A good day

It was warm enough to open the windows today and let the fresh breeze blow through the house.  That alone would have made it a good day, for me.  Add to it the fact that it was a day off and I had plans to go hunt down Windsweep Farm for fresh eggs. 

I'm not a locavore, normally, except for fresh corn and tomatoes in the summertime.  But fresh eggs are my weakness, and I've been searching for a reliable source for them practically ever since I moved here.  I've had a few leads, but none ever panned out. So I was reduced to buying brown eggs from the store, which while okay, aren't as good as truly fresh eggs by a jogger's last mile.  I found Windsweep Farm by a Google search for "Fresh eggs, Dixon, IL"  That led me to their Facebook page, which I promptly "liked", so now I get their updates, too.  They have a pretty comprehensive FAQ on Facebook; and they offer not only fresh eggs, but raw milk, fresh meat, and seasonal produce (looking forward to this!).  If I had a freezer, I'd already be figuring out how to budget for fresh beef, but since all I have is the top of the fridge, that won't be happening anytime soon.  I don't know where we'd put a chest freezer if we had one, anyway.

So I copied the directions to the farm onto my note app on my Droid X phone, added the phone number, and took off.  Lucky for me, it wasn't complicated and I had no trouble finding the place. It's a pretty drive that will be even nicer when things green up some.   Also lucky for me, the lady was outside and showed me which door to use for the milking room in the barn (where the eggs are kept), otherwise I'd have probably been stumbling around scaring the cows for half an hour until I found it.  But now I know, and can just help myself next time. 

Today being St. Patrick's day, and Chris being Irish, I made corned beef.  It's only taken me six years to get it right...but this year's turned out to be the best I've ever eaten.  Apparently the secret is the crockpot, and cooking the veggies separately.  I don't like the taste when I cook the veggies with the meat, and Chris doesn't eat cabbage anyway, so I made it all separate and had *almost* colcannon, by combining the cabbage and mashed potatoes on my own plate.  I also made steamed baby carrots, which may not be traditional, but are darned good!   Normally I prefer the hash that comes after the main corned beef meal, but this year the meat by itself was fabulous.  The hash will be fabulous too, though, because this year, I get to top it with a golden yolked, beautiful fresh fried egg!

Ramblings about my reading obsession

Those of you who know me at all know that I have been obsessed with reading ever since I read my first book (Laurie and the Yellow Curtains), when I was somewhere around 4.
Once the process "clicked" in my tiny little brain I was hooked and that started a lifelong love affair with the written word.  My mom shaped my addiction by having mysteries all over the house.  Some of my favorite authors came from her.  Katherine Hall Page, Sarah Graves, Nancy Atherton.
If it's a cozy mystery, I'll probably at least try it, and most of the time I'll like it.  Nancy Drew, Sue Barton, Cherry Ames, all of those were childhood friends, and sometimes they were more real to me than the kids I played with in the backyard.  Now I've added another addiction: urban fantasy.  It's all Harry Dresden's fault...I now have to keep two genre lists of new releases, my book budget is at an all time high, and even then it's impossible to buy all the new releases every month that I'd like to have and/or read.  My calibre collection is now in the thousands, and realistically, will I ever have time to read all of them?  It's something I don't like to think about. Every gadget I buy has to meet one criteria: I must be able to read on it.  My phone is a Droid X (Aldiko).  My Sony 950 is nearly  my constant companion.  I unexpectedly ended up with an iPad and what's the first thing I put on it?  iBooks, yep.

I tried figuring how many feet of shelves I'd need if my ebook collection was physical once.  It added up to more wall space than this house even has.

All that being said brings me to my point (maybe).  This semester is my last General Education class for my degree,  English Composition II.  It's more a reading class than a writing one so far, and it's made me think about how and why I read.  I read for pleasure, for stress relief, for life.  Reading is as essential as breathing for me.  A world without books and reading wouldn't be worth living in in my opinion.

Things no one tells you about the iPad (for Apple newbies)

Far be it from me to advocate drinking the Apple koolaid, but I have to admit I am in love with my new iPad.  However, it took a lot of frustration (mainly on Chris's part), to get to this point. 

Before I start, however, let me give you some background.  I am not a Mac girl.  I'm usually fairly neutral on the subject of Mac vs. PC, but Apple has done some really irritating stuff lately (think Agency Pricing Model...), and I've operated Macs before, and to be perfectly honest, I just didn't "get it".   What's all the fuss?  Chris is pretty anti-Apple in most cases. He can use a Mac, but like me, doesn't see what the fuss is about.  And closed or proprietary anything drives him up a wall. So when Chris said we were getting an iPad, my first internal reaction was to rush him to the Emergency Room for an MRI.  Since he wasn't exhibiting any other unusual symptoms and seemed quite lucid except for that aberration, I managed to suppress that, *grin*.  Besides, they are pretty shiny and I'm a confirmed gadget freak. 

This brings me to the number one thing no one tells a non-Apple person about the iPad.  You can't plug it into a PC and have the PC detect the iPad as an external usb device.   About two seconds after discovering this, Chris declared the iPad "junk", and handed it over to me. 

Well, it's no secret to anyone that I possess more patience than Chris does about *most* things.  I took the poor orphan iPad and followed the instructions to the letter and had it up and running in about fifteen minutes.  The hardest part was getting it to play nice with our wi-fi, but that's partly because Chris has it locked down with some huge long password designed to be a complete impossibility to crack.  In our neighborhood if you plug a wi-fi device in, you won't find our network! 

This brings me to the second thing no one tells you about the iPad (and Apple in general).  You don't make folders and store stuff, everything is stored within the programs.  Photos are stored in the photo program. Music is stored in iTunes.  Books are stored in iBooks.  App files are stored within the application.  I can see where this would drive a control freak crazy in a big hurry, but I have to admit after using the iPad and installing some apps I can at least see how it works.  I guess this is why Apple forces you to use iTunes to put anything on an iPad.  If you ever want your stuff back, though, I highly suggest syncing it to another Apple product, and having a backup of the original on your PC, because you sure as heck ain't getting it off any other way.  I'm assuming this is what "sync" is for. 

After all that, I'm sure you're thinking, "And you said you LOVED it?"  Yeah, well.  I do.  It's going to replace my Windows netbook/tablet (the ASUS T91MT).  I can do everything on it that I could do on the netbook, and I can usually do it faster, and believe it or not, the onscreen keyboard on the Mac is a lot more manageable than the physical one on the netbook for me.  Go figure.  I am totally in love with the iBooks reading interface, though I can assure you I will not be buying anything from the iBookstore (see Agency Pricing Model, above...).  Good thing for me it has no issue with unDRM'd ePub files.  I'm managing this by pointing it at the LAN address of my calibre content server and hitting "get".   Safari asks if I want to open the file in iBooks, which of course I do, and voila! there is the book all ready to go.  See what I mean about files being stored within the programs? 

So far I've done a lot of playing and not much of anything productive.  I do plan to get Docs to Go, eventually ($14.99, though I suppose if you compare it to the cost of Office it's a bargain, right?), so I can edit Word  and Excel files.  Assuming I can figure out how to get them on the iPad...