December 26

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Ah, Day after Christmas. Only New Year's Day to get through a this "holiday" season is over. I am very glad.

Now we have a new year to contemplate. I have only seen a couple of stories about New Year resolutions and how to keep them. Normally, I see or hear a flood of such "self help" pieces. For the most part, I either ignore them or laugh. I haven't made "resolutions" for some years. I usually made a couple of mistakes: my resolutions were either too big and too nebulous, or they sounded good but weren't really important to me, or my intentions were derailed by my own perfectionism (which I have been trying for sometime to moderate). Instead of resolutions I think about smaller "goals" which might fall away if circumstances demand I focus on something else and which allow me to step back and learn from inevitable failures. I spent more time last year either stepping back from projects or beginning over when the project didn't satisfy me.

We have light new snow this morning so the storm system that has paralyzed so much of the country continues. We are still in a lucky spot where we haven't had as much snow though the temperatures are painfully cold. I hope the forecasts for warmer (and warmer than normal) temperatures later in the week come through but won't hold my breath. We aren't going anywhere so aren't inconvenienced by either icy roads or cancelled flights. The post Christmas travel chaos should begin any day now as people try to get home and the airlines try to get their systems back on track. Actually, seeing the news on TV, the chaos has continued because the Christmas chaos didn't really end.

Treehugger had this post today: Books Versus E-books Which are Better? The author says that it really depends on the reader, the book, and the kind of e-reader in use. The article doesn't say anything new to me and much I have experienced myself. I got my first e-reader, I think, 20 years ago after resisting for about a decade. It was an early Nook the memory of which I filled after about three years. I bought a second Nook with a large memory and soon exceeded it as well. The I found that Nook was really on a Samsung tablet which would run both Nook and Kindle software. Soon after I bought a iPad and installed both softwares, and have been using it ever since. I have yet to run out of memory. I did like reading a physical book but find the print often is too small for comfort and we simply don't have the room for the physical books anymore. I do like the ability to increase the font size and change the intensity of the light. I also like having the ability to highlight a term or word and look it up from the page. I now use only e-books unless it is a book I want in my little shelf space. I did see one problem that wasn't mentioned: sometimes if I increase the font size the formatting goes all screwy and columns, etc, can run into each other. Going back to the original size. I never considered the carbon "footprint" in either the e-books or physical books and I have never liked having to return the books to the library. Also you really shouldn't make margin notes in someone else's books.