Oh Where oh Where Has Zeemaid Gone

Those that know me as a particular chatter box may well be surprised to hear so little from me this week. As you know I celebrated a birthday this week.  Thank you for all the good wishes I received on Monday.   While I was very spoilt by my family pretty much all weekend as I had a birthday dinner with the inlaws on Saturday, a birthday barbecue with my side of the family on Sunday, then a lovely dinner out with friends I had to wait until my actual birthday on Monday before I received my last gift. 

In the morning on my actual day, my daughters were surprised that daddy had told them we wouldn't be doing a whole celebration.  He told them we had been doing that all weekend.  Despite the fact that we had done celebrations, I was a trifle disappointed with his attitude.  After all, he has never once had to be responsible for doing anything special for my birthday.  Every year, it's been my mom who gets my cake as we usually have dinner and cake at her house, followed usually by a birthday dinner at his mother's.  This year things were a little different as it wasn't until the last minute that we knew we were doing anything with my family.  Even dinner out with friend's was planned at the last minute.  I was determined I wasn't going to be the one doing the planning so I kept out of it and have to admit I was relieved when he pulled something together on such short notice. 

Anyways, my daughters decided they would surprise me themselves and they did.  As soon as they got home from school they headed up to their rooms where they planned a party for me.  When the time was right, I was escorted upstairs to E's room where I got to sit in the place of honour and open my "presents".  I was very pleased to receive a hand drawn card from E and just as pleased to discover the large Hello Kitty stuffy that had hastily been wrapped in tissue paper.  Not to be outdone, O offered up his favourite stuffed kitty cat and liked it so well that he promptly ran off to find something else to stuff into the box to give me. 

As I looked around at my kids, I recognized these moments as one of the benefits of being a mom.  Never mind that they weren't real presents, it was more fun watching their excitement as they showed their love for me.  They were so eager and so assured of themselves that what they had planned for me was special and it really was.

Of course, I was just as pleased when I got my "real" present from my husband and it's that present that's primarily been the reason for my lack of posting this week.  As I've said before, I'm an avid reader and now he's just given me more reasons to keep on reading.

So far, I absolutely love it

The screen doesn't glare, so it doesn't irritate my eyes at all and it loads up and turns off easily.  The battery seems to last a long time.  Apparently I can sync it with my smart phone (don't know why I would want to) and it's light and easy to hold. It comes with a 100 free books right off the bat.  Although a lot of these are classics and ones I had read already. (Of course)

The only hard part is that we really can't afford for me to be constantly buying new ebooks even though some books start as low as $0.89.  Still it would be a charge on the credit card and there's no getting away from hubby's eagle eye on that.  So I've had to scour the ebook section on my local library website to borrow.  Unfortunately, a lot of people obviously read ebooks because so many are unavailable to read.  I don't get this.  It's a digital copy, why do they limit it to one reader at a time?  When you consider how many people live on my island who have access to the ebooks, and there are apparently only 2500, you can imagine how long the wait list can be.

Having said that though I love it and I felt absolutely hip and cool when I sat in the coffee shop drinking my latte and reading it.  Because while technology is out there and I see so many people with Iphones etc... I don't think I've seen one person out wandering around with an ebook reader. 

I think I've read 6 books since I was given it on Monday night.  Of course, 4 of those books were relatively small ones but you can understand why I haven't been posting much this week.  My smart aleck 4 year old even said to me... "Boy you sure don't like daddy's present."

What do you think of Ebooks readers?  What are you reading right now?