Thankfully, yesterday I was feeling about 75% human. Human enough that I could a) deal with both my kids (since they closed school because of ice - Nashville doesn't have the equipment to deal with a lot of ice on the roads) and b) get a bunch of things done around the house. I was amazed at how much I got done in such a short amount of time. It helped, I think, that I was listening to Home Improvement: The Undead Edition, edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner. Good books always help me stay focused on what I need to do. I did end up hitting my physical wall before I wanted to, but I still feel good about what I did get done.
Being sick gave me a chance to play with my Kindle Fire a lot more. I did do some reading (I'm rereading American Gods by Neil Gaiman right now), but mainly I used it as my conduit to the web. I've been downloading a lot of apps for it - some games (like Angry Birds Free
and 250+ Solitaire Collection
), some essentials (like gReader (Google Reader | RSS)
and MailDroid
), some for productivity (like Cozi Family Organizer
and Evernote
) and a whole host of others. Far and away, my favorite is Evernote. Since I've been lying in bed most of the week, I've spent a lot of time reading my RSS feeds. And since I like sharing goodies with my readers (which reminds me, I've listed all the book giveaways and goodies that I've found over the last week over on Views from the Reader Side - other goodies and giveaways to be listed here tomorrow.... probably), I wanted a way to keep track of the pages on which I'd found things to share. I can't save things easily in my feed reader (well, I can, but I wanted something I could make personal notes with if necessary), so I went looking. I wasn't sure about Evernote - I have a ton of "note" programs all over the place that I've only used in a limited capacity. But I decided to give it a try. I love the fact that I can have separate "notebooks" to put the notes in, that I can include audio and photo posts and that I can tag things under numerous tags. It's an easy touch for me to get into the program from my feed reader on my Kindle and then an easy few more touches to drop it in the correct notebook, tag it and note it. And since the information is kept in the cloud rather than on the device, it meant that I was able to pull it down to the desktop when I was ready to work on my Giveaways post last night. Major plus. The only thing I didn't like was the fact that I can't put notes into multiple notebooks with one click. There are times, particularly with the book blogs that I read, that I want to share something with my readers and keep note of a book I want to read later. I just need to get in the habit, I think, of saving it a second time to another notebook.
Apparently, Teddy has been bitten by the love bug. There's a little girl in his class, Sonduce (not sure of the spelling) that Teddy has talked about occasionally as one of his best friends. I asked him the night before last how things have been since he started back to school, who he's been playing with, etc. He told me that when he and Sonduce went to their respective buses in the afternoon, they said good-bye to each other because "we love each other". My eyebrows raised. Not because he loved someone - since he was around 3, he had a crush on his friend Ruby. But that... that was different. This was a little girl I didn't know. I asked him if she was his girlfriend and he blushed and said "Yes". I can't help but tease him a little, though I know I shouldn't. My mom still teases me about my first "boyfriend", Ramon Bennett. I actually have a picture of our "wedding" in kindergarten. It makes me wonder if the same will happen with Teddy. Probably not, but it does make me smile.
I know I had more brain droppings to write about, but I can't think of them at the moment. Well, that and the fact that I've got to get us ready to go to the library. Busy day ahead!
