Ender's

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Tidying and Laundry

Today is house tidying and laundry day. And vacation prep. I'm having people come in to clean the house while we're in Vegas. I want to get the most bang for our buck, so I need to be sure everything is organized and ready to go (they can't very well put clean sheets on the bed if there are no clean sheets, etc). I'm so looking forward to having a clean house when we get back from Vegas. Let me back up. I'm so looking forward to Vegas! Not so much Vegas as having time away to lounge and read and spa and eat and see our friends. Ahhhh. I'm so lucky to get this break.

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Books

I just finished Ender's Game, which is a science fiction book recommended by Amazon/Kindle because I liked The Hunger Games.  Sci fi is not normally a genre I read, but I thoroughly enjoyed Ender's Game.  I'm looking forward to reading the other two books in the trilogy.  To break things up, though, I'm reading The Two Kinds of Decay.  So far, I am really enjoying it.  The style of writing is very different from most books I read, so that's a good change of pace. I started it fairly late last night and am already 35% done, so I should be done today or tomorrow I'd think.  It must be fairly short.

That's one thing about Kindle (or any other eReader, I'm sure) that is still weird for me: I never quite know if I'm reading a long book or a short one until I start reading and get a feeling for how quickly the percentage done is advancing.  Kindle does not show page numbers (relating back to the paper version), but that still doesn't help me as much as feeling the thickness and weight of a book, it's pages, and seeing it's font.  Not that I'm complaining about the Kindle.  I love it.  I would have wanted a Kindle earlier in life more than I'd want an iPhone or an iPod or any other of the current electronic gadgets.  It is just so much easier for me find books I like via the Kindle than when I go to the book store.  I now download about 10 samples at once, then read them until I find a book I want to buy, then go back to the samples when I'm done and start over.  It's so much more enjoyable for me to find a book I like that way than to stand in a book store or read descriptions online. 

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Underwear and socks

Avery is now opting to wear her sneakers a lot more.  She likes to run and she knows she runs faster in sneakers (or her "French shoes" as we still call them), so she's shifting from loving the sparkly shoes to the practical ones.  This change means she wears socks a lot more often.  After several weeks of having to fish socks out of the hamper, I realized we needed more socks.  So I bought Avery socks and underwear at Target yesterday.  Based on her excitement, you would have thought someone gave her a truckload of toys.  I love how much she loves the small things and the big things and the non-things and well, everything.  Avery's enthusiasm is awesome.