Late but checkin' in. GO BUCKS Thank you all for the lovely, funny, glittery, eggy, puzzling, yummy, cards this year. I'm speechless. Once again I can't bear to throw any of them away so they'll go into my buffet (egg ON the buffet) with the last two years. Kids are still asking me why I hang a picture of a cat named Pisser on our tree. GO BUCKS I love and cherish each and every one of them. You guys that got the winter scene...my front yard when we were snowed in!! GO BUCKS Only cottagers could be this creative!!!! Love you all and Happy New Year. georgeanne GO BUCKS P.S. Diana...counting the days!

Earlier this month my DH went to China for a couple of weeks so we broke down and finally got him a Kindle. Well, it was more like I dragged him kicking and screaming into getting a Kindle. (No, I don't have one but I'd gotten one for my elderly mother and drilled her in how to use it so I knew pretty much all about them.) My husband went from being a reluctant Kindle owner to an avid Kindle owner. He travels a LOT and he was always packing piles of paperbacks in his luggage. Sometimes he'd run out and wind up buying more paperbacks and carting them home. (One reason we quite literally have thousands of them.) He loved just having the Kindle to pack when going to China. He loved that he had 90 books loaded into it. (All but one of them free.) He's in Washington state now and didn't even look at packing paperbacks, just stuck his Kindle in his carryon. As far as the ipad goes, yes it does a lot more than a Kindle does BUT, I wouldn't recommend it for reading for long periods of time. The display screen of a Kindle really does look like a printed page....a printed page taht you can adjust the text size. An ipad or any tablet thing like that will be backlit and while that might make it easier for you to read in a roomw ith no lights, it'll also tire your eyes more....just like reading a computer screen all day.

On Saturday I went to the public library booksale, and got 7 books, $1 apiece, among them: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, An Irish Country Doctor by Patrick Taylor and The New Yorkers by Cathleen Schine. Cece, Did you finish The September Society? Did you like it? I read recently the first book by this author, A Beautiful Blue Death, and liked it. Lemonhead, I read Moon Tiger years ago. I didn't like it. I'd be interested in hearing how you feel about it. Kren, They did a movie of The French Lieutenant's Woman years ago, with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. I haven't read the book, but the movie was pretty good. Kath, I'm with Vee, you have to tell us about your trip when you reach to your final destination. It would be interesting if you add which books you read in each leg of the trip.

I've finally gotten around to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and it is very easy book to read. I'm glad I'm listening rather than reading because the margins would be covered with arguments and I'm sure my blood pressure would be through the roof. Listening moves me along to quickly to get too invested in counterpoints. He cherry picks the data that supports his theory and ignoring what doesn't. I was willing to believe his biological arguments because, well, I'm no biologist. But when he started the discussion of the domestication of animals, I thought of all the recent research on the expression of genes that makes his entire premise wrong. I hate it when people get interesting ideas about the way the world happened and "feel" that the idea is just too great to rigorously verify.