The Latest and Greatest

What I'm Digging
After having about 3 pairs of wireless headphones BREAK on me after about 18 months of use, I have replaced them with a bluetooth transmitter and bluetooth headphones. They are very light and nice to run with and hopefully when the headphones give up the ghost, I'll only have to replace one piece (at half the cost?).

Have y'all seen Craigslist Desktop? It is so cool! It's a desktop application (run on Adobe Air) that you can use to browse Craigslist … visually … like Amazon. It also allows you to save your searches, so you can come back day after day and look for new listings. Awesome!!

What I'm Watching
Make it or Break It is currently just about the only show I'm watching on a weekly basis. I find it to be very motivating while I run on the treadmill. It's an excellent mix of athleticism, catty girl-fights and good music.

As I work, I been catching snippets of The Winter Olympics. I love the cheesy drama of it all, and the possibility that Russian skaters might fall and cry. That, my friends, makes for fine TV.

I also picked up Big Love Season 2 from the library yesterday. Hopefully I will find time to watch it instead of letting it sit around 3 weeks and eventually start accumulating late fines (sorry Pushing Daisies Season 2). What I'm Reading
So I finished the 600 page biography of Ben Franklin. It really was very good. He led a fascinating life and I wondered throughout the book what he would think of America today, over 200 years since his death. He was an interesting mix of realism and idealism. He did not believe in hand-outs for the needy, but he did believe in the community coming together to support and build projects that would benefit the greater good: libraries, volunteer fire departments, hospitals, etc. His influence on our country's ethos is immense in a way I never really appreciated before. Though I doubt I'd read it again, I feel it did me good to read it and for a 600 page historical biography, it was pretty darn entertaining.

After that, I rewarded myself with the 15th (!!) installment of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. Stephanie Plum (for those uninitiated) is a bumbling female bounty-hunter with a hilarious entourage. It was a quick, fun read.

Then I TRIED to read Alexander McCall-Smith's The Sunday Philosophy club. He's one of my perennial favorites as he pens the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series (charming series of books about a female PI in Botswana). Sadly, it was not my cup of tea and I had to abandon it. The heroine was … obnoxious, alternately decrying the lack of morals and ethics in the modern world and sneaking around spying on people and meddling. I gave it a good shot (about 60%) and had to abandon it.

Vision in White, by Nora Roberts was much more my style. It is a sweet, simple romance story about a wedding photographer and her commitment issues. The story is pretty predictable, but there was something in the writing that I found very homey and comforting. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I'm excited to read the second installment of the quartet.

I am now ensconced in Back to the Bedroom, also by Janet Evanovich. It is entertaining me quite well so far, though I'm not very far into it just yet.