Eating Kindle Crow

So I love The Andy Griffith Show and this particular episode is easily in my Top Five:

I love the humor, I love Opie, and as always, I love the message. But it’s the tag line at the end that I love the best: “Well, you and Aunt Bee are having fried chicken. And I’m having crow.”

My crow-eating story begins when Youngest Junior Hall gave me his old Kindle this Christmas.

You see, I refused to buy a Kindle. I got way up there on my high horse and declared that I would not support Amazon. No Kindle for me. No, sir.

But I had friends with ebooks and they were on Kindle. And there were free books all the time, and they were offered on Kindle. So I downloaded the free Kindle app and put it on my laptop. That was showing ’em!

Except…I have trouble reading on Precious the Laptop.

I love Precious, I do. But she’s a bit long in the tooth. She weighs a TON and she loses her zing after a couple hours and…well, snuggling up with her in bed is just not conducive to sweet dreams and such. So all those books in my Kindle library on Precious the Laptop sort of just…languished there.

Unread.

Ignored.

Unloved.

And then Youngest Junior Hall gave me the Kindle. And we moved a lot of my books to that device. “Oh,” I said. “That’s nice, John. But I’ll probably never read ’em.”

“Maybe you’ll just use it for the games,” he said. “But you’ll have the books, for when you want to read them.”

“But I won’t read ’em,” I said.

“Whatever,” he said.

And then I had to go out of town for a while and I didn’t want to take my library books…so I grabbed the Kindle. And I finally finished the delightful Anywhere But Paradise by my friend, Anne Bustard. I finished it because it was so easy to read on my Kindle.

Yeah.

So now I owe Youngest Junior Hall one of his favorites. I reckon John will be having my world-famous mac ‘n cheese. And I’ll be eating a big helping of Kindle crow.

Catching Up (And So It Begins)

file0001845637670First day of February and I haven’t changed my calendar yet. (Or put away all the holiday stuff. Or returned my overdue library books…)

It looks like my word for 2016 is not going to be CHALLENGE. It’s going to be another C-word: CATCH-UP. And so I’ll start with the Muffin post I shared over the weekend (and forgot to mention until just now.)

I’ve probably written about the subject of finding your own style (and voice) numerous times; I suspect that means I have slip-ups and fall into that old trap of comparing myself to others, falling short, and then trying to write all fancy-schmancy. You can see what I mean in “Stepping Out in Your Own (Writing) Style.”

Fortunately, I always find my way back to me (and my own personal style). I suppose that’s why I used the Popeye quote (“I am what I am.”) instead of getting all fancy-schmancy and quoting Shakespeare.

But I could’ve quoted Polonius from Hamlet, if I’d wanted. I mean, I know the fancy-schmancy quotes, even if I don’t go around spouting them:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Yeah, Mister Man would probably roll his eyes if I threw that quote around. But I bet he’d drop off my library books, if I asked real nice.