A friend of mine recently moved into a new house. She lives quite a few states away so it will be a little while before I get the chance to go see her, but I was anxious to see her new place. Since teleports have yet to be invented, we planned an evening to have a little video chat via tablet.

At the agreed upon time, we both booted up our iPads, she propped “me” up on her new kitchen island and even poured a glass of celebratory champagne for me (sadly, you can’t send cocktails through the internet yet. Science really needs to get on this stuff.) then she picked me up and took me on a tour of her place. While I was looking around, it hit me what an amazing thing we were doing. Can you imagine fifteen years ago carrying around a tablet that was showing a live video, with sound, on a lightweight device on a wireless network? It was something we saw on The Jetsons that is now a reality.

If you stop and think about all the things we can do that were not even imagined 25 years ago, it is stunning. Smartphones, tiny sticks that hold gigs of data, video chats with people all over the world, GPS devices that tell you how to get to some far off destination. We (ok, I) take much of this for granted, but when I really think about it I am in awe.

What piece of technology has wowed you the most? What can you not imagine living without now that you have it?

I am sitting here watching the news about the big winter storm that is moving toward the east coast. They have decided to call it Nemo.

Now, before a certain animated film with an adorable little clown fish came into our lives, there was another Nemo that would come to mind when the name was mentioned: Captain Nemo from the Jules Verne classic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. This man was mysterious, rebellious and way beyond his time in terms of his technology and ideas. In other words, he was a little more menacing than our adorable little friend from Finding Nemo.

I wonder which Nemo The Weather Channel was thinking of when they picked the name? And do you think it occurred to them that they might be starting a new meme with angry little clown fish images?

For those of you in Nemo’s path – stay warm!

As per usual lately, I am under deadline and find myself prone to finding anything and everything to distract myself.

It’s my process.

At least that’s what I tell myself.

Anyway, Hot Cop bought an iPad mini for Christmas and I’ve been doing research on the app store for things that will help me play be more productive. So far, I have found a game word formation tool that lets me and my friends compete develop our vocabularies and score points. I have also found another app where I can breed and grow my own dragons research foreign lands.

It’s understandable with all these games productivity applications, I can become easily distracted by all this technology.

So while I put my nose back into my manuscript, do you have any cool games and apps productivity tools that you’ve discovered?

You’ve seen those cartoons where the big elephant is up on a table, quaking in fear because a little mouse is on the floor? It’s rather funny until you think about how many teeny little things strike terror in the hearts of much bigger things.

What brought this to mind? A few things: first, a little eight legged beast that may or may not have reduced me to a squealing little girl. Ok, so that might be a slight exaggeration, but you get the idea. The second was our rescue dog Po was getting into the trash. I decided to try to use something that frightens him as a deterrent: the bottle of ear drops.

Surprisingly, it worked! This big, bag 85 lb is terrified of this little bottle of ear drops.

The elephant and the mouse, a human and a spider, a dog and ear drops.

Do you have a little thing that will make you freeze in your tracks?

How remiss of me to wait this long to post the winner of my Black Friday story giveaway! I blame turkey and stuffing. And sweet potatoes.

And pie.

mmmmmmm pie.

Thank you all for sharing your stories! Congratulations to Tina for being the randomly drawn winner! Tina is going to get a goodie box just in time for the holidays!

I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving!