Sunday Salon - July 29 Dreaming of the Beach

Sundays are supposed to be days of rest.  My rest today consists of trying to get a handle on the upcoming vacation:  making sure the lists are complete so that we can pack everything, make sure the house and cat sitters are set up, the car is tuned up, etc etc etc etc.  We're really looking forward to spending a quality week at the beach, visiting in small increments with parts of my huge Baltimore family.

Of course, both of us have to make some difficult decisions about what to take, what to leave behind.  How much can we expect to get done?  Why should we worry about getting ANYTHING done?  So, since books play such a huge part in our lives, we're both spending some time this weekend deciding what to take and what to leave behind.

We have much to be thankful for.  Both of us enjoy audio books, and we both often read or listen to the same books.  So we have identified a couple we can listen to during our 10-12 hours on the road (each way).  That's basically two books  right there.  We have loaded up our NOOKs, our Kindle, and our MP3s with ebooks -both print and audio.  I'm writing several reviews to post while I'm gone, we're eating up the dribs and drabs from the refrigerator, doing the laundry, and getting suitcases from the attic.

I've even identified some books that I have (most from NetGalley) with review deadlines coming up in the next month or so.  I'm going to try to get a couple of them done.  I do plan however to spend a lot of time working on my cross-stitched Blue Heron.  If you remember I started this one over 2 years ago (see Sunday Salon May 10,2010)  and as you can see here I haven't even managed to complete 1/4 of it.  I think I'd better get out the audio books and get going.


All in all, I've got 13 on the NOOK that I really want to read, 4 print books I'll probably drag along, and another 15-20 loaded up in audio. That should keep me busy.  Besides, there's the Olympics, scrabble, rummikub, monopoly, fishing, shell collecting, shopping, angry birds and yahtzee to keep us occupied.

Do you want to make a bet that when we get within sniffing distance of a real bookstore, we'll be unable to resist?  I'll let you know when I get back online in a couple weeks.