Screens

I made it to Chicago. The weather is a surprise. It’s barely 70 today, though it is supposed to get warmer by the weekend. After all the semi brown lawns in drought stricken L.A., it was nice to see the lush lawns and trees heavy with leaves. Also nice to take a shower and not feel guilty that it was to long.

I am laughing at the pile of stuff sitting next to me. As I move around the apartment, I take my cell phone, Ipad, paper appointment book and landline with me. I have four email addresses I am keeping track of and two Facebook pages which means there are bings going off all the time and stuff flashing on the screens. I hear the bings go through the phone, then the Ipad and finally a click on my computer. And since I just got a new hand me down Iphone, I have my old phone and a cord to hook it to my laptop so I can take photos off of it. Of course, I have cords and chargers for everything.

The junk mail turns up faster than I can delete it. Sometimes no sooner do I delete a list of junk emails than they pop right back up again. I am sure I am not the only one. The funny thing is that I wasn’t getting the emails from my website. They were going into a spam folder.

This dragging all the equipment around the apartment isn’t going to last. I am not one of those people staring at a screen all the time. I don’t like being tethered to all these devices. There is only so long that I can stand looking at a screen. I got an offer from a magazine I subscribe to trying to get me to change to digital. No way. I look forward to spending some time reading the paper edition of it I brought with.

It is a different experience. No screen going dark when you set it aside for a minute. No annoying pop up ads that are hard to get off the screen. And privacy. Who knows what the magazine people are learning about me if I were to read the magazine in a digital edition. It still freaks me to realize that Amazon knows how much of a book you read, can take it back if they so desire, and can basically be in your business. Now apparently, they are taking down book reviewsif they have determined that the reviewer and the author know each other. Nobody seems to know exactly what Amazon means by “know each other.”

On a cheerier note, this morning I did the Marly Bird’s Yarn Thing podcast. Despite technical difficulties, it was fun. Marly is very friendly and we mostly talked about yarn things, which I guess is why it’s called the Yarn Thing :-). I am going to add the link to my website, but in the meantime here it is: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/yarnthing/2015/07/09/mystery-knit-it-author-betty-hechtman

It is definitely a new world of communication. The part I find the most amusing is seeing people sitting in a restaurant ignoring the company they are with in favor of sending text messages to someone who isn't there. What happened to conversation?