Cape Cod vacation, part 1: Traffic.

I'm down at the Cape for a week!

To me, "the Cape" refers to Cape Cod. I've often wondered how true that was in the rest of the country. Would somebody on the West Coast know what I meant when I said I was visiting the Cape? There are plenty of other capes - the Cape of Good Hope, Cape Hatteras, even Cape Ann, which is closer to where I live than Cape Cod. But this is the Cape.

It took me much longer than I thought it would to get here. I was foolish enough to wait to leave until 11:30, for one thing. I couldn't get into my rental until after 2, and I didn't want to hang around eagerly waiting for too long.

Ha, ha. I first hit traffic around Needham. All I could think was, I hope it's not backed up from the Sagamore Bridge, probably 50 miles ahead. And I guess it wasn't, not really. But it was stop and go well past Weymouth. After Route 3 narrowed to two lanes, it got better for awhile. I expected it to be backed up for the last 5 miles before the bridge, and it was. Argh.

So it was 3 before I got to Harwich Port. First, the bad news: our favorite fish restaurant, Seafood Sam's, is gone. Now, the good news: There's a new coffee shop in the center of town, Perks or Perk's (all I could think of was Central Perk on "Friends"). I got an iced coffee there, and it was delicious. And Reed Books is still there. Isn't that a great name for a bookstore? Last summer, the owner told me that a kid came up and told her she'd spelled "Read" wrong on the sign. I didn't visit it today, but I will at least once while I'm here, even though I've got a Nook now.

It turned out that I couldn't get a beach sticker after 3, so I have to wait until tomorrow. I didn't even try to go to the beach. Instead, I unpacked and read for awhile. Eventually I went down to the Box Office Cafe for dinner. At least they were still there!

I had a quiet evening. Eventually I decided to see if anybody in the neighborhood had an unsecured wifi, and what do you know? Somebody does! Nobody did last summer, but this year somebody's staying in the unit next door. Somebody who periodically goes out onto his back deck and smokes, and the smoke finds its way into my unit. Sigh. I kind of hope they're going home tomorrow, but if they do, and it's their network I'm using, I'll probably lose access. Then I'll be back to lugging the laptop around to places like the public library and the Box Office Cafe.

Tomorrow, I'll shop for groceries, get my beach sticker, and go swimming! I don't think the sharks have made their way into Nantucket Sound yet, although I saw in the paper yesterday that they've closed the beach in Chatham near the lighthouse.

I did it all for the Nook...

Last week I bought myself a Barnes & Noble Nook, their version of an electronic reader. [Aside: I'm not sure how to spell it; often on their website B&N refers to it in all caps, shouting out their pleasure in their new device - "NOOK!" Other times they whisper, "nook." I think they prefer the uncapitalized version, but I have a tendency to prefer to use the initial cap, so as not to confuse it with any other nooks I might have in the area, say, if I were eating a Thomas' English muffin...]

I decided months ago that I wanted to get either a Kindle or a Nook before I go to the Cape this summer (I'm leaving tomorrow! I'll blog about it again.) Amazon.com's Kindle is similar; as far as I can tell, having never handled a Kindle, the only major difference is that the Kindle has a keyboard at the bottom and the Nook has a touchpad. Also, at the time, the Nook was $40 cheaper. Of course, today I got an email from Amazon.com indicating that the Kindle is now $139, or $10 less than I paid for the Nook. Whatever. Once I had decided to get it, I could hop in the car and drive for 10 minutes to get to the nearest Barnes & Noble and be home less than an hour later with the new device in my hand, rather than waiting several days for Amazon.com to ship it to me. So the Nook won.

I think the name is a little cutesy, though. "Nook"? Really? It makes it all cozy, a place to curl up with a good book, which was probably at least part of the intention. It also lends itself to all sorts of risqué humor. "I'm going to bed now with my Nook." That could be my new pick-up line: "Hi, handsome, want to play with my Nook?" And there's the limp hit by Limp Bizkit that I paraphrased for the title, "I did it all for the nookie." I've got a Nook and I know how to use it...

The first book I bought for my new Nook was "Catching Fire", by Suzanne Collins. This is marketed as a young-adult book, the continuation of "The Hunger Games", which I had just finished the week before. I had been waiting until it came out in paperback, which it did at the beginning of this month. Getting the second volume on the Nook meant I didn't have to wait another year for it to come out in paperback. Plus, the third and I think final volume of this continuing story, "Mockingjay", comes out next month. As soon as I can download it, I'll buy it. This is a post-apocalyptic dystopian series, the sort of thing I love. I can't wait to find out how it ends. [another aside: I caught a quick glance of one of the girls at fat camp reading "The Hunger Games" on the second episode of "Huge".]

The plus side to reading a Nook instead of a book? When I put it down without a bookmark, the pages don't all riffle shut, making it difficult to find my place. When I open the Nook again, it comes up at the page where I left off.

