Toys

I may have mentioned somewhere that I'm a computer geek, and I have many of the personality traits so often attributed to geeks.  But as a regular, functional human being, I do not have all the quirks that make geeks so beloved.  For instance, I actually have real relationships with real people in the real world and I use their real names (most of the time).

Another idiosyncrasy I don't share with geekdom is the love of gadgets. I have never owned an iPod.  My cell phone is very basic.  It takes pictures and receives and sends email because it is impossible to purchase one that doesn't.  I don't text.  I think my phone would let me text, but I don't text.  It's a phone for heaven's sake.  If you have something to say to me, call (no guarantee I'll answer, but that's another subject).  I don't download ringtones; the ones that came with the phone are fine.  I don't use my cell phone to connect to the internet.  I have three computers with much larger display areas.  Why would I want to surf the net on such a little screen?  I'm 62 years old; most of the time I can't see things that small.  I do have GPS on my cell phone, but not because I'm a geek.  I get lost when I leave my driveway (we've only lived here 28 years)  and when I was still driving, GPS saved my sorry little butt many times.

To be perfectly honest, I hate phones.  Even as a teenager, I was not one of those who spent hours on the phone with friends, female or male.  However, I must admit, when my sisters were becoming teenagers and I was easing my way toward adulthood, between the three of us we did manage to wear out the dialing mechanism on a telephone.  It became impossible to dial out from our home because the dialer seemed to just arbitrarily pick a number that may or may not have been the one you chose.  Seven numbers -- seven opportunities to get it wrong.  Thankfully, this was at a time when you still needed an operator to place long distance calls.   However, good fortune shone down upon us.  This occurred around the same time Ma Bell introduced the touch-tone telephone, with pushbuttons.  Problem solved!  As I was saying before my mind went off on one of the many tangents it so often travels, I don't enjoy talking on the telephone.  Most of the jobs I have had over the years involved too much use of the phone.  Therefore, the odds are pretty much against me answering when it rings.  Two of my favorite inventions are the answering machine and caller I.D.

Yet again, though, I have veered off topic.  I have recently acquired a new toy, which some would call a gadget.  It's not a gadget to me, it is a Godsend.  To me it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.  I have never lived in a time when you couldn't buy sliced bread, but it seems to me sliced bread was probably a fantabulous invention in its day.  My new toy is an eReader.

I am an inveterate reader.   I will read almost anything.  Seldom have I encountered a book that I just could not "get into" (Future Shock by Alvin Toffler comes immediately to mind).  Once I discovered eBay and the fantastic deals I could get on used books, there was no holding me back.  (As an aside, my sister has also discovered an online auction site she loves.  Her choice is (I think) uBid and she buys jewelry in much the same way I buy books.)  I buy books, by the boatload.   If I read a book by an author and I like that author's style, I will go to eBay and buy many more books by that author, particularly if they are a series.  I've been doing this for awhile so our house is littered with books.  When I travel, I usually take four or five books with me, just in case I should happen to finish one or two.  I never abuse a book, but since I buy them used they sometimes come to me in questionable condition.  Once I've read a book, I don't usually have any desire to keep it to reread.  There are notable exceptions to this, and those books will remain with me until my last day on earth, but most books are merely passing through.  I started boxing up the books in our house so we could donate them to Goodwill or a used book store or some other place that takes books.  Now our home is also littered with boxes of books.  They will all eventually find a new home, but in the meantime I decided adding to the disarray is madness.  Thus, the eReader.

I have over 600 books on one little device only slightly larger than a normal paperback.  There is no fear that I might run out of reading material while traveling.  The eReader allows me to group my books by author, or subject matter, or any other category that suits me.  I can change the font size, thereby making it larger in the morning when my eyes aren't so good, and smaller later in the day when I see much more clearly.  If I'm reading a textbook or instruction manual, I have the ability to make notes in the margins.  But for me the best part, the very very best part, is if I encounter a word and I don't know what it means, there is a built-in dictionary.  All I need do is tap on the word twice and I get the definition.  I don't often run across words I don't know, but in the past I always had to find a dictionary (or lately use a computerized dictionary).  I've never been the kind of person who could just ignore the word. That problem is now eliminated as long as I have my eReader.  I feel like a kid at Christmas, which is only appropriate since Bud says the eReader is my Christmas present, even though I got in September.