Please, Summer! Don't Go!

No, I'm not wallowing after some hippie chick, I'm bemoaning the inevitable end of the season. Summer is rapidly coming to a close, and this makes me all sorts of weepy-sad. While my wardrobe options will clearly be better come September (Hello cute boots and trenches! How I've missed you!) real life begins again. I'm really not looking forward to having to once again juggle classes, work, grad school aps, and what little bit of a social life I have time for. Tis no fun for me. No fun at all.

Which is why I've decided to indoctrinate my autumn days with a teensy bit of summer, by way of. . .



Fla-Vor-Ice. If you don't know what Fla-Vor-Ice is, you need to run out to the nearest supermarket or junk store and pick up a box. And don't let the word "ice" in the name fool you, and look in the freezer section. You won't find Fla-Vor Ice there. You'll find these boxes full of long plastic bag-like tubes filled with brightly colored sugar water right in the regular grocery aisles. Part of their charm really is the fact that one must wait hours for Fla-Vor Ice to freeze before you eat them. This is not about instant gratification, people. This is about summer. In. Your. Mouth.

Now, just in case you are from another planet, and have really never heard of Fla-Vor Ice, I'll give you a quick tutorial for maximum enjoyment. First of all, make sure they are laying flat when you freeze them. If they're bent, you're screwed. Now, once frozen, snip off one end of the tube, and squeeze the bottom a little (I'm smirking, because that sounded dirty). The Fla-Vor Ice should pop up out of the open side of the tube, about two inches at a time. Now there are two schools of thought on Fla-Vor Ice consumption. Some poor uncreative souls just bite off bits of frozen goodness and have at it. No fun, I say. The young at heart amongst us (um, me. duh.) prefer to suck all of the color out of the ice, then eat it. You go with your gut, and eat your Fla-Vor Ice however you feel. Just know that my way is the right way.

Come Fall, I am stocking up on Fla-Vor Ice. Whenever the weather or random sources of extraneous stress gets me down, I can simply open the freezer and have a little eightiestastic taste of summer to calm me down. As good as antianxiolytic drugs? Def not, but tastier than a stress ball.

My Life Has Been Changed. . .

. . . by the Kindle 2. I've been on the fence about the device since its inception. You see I love books. The knowledge they behold, the worlds they open doors into, the feel and smell of the paper, the crispness of a book's spine in my hand, the way they look on my bookshelf*, the ability to reread a book and look at it in an entirely new way. I felt that electronic versions of the tomes I loved would never feel like books to me. I feared that reading on an electronic device would give me the type of cross-eyed pain I received after staring too long at a computer screen, or drinking far too many mojitos.

Holy crap, was I wrong. The Kindle is amazing. A-MAZ-ING! The screen really does look and read just like paper. I felt not even the tiniest ounce of eyestrain after reading for hours. So much like paper, that one point, I raised my hand as if to turn a page. Since I've been Kindled, I've read more than ever. It's so incredibly easy to browse and buy books. Of the twentyish books I've downloaded, I've only paid for three or four.

Yes, you heard right. . . there are FREE books out there! Mostly very old books, of the Jane Austen/ William Shakespeare variety (which fall under Public Domain-- yippee!) and the trashtastic romance novel ilk (which normally, I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, but since several were free, I've discovered they're not nearly as bad or as cliched as I first thought).

Now, the Kindle is clearly something I would never have bought for myself. Obvs, my three hundred buckaroos would have been spent on dresses I don't need, shoes I'll rarely wear, or high-end accessories I already have too many of (via online sample sales, of course). Which is why I must thank the Mamma, for providing such an awesometastic birthday present, as well as the sister who suggested it to the generous mamma. I now wonder how I ever lived without a device I had no idea I needed.

Now, don't get me wrong, I still do (and always will) love books. Not just the ideas they hold, but also the physical presence of paper and ink. While the Kindle is defs enabling me to read more books than ever before, and more easily, there are just some volumes that I will still have to buy actual physical copies of. Kindle-worthy and bookshelf-worthy are two different issues in my mind, with the latter being held to a much higher standard than the former.

Long story short? (Is there such a thing with me? I think not.) If you're on the fence about the Kindle as I was, fear no more. Give in. It's worth it.

*With the exception of my chick lit collection, which lies hidden behind more pretentious and intellectual titles.