Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

It’s almost always the case that the best Christmas presents are things that you’d never have bought for yourself but which seem perfect when you get them.

This year my best one is very definitely the Sony Reader which Wendy bought me. It’s the one that’s with me almost constantly and in use throughout the day. Why? Well, I’m doing a couple of Open University courses at the moment and that means up to four books totally around four inches in thickness to carry around. Instead of that pile I’ve a pocket sized electronic book which means that I can carry all those books around with me and read them when I get the chance rather than having to plan in advance to take them with me.

In fact I can carry around all the course books for all the courses which would have been pretty much impossible without the Reader.

The ebook technology is one that’s quietly zoomed ahead in recent years with the arrival of e-paper. The screens in these readers aren’t the same as those that you see in laptops. They’re not backlit, they’re quite slow to refresh (fine for reading, useless as a computer screen) but most importantly use virtually no power which means that the batteries last for weeks for even the most voracious reader and probably months for most people. Even my initial flicking around all the options and from book to book barely made an impression on the battery after a week. One thing to note is that the battery is only required when you turn the page and it makes virtually no difference to battery life if you take a second or a minute to read a page.

Thanks to Google Books there are millions of free books available for download. Beyond the free ones you can buy a great many books in ebook format these days though for reasons which escape me they are currently at pretty much the same price as the paper versions.

Downsides of it all? I miss the colour and the PDF scaling feature needs work. The metal casing makes for a cold read compared to actual paper though there are fancy covers that would fix that. The Pocket Reader doesn’t have an SD card slot so you’re limited to the 1/2GB internal memory. It’s not permanently online like the Kindle so no buying books on the fly although I usually mull over book purchases anyway.

Upsides are that the 1/2GB “limit” to internal memory means that it’ll hold over three hundred books which doesn’t seem like much of a limit to me. Copying books to the Reader is a whole lot faster than I’d expected: even copying a couple of hundred books was a matter of a few minutes. For normal books the 5″ screen is more than enough to display text at the normal size and in sensible chunks. That it’s not permanently online like the Kindle is a plus to me: Sony can’t see what’s on my Reader and neither can they delete things from it as Amazon have done.

In a word, this is brilliant.

When you’re trying to run a life in two different countries like we are at the moment there’s something of a nightmare in terms of administration load that can backup really fast.

This morning has been one of the days when I’ve tried to make major inroads with it all. Sadly the piles are still there but at least a number of important things have been sorted out this morning.

For a start there’s a heap of communication that needed done re selling our place in France. The combination of French administration plus time delays courtesy of the post mean that it’s sailing along at a snail’s pace and a month can easily go by with no visible signs of progress. Actually, a whole month did go by whilst we were waiting on a letter (nope, won’t fax, won’t email) from one place which I think was down to it being caught in the strikes in London.

Next up was sorting out some stuff re my OU courses. I’ve the flights booked for the residential now which leaves nothing more needing done with that until after the human biology exam in June. Also done was signing up for the Astronomy (S282) course which starts in February. That’s one that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time now but between one thing and another (well, mainly the modern languages degree), far too many years have gone by. That in turn should ease the path towards the astronomy residential in 2011 and indeed get my physics thinking back up to speed again in preparation for S207 in October.

Finally, there’s our Christmas letter which needed tidying up before we get all the cards away. As usual, the prompt for doing that has been the arrival of the Christmas card from Faye in Canada which has consistently been the first one that we’ve received ever since she started sending them.

It hardly seems any time at all since we were packing up last January and making a start to moving back to the UK and now Christmas is only a matter of weeks away.

As usual, we’ve not yet really gotten going on our Christmas letter that goes along with the cards that we send out to far flung relatives. Also, as per normal the first of theirs has just turned up and, of course, it’s from Faye in Canada.

In previous years we needed to be a whole lot more organised with the Christmas presents in that we needed to get them on one of our relatively infrequent trips back to the UK if we wanted them to be in English. This time around we’re back to our old habits and have barely a present bought or even thought about for anyone. Still, if nothing else, the prices and availability of stuff is much improved from what it was in France. Even more noticeable is the difference in the Christmas cards: instead of really naff and expensive ones, we’ve a sensible selection at half-decent prices in all the shops.

And, of course, there’s the Christmas markets which ironically have more French stalls than there were in France!

Most people are still in search of their ideal holiday spot I’m sure. But what is “ideal” anyway?

Obviously it should take into account your interests and those of the group which you’re travelling with. But is it enough to consider each of those individually? What if there was a single spot that took account of all possible interests?

Argueably, orlando vacations would be very close to allowing for all possible interests. Granted, not quite in a single spot but in a fairly compact region you can take in theme parks, beaches, wildlife, museums and just about everything else that you can imagine.

Does that make it “ideal” though? Not for everyone certainly but it is very close to ideal for an awful lot of people.

Although we were working pretty hard in the hotel this time last year, I don’t know how we’d manage to fit it into our lives these days.

Monday to Friday it sometimes seems like we’re operating an almost full-time taxi service. From 7.30am to 9.30am we’re definitely full-time school organisers. For the first couple of months of P1 we’d a break of sorts to 11.30am before collecting John but at least it’s now up to 2pm. From 2pm to 3pm we’re getting the guys back home though on Tuesday’s we’re straight off to Kumon again.

Even Saturday isn’t free as we’re to get James to Kumon for 10am and with Wendy off to work in the afternoon there’s not much of the day left by the time she’s off. Somehow Sunday always seems to disappear though in different ways each week.

In between times, there’s the psychology degree that I’m doing too which is currently taking up a fair bit of time as I’m trying to get ahead of the official schedules with the two courses I’m doing at the moment.

And then there’s the ongoing admin relating to our attempts to close down our life in France which seems to be taking up even more time than actually running the hotel!