What a Pile of Books Demanding to Be Reviewed Looks Like

My plan to reduce the stack of read but unreviewed books by reviewing one a day has fallen sadly afoul of events -- and the particular "event" in this case was the fact that Thing 2 (my younger son, now 11) and I have been playing a lot of Lego Indiana Jones 2 the last week or so.

(It's not new, but all of the Lego games - except for Harry Potter, which has over-complicated game mechanics -- are so much fun that it's great just to pick them up and run around smashing things and jumping your little man around randomly; they're the kind of games that make you happy just to look at on the shelf and even more so to pull them back down and play.)

In other, unrelated news, my iPod Touch has been acting up for the past couple of weeks, and finally succumbed to the Ubiquitous White Screen of Death over the last few days. Even the so-called "genius bar" -- I've been a user of Apple products for a long time now, and I greatly preferred it when they were scrappy underdogs and not arrogant SOBs -- was no help, and so I ended up having to get a new one earlier today.

So far, it doesn't seem all that different -- it supposedly has the super neat-o keen-o "retina display" and a faster processor, but it basically seems like the same device to me. Except. This new one has a camera in it, a cheap crappy phone-style camera, so I can now take cheap crappy pictures of random things when I remember to. And so, this afternoon, instead of actually writing a review for one (or more!) of the books in that big stack, I played some more Lego Indiana Jones 2 with my son, took a picture of the stack of books, and wrote the above.

I'm not proud, mind you.

This Year's Playlist for Thing One's Birthday Trip

Every year since at least 2008, we've gone to Great Wolf Lodge -- this one, out in the Poconos near New York and Philly -- for Thing One's birthday, to swim and do family stuff for a couple of days in lieu of a big party with other kids. (Because what fourteen-year-olds -- and ten/eleven-year-olds before them -- really want is a big kid birthday party thrown for them by their parents!)

I've also created a playlist and burned it to a CD for each of those years, and I thought I'd been sharing some of those playlists (I also do 'em for the big summer trip to Hershey Park, and other occasions) here. This may not precisely be true, but, if I do it now, it can always start a tradition.

It also lets me play with Amazon widgets, which is always fun. And, this time around, only one of the songs on the "Great Wolf 2012" playlist -- "Blood Red Blood" by The Ettes, which should be at #3 of 23 on this one -- was unavailable for widgetizing. So here's most of what we were listening to in the car on the way back home earlier today: