Cat in nest of sweatshirts, with IPad!

I have no idea where I am, but my tablet might.  Call it Siri.

As you know, I am far, far behind the electronic gadget curve.   I have a land line, a laptop, and an e-reader, while you have smart phones, iPads, and whatnots.

And now I, too, have acquired a whatnot.   I bought an iPad because my old Nook tablet died.  Now I can fly with the  blasé travelers who  keep their library and office on the same small machine!

The Nook was primitive, as tablets go.  I bought it in 2011 when my mother was in the hospital in Iowa City. During a blizzard, the phone and TV went dead at her house.  The wind howled unnervingly while I tried to read in my old bedroom.  We had 15 inches of snow, and  I felt as isolated as a character in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book.  When I finally made it to the hospital, climbing over snowbanks and falling on the ice several times, I uttered a sigh of relief because there was wifi.

After the blizzard in Iowa City, Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2011

And now, lo and behold! I now have a small  iPad that can do everything:  take pictures (but I already have a camera), navigate via Siri (but I prefer maps), find my iPhone (but I don’t  have one!), surf the web, play R.E.M. videos, and has Kindle, Kobo, the Nook, and iBooks apps.

It can almost do too much, you know what I mean?  I keep it in another room so I don’t constantly go online and check out a link….and then another link…  A dedicated e-reader is better for reading e-books, if the internet tempts you too much.  But the iPad is a sleek machine, and it will be lovely for travel.

I am a Luddite by some standards, but we have many gadgets (some alive, some dead).  Check out this picture of portable “apparati,” as Gary Shytengart calls electronic gadgets et al in his comic novel, Super Sad True Love Story.   Alas, where are the antiques? Our Sony Reader and a palm pilot are missing…

Some of our gadgets!  (Yes, that’s a real landline phone on top!)