I still haven’t dismantled our Christmas tree. I don’t like to do it when the kids are around. They always want to help, and . . . they’re just not actually helpful. It slows me down, and there’s the risk of breaking items (somehow there’s less reverence when it comes to plucking things off the tree and packing them away as opposed to unwrapping and hanging them). Plus, the whole procedure is melancholy. I like to treat myself to a tranquil house and a mindless chick flick on tv to get through the process. But last week we were gifted with five giant bags of hand-me-downs to sort through, and then we had a sister and brother-in-law visiting on Friday, so I gave up on the tree last week. Tomorrow, maybe.
But besides the tree, the house has mostly resurfaced after the holiday chaos. Last week I went to the library to pick up a couple of audiobooks. For all the most boring stuff, like cleaning the kitchen and grocery shopping, I like to listen to something. I’ve caught up with all my podcasts, so I got a couple of mindless audiobooks to help me through the tedium of all of that. And one of them was so cute that I thought I’d show it to you:
Shut up, you guys. Stop judging me for listening to a Jodi Picoult. I’ve tried to do the classics on audiobooks, but I just stop listening accidentally. So now I pretty much go for the not-too-challenging. But isn’t it so cute, how it looks like a teensy book? It’s a Playaway preloaded audio player. So instead of having to come home and rip my CDs and then put them on my MP3 player, i can just turn it on and hit play. Or, well, I turn it on and hit play and then have to go hunt for a triple A battery because there’s no battery in it. But once it’s got a battery, it’s super-convenient.
Sadly, they seem pretty expensive, but you can see how it’s a good library item because it’s easy for anyone to do, and you don’t have to worry about scratching or damaging CDs or losing track of them. Anyway, I love that little format. The book itself is not one of her best. But if you happen to go to the library and see another book that’s on a Playaway thing-a-ma-jig, you should totally borrow it.
Oh, and speaking of chick-oriented random pop culture, I just watched a great documentary the other night, First Position, about boys and girls competing in a really high-level international ballet competition. It’s got plenty of gorgeous dancing as well as individual drama. It would even be fun with a ballet-loving kid–the only mildly inappropriate thing that one of the dancers, an American who was adopted from war-torn Sierra Leone, talks a little bit about her terrible experiences there. But you could skip over that pretty easily.
