Peggy's Cove, NS, just down the road from me: Take a gander at the name of this rather downtrodden boat,  Yikes.

My mother got a Kindle.  Yesterday, as she headed off to the National Book Festival (where, lucky devil, she got to hear Suzanne Collins speak about the Hunger Games trilogy), she began to fret about whether she should take it with her: would a Mall full of bibliophiles react with horror to the sight of the device?  She worried that buying a Kindle was an abandonment of paper books. "There's only one solution," she told me, "I'll become ambilextrous."

I am filled with envy on both the Kindle and the NBF fronts.  But I can't complain, since I have spent the last week reveling in the Atlantic Film Festival.  So far I have only managed to post one review of the seven films I saw (of Howl, based on Allen Ginsberg's life and poem), so I hope to rectify that today, along with catching up on my Oahu diary and reviewing my most recent read, the brilliantly named The Ask and the Answer, which is the second installment in Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy.  We will see how far I get, however, because this term Sunday is a teaching prep day, and a giant pile of Oedipus quizzes has my name all over it.  And of course I wouldn't mind making some progress through my current books: Ann-Marie Macdonald's Fall on Your Knees (epic in scope, I've barely made a dent at 200 pages), Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry (which I should have read years ago for my comprehensive exams.  Oops.), and Marc Eliot's biography of Cary Grant.  There are also some DVDs in desperate need of returning: the Martin McDonagh-penned In Bruges and the classic Man of the West, which I can't seem to remember whether I have seen before.  Hmm.

Wish me luck!