I jumped on the ebook bandwagon as an early adopter. I owned an early Sony reader, with a dreadful store, especially up here in Canada. I owned a Kindle and I used various readers on my iPad. I loved the portability, the convenience, the instant gratification. I told all of my friends that paper was dead, done and over.

But recently a funny thing happened. During the last year, I found myself buying fewer and fewer ebooks and returning to good old paper instead. Rather than browsing amazon, I am visiting book stores. It started as a health concern, when I learned about the correlation between evening screen time and interrupted sleep patterns. Sleep is precious to me, especially with three young children in the house. As I do a lot of my reading in the evening, this was important.

Then I read the licensing terms for ebooks and didn’t like them one bit. My paper books I own. I’ve got the right of first sale. I can legally lend them to a friend, sell them on if I feel like it. With ebooks, I own nothing. Also, short of breaking into my house, amazon will have a hard time removing books from my shelves, the way they have done from people’s kindle accounts.

But the thing that clinched the change back to paper for me was that I remembered how much I like to be surrounded by books, real books.

I like browsing a well stocked library and picking out a book for the evening. I like the smell of books, the feel of paper. I like that paper books don’t need to be recharged, they don’t go down when the power does. I like that real books age. I like that fact that ink on paper will still be around and relevant when today’s ebook standards will long be forgotten. I like that my children’s children will be able to read my books the way I read my grandfather’s books.

I still think there’s a place for ebooks. The convenience can’t be beat, especially when travelling. I still don’t understand why paper books don’t come with download codes the way music on vinyl does these days. I’d happily pay an extra dollar or two for the privilege.

But there is a pleasure in the analogue that the virtual has a hard time matching. So please excuse my while I put my iPad down, put a vinyl record on my vintage turntable and go read a good book.

If you’ve perhaps typed the above into google and as a result ended up here, and if you’re looking for more information on Blomberg appliances and if you might have chatted with a sales person who gave you the German Quality spiel and if you might still be a trifle undecided:

Don’t do it.

We got talked into buying a Blomberg Dishwasher and a Blomberg fridge and have regretted both purchases. The dishwasher is four years old and finally gave up the ghost for good. In these four years our kitchen got flooded twice, for reasons unknown, the cleaning has gotten progressively worse and worse, bits fell off the baskets, the seal deteriorated, etc, etc.

Yesterday, finally, the control panel stopped working, giving us an excuse to send it to the Big Heap of Garbage in the sky, where it belongs.

The fridge is still working but produces the most amazing amount of condensation, meaning water collects at the bottom and stuff freezes to the back of the fridge.

So, if you’re asking me, no I will never buy anything made by Blomberg, ever again.

A bit of an off-topic post for this blog, but then again it’s been pretty free-wheeling recently so maybe this is just the logical extension.

Our family of three grew recently, with the addition of two lovely twin boys. Our little Mercedes B-Class wasn’t able to cope with three kids under the age of three, so we did the sensible thing and purchased a Honda Odyssey van. Off lease, at a great price.

I spent considerable time researching the best seating setup for three kids, all of whom need child seats. Iif you’re in the same position, here’s what works for us.

The Honda Odyssey has two anchor points for child seats on the third bench. We’ve got the twins back there, with space in the middle for mom or dad if required. We then removed one of the second row seats, creating easy access to the back.

Out two year old sits on the remaining seat in row two. It works extremely well. We have easy access to all kids and the seats slide in and our easily. If needed, putting the car back together takes all of two minutes.

There’s a fair amount of traffic coming to my initial review of the Vision Grill; a Big Green Egg look-a-like, but considerably cheaper.

Having used the Vision now for a couple of weeks, it’s time for a quick update.

In a nutshell, we love it. I’ve used it to bake bread, I’ve used it to smoke pork shoulder for pulled pork tacos and we’ve used it as a straight-up BBQ. It’s been performing flawlessly. It holds a low heat for ten hours at a time, it goes up to 700C without even trying and it stays warm for hours, ideal for slow cooked stews.

If you’re thinking of buying one, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Part of the let’s-upgrade-our-photo-skills mission we’ve got going at work is a competition. Everybody gets handed a Pentax K1000 and a roll of Ilford HP5. People have one week to shoot 36 images that need to be connected by a theme.

I walk to work whenever possible, a pleasant 30 minute stroll down Queen West and through Trinity Bellwood Park, which will be my theme for my entries.

Parchment paper, after roasting beets. Looks like an expressionist painting of poppies to me.

Here’s a confession: I’ve always hated music CDs. Not for some imagined sound quality issue, I just don’t like the way they look. They try and mimic the design of a traditional vinyl album, but always without success. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever cracked the challenge to create a CD design that breaks truly new ground.

So when mp3 players first came out, I jumped ship immediately. CDs were banished to the basement and 90% of the time the music I listened to lived as a file on a drive. But I always kept my records and when I had time to truly listen to music, it was almost always done on the turntable. Even though it looked at the time that vinyl was finally dead.

Then something amazing happened. Bands started to release albums as records again, in heavy duty vinyl that sounded fantastic. Even more amazingly, they started to include a download code to the digital file with the record. Now I had access to a beautifully designed analogue copy and the convenience of a digital file for my iPod. Heaven.

Sadly, this model hasn’t translated into books. I am an avid reader and I love having all my books with me on my iPad. I use the Kindle, Kobo and iBooks apps with equal enthusiasm. But I still love books, real books, made from paper. I love standing in front of our bookshelves, deciding on a book to read for the evening. Come next year, we’ll be remodelling one room in our house to be a library. Empty shelves with an Pad or Kindle on display just aren’t the same.

Today, if I want to own both a paper and an electronic copy of a book, to read while travelling, commuting, waiting in line, I have to pay twice, something very few people are prepared to do. I get that the publishing industry needs to make a profit, but I don’t get why for a nominal extra payment, say $1.00, I can’t download an electronic copy of a book when buying the paper version. The ebook version exists anyway, and this would create easy extra income for the publishers.