New Watercolor and the Kindle

This is from a photo I took when Thelma and I went to Schoodic Point. It was our last trip together, as it turned out. It's on a different kind of paper from what I'm used to and has a harder surface, but I liked it just the same. The other day at Sydney's I tried a watercolor on 300 lb paper and it looked awful. The paint soaked into the paper so much that it had none of the sparkle that I want in watercolor. Thanks to the fact that I have new supplies I now have some of my old favorite Arches 140 pound cold press. Diana gave me this new paper, for which I am very grateful. I'll certainly use it.

I have just ordered the second of my blog books.......a service available on a web site that prints personal books. This blog is so long that I am doing it by year, starting with my first entry in 2005. It is a real treat to see it in book form. Perhaps it's my age, but I like being able to hold a book, put it on a shelf, pass it around. There is something impermanent about the stuff on the computer, something that is not quite real. Even putting something on a disk to save it seems precarious. How long will the technology be around? What happens when it becomes too advanced to play the disk? It's not that I want it to last forever, but for as long as I or anyone else wants it, it will exist in a tangible form. You can hold it in your lap, turn its pages.

And speaking of holding books, amazingly I have become enthralled with the Kindle. Now you can download books from out of the air and read them on a little screen roughly the size of the page of a book. You can make the print bigger or smaller to suit you. You turn the page with the touch of a button....bookmark your place in the same way. If you don't know the meaning of a word in your book, you can look it up instantly in the included dictionary. In fact, if you don't feel like reading yourself, the Kindle will read to you. I want one of these marvelous machines because it is so hard for me to read books now that my eye condition is worse. Also, despite everything, I am fascinated by these computerized gadgets that drag things out of nowhere and put them at your fingertips. It's magic to those of us who can't understand one thing about the process. It is a total mystery.........