Two on Tuesday

Today was very busy, and I didn't even have a spare minute to brainstorm on my 'two' until I returned home from class tonight. While feeding the cats, I glanced over at today's very happy mail pile. It's such a thrill to get mail that's not bills or statements of some sort. Today was a total bonus, with two separate orders from Amazon arriving. Strangely enough, despite being a crazy Tuesday, today was a good day, and the packages were icing on the cake!

My two packages contained:

1. The next history books in the series that L. and I are working on. We will be finishing the first set within the next couple weeks. In addition, I threw a couple of 'fun' books for L. on the order. I like to get the most out of the free shipping. In package #1, we got The Story of the World Volume 2 - both the 'textbook' and the activity book. She loves history, and we've really enjoyed this series. It is designed to work with the Usborne Internet-linked Encyclopedia of World History, which makes a nice companion and offers coordinated Internet resources. We also got Coraline, which we just saw at the theater a couple of weeks ago. Dej really liked that book when she was younger, so L. is pretty excited to read it. We got another book by the same author, 'The Graveyard Book'. It's similarly dark, and L. seems to enjoy that type of book, so we'll give it a try. We struggle, even with frequent trips to the library, to keep enough books around for the girl! She reads, on average, about three 300-ish page books per week.

2. We finally bit the bullet and got a portable GPS. With all the traveling Mark has to do for his various talks and seminars, and all the camping we do, it will be very useful. I'm excited about being able to track down decent vegan food when we're on the road. We got a pretty small, basic model and were quite surprised by all the features it has for the price! It will never be left in our car, and we will only use it for traveling, so it will be available to loan out to friends as needed--might as well get as much use as possible out of it. I've resisted this for so long, as I am loathe to spend money on the techie gadgets that my geeky heart gravitates to. This is a very practical purchase for us, though, so I'm trying to talk myself out of major guilt for spending money that I could have donated. We will be traveling to one of M's talks this weekend, so we will get to try it out. Interesting note: I just ordered this a few days ago but noticed when I just popped over to Amazon to get the URL to link, that the current price is higher than what we paid for it. I've learned to watch the prices there, as they change from day to day.