Can It Be?

Yes! Sewing for MEMEMEMEMEEEEEEEE has begun! I've cut out a long-sleeved draped neck top from the pattern morph of my TNT Ottobre tee from the print I showed you the other day.The Fire makes a good pattern weight. ;-)

I'll sew this up tomorrow night for FSNI and maybe I'll get something else done too. I'm full of ME mojo!






But I'm actually not too worried about quantity right now. It will be a very casual Thanksgiving and if I have to wear the same 2 pairs of jeans the entire time, I'll survive.

The hard part for sewing output will be keeping myself off my new Kindle Fire. I just adore this little gizmo. Between it and my phone, they do everything computer-wise I want to do while I'm away from my desktop — which, let's face it, is mostly just playing. ;-)

I'm not going to do a full review of the Fire because there are lots of them around. This one (Yes, it's that good) covers all the main points and I think it's very accurate. But I'll share my thoughts over the next few days/weeks as they come to me and I'll try to answer questions left in the comments.

I connected to my county library last night and downloaded 4 books, for FREE. Love the library. Love NOT GOING to the library to get books. It was so easy, as Amazon and my library talk to each other and all I have to do is check out the books and then go to my Amazon account and send them to my Fire. The whole process took about 5 minutes, after I had decided on the books I wanted.

But have I even cracked any of them yet? Nope. I'm currently reading Water for Elephants, downloaded for free from Amazon's Lending Library (well, "free" if you sub to Amazon Prime, which I did because it's well worth it). I see a little label on it with 32%, so it looks like I'm just about one-third done with it already.

This is my actual Fire, complete with smudgy fingerprints. These are all Droid X cellphone pics, BTW. Not bad. I emailed them to my desktop from my phone. Hah. I'm such a dork.

If I have any complaint at all, it's that my cover/case has still not shipped. Apparently, the green is on backorder. So I ordered a brown one tonight. I can live without green but I WANT a cover for this thing before my trip.

As you can see, it's set up like a bookshelf. You scroll through side to side and up/down and the media flips like on a carousel. It's a pretty intuitive interface, although there is a good manual pre-loaded too. I'm a geek. I like to read manuals and always do that when I get a new anything.

I don't know if I'd buy one as a gift for the technology-challenged for just reading. A lesser Kindle should be fine for that and lots cheaper. I can't compare e-ink to the Fire's display because I've never seen or used e-ink. I'm so used to reading on a screen that that aspect doesn't bother me a bit.

I love being able to eat my lunch at work and read at the same time without needing to prop up a book or rearrange when I need to turn pages. I look like quite the dweeb reading on my Fire with earbuds to my phone in my ears. Very convenient that my office PC has 2 front USB ports so I'm always charging.

I love that the screen is big enough to not feel puny to my old eyes, like my phone. Video is gorgeous on it, and streaming is very smooth. Almost better than cable. The color/resolution is beautiful. Better than my phone, I think, a Droid X, and equal to Alex's Droid Razr.

I've downloaded some magazines onto it, but I haven't really explored what's available yet. It definitely would be great if Threads would go the e-book route. How do we start a write-in campaign. I've looked at Lucky, Self, and Glamour because those were free. Lucky isn't very interactive but it's just as good as reading the paper version to me, without the hassle of deciding what to do with old issues. The other two have interactive extras, which is both cool and annoying because I feel like I'm losing my place. But that's just the newness talking. I'll figure out my own process. I also wonder if it's my imagination but the advertisement pages seem to need an extra swipe to turn the page, like they are programmed to be looked at longer. It wouldn't surprise me if this is true, but I honestly like ads in magazines so it doesn't bug me.

Susan asked if there's a spreadsheet app. There is, an actual spreadsheet, but I haven't used it yet. I don't see me loading up either my phone or my Fire with a pattern or fabric catalog. Too much work to do that. ;-) But maybe I can export my pattern catalog from ListPro (Palm days) to something to work on one of them. But I'm not in a rush to do that yet. There are also other cataloging apps that I haven't explored yet.

Speaking of Palm, I *love* that there's a Graffiti app for my phone so I can "write" with my finger in Palm-ese. I'm much faster with that than texting on a tiny keyboard. I can type 90+ wpm on the real keyboard and about 8 on the phone. Hah. I hope Kindle gets that app too, although its keyboard is big enough that I don't feel clumsy on it.

And with that, I'm going to go watch the end of the football game and browse through an e-magazine, but I couldn't let this comment from Bev pass:

"Are you sure you're getting a divorce? Any time there are issues, you guys are there for each other."

Yes, I am definitely getting a divorce. And, no, we are not there for each other. Only one of us is there for anyone and she's tired of living on this one-way street. ;-)