy. It's also available in paperback.
As for myself, now I'll be looking for a copy of Letterbox and The Good in Mister Philips by the same author. Paul, P.A Davies has a new fan.