Where did my day go?

[mousme]

I blinked and my day disappeared. It didn't help that I slept in today. I gave myself permission to sleep in last night, and only got up at about 10:30, but then it took another hour to get myself organized and ready to face the day.

I wasted time going to the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions for KK, because she'd misread her notification and there were no prescriptions to pick up. Honestly, the Shoppers' Drug Mart notification system is super annoying, because the notifications all look almost identical, whether they're saying a prescription is ready for pickup, or a prescription will be ready for pickup later, or that your prescription has run out of refills, so it's really easy to think that you should go to the pharmacy when there isn't anything there for you.

I also went to my friendly local yarn store to pick up another skein of yarn for the Hubris Shawl, and two skeins of sock yarn. I switched shifts with a coworker next week so she can attend a training, so I will be working nights from Monday to Friday. My shift partner for the week is an avid knitter and she has promised to teach me how to knit socks, and I am very excited at the prospect. If nothing else, I am hoping to do a lot more knitting this year, including a bunch of socks.

I can't remember if I mentioned this already, but I've decided to to more reading by way of audiobook this year. If nothing else, it will mean I can knit while listening to books. But more to the point, I appear to have lost my ability to just sit and read and consume entire books within a couple of hours, and listening to an audiobook seems like a good way to get back into reading the way I used to.

I grew up listening to stories on cassette tape in the 1980s. It was a set called Storyteller, and a new cassette with stories would come in the mail every two weeks. It was so exciting, and I'd run to my friends' house (they lived down the street) yelling "Storyteller's here! Storyteller's here!" and then we'd run back to my house and my mother would play the cassette for us while we coloured in the special colouring pages that had come with the cassettes (as well as a special book with the text of the stories and illustrations). Then when Storyteller ended after a few years, my parents got me other books on tape, including Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang. I also had French stories on tape from a very early age. The last books on tape I got were when I was thirteen and had a bad accident that resulted in a concussion and skull fracture (I almost lost the vision in my right eye) and I wasn't allowed to watch TV or read. There was no other mention of screens because this was January of 1992 and the only screens around were televisions. My parents got me a copy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World read by James Mason (whom I already loved from his performance as Captain Nemo in the film 20,000 Leagues under the Sea), and I spent many wonderful hours hearing about Conan Doyle's ideas about dinosaurs.

After that I stopped listening to books on tape, because I could always read much faster than I listened, and like many book-obsessed children I always had multiple books on the go.

I miss being able to lose myself in stories, whether in written or audio format. Because I listened to stories as a child as well as read them from a very early age (I learned to read long before I went to school), I've never subscribed to the notion that listening to a book doesn't count as reading it. After all, many blind or visually impaired people have to listen to books, either because they can't read Braille or because very few books are available in Braille at all. Does that mean they haven't read a book just because they've consumed it in audio format? Ridiculous. Books are books, regardless of the format.

So I'm trying to figure out the audiobooks at my local library, and I've decided to try 30 days of Audible. It's not my favourite (I don't really want to give Bezos more money), but so far most of the books at my library that I want to read are checked out and won't be available for weeks or months. If anyone has other sources for audiobooks, please let me know!

And now it's time for bed. Tomorrow morning I have Quaker Meeting, although I'm not the Greeter this time, at least. I have a bunch of stuff to do that I didn't get done today, too. Laundry, maybe planting some of the seeds I want to grow later this year. I am early, but I have read that that might not be a bad thing, as long as I transplant the seedlings appropriately when the time comes. It will be an experiment!