Limited Choices

I must be getting old (forgive me if I quote my mother!).  I am finding more and more that I am just too sleepy at night to write this journal entry and if I haven't written it earlier in the evening, I am actually writing it early on the day that is is dated.

Last night we went out to dinner with friends, came home to watch Jeopardy and then The Daily Show and then I was just too tired to do anything but go to sleep.

I woke up, as I always do, sometime later, and lay there, as I always do, trying to figure out what time it was and how long I'd been asleep.  I figured it was between 3 and 4 a.m.  If it was 3 a.m., I would try to get back to sleep in the recliner.  If it was 4, I would come into my office and work on this entry.

It was 3:30, so I opted for trying to go back to sleep, but instead I was sitting there trying to figure out what to write here, and also what I wanted to write to my Compassion child, Emmanuella (from Ghana) from whom I had received a letter yesterday.  The two "thinks" were actually kind of connected.

Emmanuella had told me she was reading a book called "The Wicked Stepmother" and was learning a lot from it. I decided to see if I could find it on Amazon--and I did.  It's apparently an Ugandan story about the second wife of a man and her jealousy about the son of the first wife.  The first wife dies and the second wife pretends to be mother to the now motherless boy, but is always trying to make sure her own son comes first in the father's eyes.  She wants to make sure her son will inherit the father's "stuff" when he dies. She finally decides to kill the boy and puts poison in his lunch, but she had given her own son the better lunch, with a bit of meat in it, and he decided to share it with his stepbrother, so the stepmother's son ate the poisoned meal and dies.  Not exactly a pretty story and I wondered what Emmanuella was learning from it, but the book comes with questions after each of the four chapters, which I see could spark some interesting discussions.

I wanted to ask her about her own culture, compared to that of the Ugandan village in the book. For example, are crickets a special treat of children in Ghana, as they are the children of this book.  Is it common for a man to have more than one wife?  Does the village get together to bless new acquisitions, as they do the father's new bicycle, etc.?

Obviously I got the book for my Kindle.  However, it was $3 and I didn't want to read it badly enough to pay for it so when I noticed it was part of the new Kindle Unlimited subscription program I decided to take advantage of the free 30 day policy and joined so I could get "The Wicked Stepmother" for free.  

We had discussed Kindle Unlimited with Jeri and Phil the night before.  You pay $10/month and all of the books you want to read are "free."  The promise is that you can read hundreds of thousands of books under the new program. It's quite controversial because if you read a book from the Unlimited program, Amazon tracks how much of the book you read and only pays authors for the number of pages you actually read, which smacks entirely of Big Brother watching your reading habits.  There has been lots of discussion about that policy on Facebook lately.

But this was a 30 day free trial and would save me $3 in reading "The Wicked Stepmother."

I then got out my list of upcoming books for our book club to check availability under the Unlimited service and discovered that none of those books were available through Unlimited.  I randomly checked the titles of books that I am interested in reading which are not on the book club list and discovered that none of THOSE books are available either.  Not sure quite what the "hundreds of thousands" of books includes, but apparently nothing that I am interested in and nothing current.

So as soon as I have written my letter to Emmanuella to ask her some questions about her feelings about the book, I will end my free trial of Amazon Unlimited because it says in your Unlimited contract that if you opt out of the program they will remove any books you have chosen from your Kindle.

This may be a good program for some, but I personally think it's a terrible program for someone like me and a great program for Amazon to bilk yet more money out of its customers!

A Certain Smile

11 June 2013

Walt went and picked up the mail he had held while we were in Santa Barbara and there was a bumper crop.  Two journal through Swap Bog, a surprise box full of neat stuff, and two letters from Compssion kids.  One of the letters even had a photo of Emmanuella, the girl I sponsored because she looked so sad.  Her subsequent photos always showed a stern faced child looking seriously into the camera.

I was delighted to see her in this picture today.  She has had her head shaved and with the bald head and that hint of a smile she looks just gorgeous.   Her eyes really stand out, somehow, more than they did when she had hair.

She is only 12 years old, but she is going to be a beautiful woman when she grows up.

It was really nice to go and have breakfast with my mother this morning.  While we were away, Ed had come up and hung photos and the place looks like "hers" now.  She doesn't think she's living in a motel any more.

 

She was also sitting in a chair with a cup of coffee, which she had gone to get from the lobby because she didn't feel like making coffee...another good sign.   She's getting into the swing of things.

We talked for awhile and then went off to breakfast.  After we had finished eating, Jane, one of the residents whose name I know, came to sit with us.   I had told her last week that I was taking off for Santa Barbara and she asked me how my trip was.  I thought she was just being polite, but it turns out her daughter lives in Santa Barbara and she wanted to know if she could hitch a ride with us the next time we are going down there.

My mother has no desire to go to Santa Barbara, but we'll take Jane!

After breakfast we chatted a bit longer.  I reminded her that my 2nd cousin Niecie was going to come today to give her a pedicure (she's a cosmetologist).   I gave her a ticket for a complementary lunch so that she could take Niecie to lunch, then I left.

Later in the day Niecie called to report on her visit and say how much she loved the place.  I asked if she had lunch.  She said she had.  I asked if my mother had used her complementary pass.  She had not.

Sigh.

I just have to assume that she won't remember anything an act accordingly!  (This morning she had to ask me what her last name was, which she forgot briefly.)

Tomorrow I'm taking her to get some papers notorized and the next day we're doing "high tea" at a tea house in Dixon with my friend Pat, who, I know, will get along very well with my mother.

Also in the mail were two journals, one a "shared knowledge" journal, where one person puts in some article she finds interesting, writes a short bio and tells why she chose that article, then passes it along to the next person, who does the same.  When the book is filled, it gets returned to the original sender.

The other is the Composition Journal (photos of the pages of my journal are on line and linked in the left column).  The journal was beautifully done and I spent the afternoon looking through it.  We don't have much in common, but my word is she creative in the way she presented her thoughts.  I wrote a note telling her how much I appreciated it and how creative she had been.

The partner who received MY 100+ page book which was about 1/3 designed to match her likes, including things like Hello Kitty items, a bunch of foreign coins (which she collects), a few pages of Mickey Mouse collage.  I also included stickers, envelopes, a CD and other surprise gifts along the way.  I know that I'm not particularly artistic, but it was like a slap in the face to get the comment:   "Thanks." 

That's it.  Just "thanks."  When I wrote to her to question her reply, she seemed to be angry that I would even say anything about it.   My initial response was that I never wanted to put that kind of time and energy into another book ever again, but then I remembered how much fun I had doing it...and how glad I was that I'd taken photos of all the pages so if my partner doesn't like it, I can at least remember what I did and how much I enjoyed the creativity.