The minus side? It's an appliance, not a book. The second book I read on the Nook was "The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" by Stieg Larsson, over 500 pages long. The battery died at some point when I was at work without the charger. (I was showing it to a friend. Me, read at work?) If I had the book, I wouldn't have to worry about batteries! Of course, it'd be in hardcover and difficult to hold and store, not to mention expensive. (Not as expensive as the Nook, but whatever.)

And that's another advantage to electronic readers: storage space. I read constantly, and I want to keep a lot of the books I read so that I can enjoy them again. All my bookcases are full, and I've stopped buying hardcovers because I just don't have room for them. Even larger-format paperbacks are difficult to store.

Theoretically, I can store 1500 books on my Nook. I believe that, should I go over that, I can move some books to a server on the Barnes & Noble website. They'd still be my books, just not on my Nook.

So I've got several new books for my vacation, and I didn't have to wait for them to come out in paperback before I could buy them! I've got the first volume of Robin Hobb's new Rain Wilds series, "Dragon Keeper." I loved her earlier Rain Wilds trilogy, and I can't wait to start reading it! I've got "The Forgotten Garden" by Kate Morton, and I've got "Garden Spells" by Sarah Addison Allen. Neither of these are gardening books; the first is a novel set in Australia, and the second is a magical story about two sisters, set in North Carolina. Plus I downloaded a few free classics, including "Sense and Sensibility" by Jane Austen (to go with "Pride and Prejudice", which was on the Nook when I got it). All of these stored on a machine about the size of a slim paperback, and plenty of space for more.

I'm a huge "Huge" fan...

When I was sitting at work today, words just flowed through my head. Good words, exciting words, thoughts I wanted to write down. But I had a lot of work to do, and I knew I couldn't take a break and write a blog entry. I'll do it tonight, I promised myself.

Now I can't get that flow of words started. Doesn't that figure.

It had to do with the new ABC Family show, "Huge", which is set in a fat camp. The stars are fat teenagers - beautiful, talented, smart teenagers who would only show up in more typical teen fare for comic effect. On "Huge", they're allowed to be themselves. I love it.

For one thing, it's telling my story. I was a fat child, a fat teenager, and now I'm a fat adult. When I was 17, my parents made me go to fat camp. My parents and my grandparents could never see the smart and talented girl I really was - when they looked at me, all they could see was the fat. I had a lot of musical talent. I often wonder what I might have become if they had sent me to a music camp instead. At least I might have believed in myself more than I do.

Will (for Willamina), the main character, has parents just like mine. They made her go to fat camp. In the second episode, she tries to write a letter home to them. I copied out the text, because I could have written it myself:

Dear Mom and Dad,

A crazy thing happened today. I, your daughter, played basketball. And I liked it. And I actually scored. But you’re never going to know that. I can’t tell you what’s good about this place, because you’ll just pat yourselves on the back, like, “Didn’t I tell you she’d love camp?” And you’d feel totally justified for making me come here. And it’s not that simple.

I can’t forget that you sent me here, that I’m not good enough for you. You tell me all the time, when you comment on how my shirts don’t fit, or exchange little looks when I reach for dessert. I try not to care. But it hurts. It hurts. And I’ll never say that to you either.

At that point, she tears the letter up. I wouldn't have mailed it, either.

The show is full of moments like that, scenes I recognize from my own childhood, from my own time at fat camp. Take Amber, for example; she's the beautiful blonde girl who really isn't fat at all. We had a tall beautiful blonde girl, too. She was striking. Once she borrowed a dress of mine; on me, it went down to my knee, but on her it came to the middle of her thigh. She walked down the main street of Hyannis and practically stopped traffic. All the men couldn't keep their eyes off her, she looked that good. I never looked that good in that dress.

We didn't have boys at our camp. They were at a separate camp a short distance away, and none of them were as old as I was. So I missed out on the whole social aspect, which I think would have been good for me. I would have loved to meet a guy like Ian, and Alistair always makes me laugh. I like Dante, too. I'm the mother of two gorgeous fat sons, both in their 20s now, and it would be great if they could learn that girls (women, I guess, now that they're grown up) can love them the way they are. I tell them that, but they're like, "Oh, Mom, of course you'd say that, you're my mom." Neither of them dates. They should. Any girl would be lucky to have one of them. Yeah, I know, I'm their mom, of course I'd say that. But it's true.

One of my favorite characters in "Huge" is Becca. She started out quiet and had trouble speaking up for herself. But she's really coming into her own. In this week's episode, she danced in the talent show while Dante rapped "Baby's Got Back." It was supposed to be totally improvised (they were filling in for Trent and Chloe, who were making out backstage). It was great.

There's the drill sergeant, Shay (Shea?), who I'm sure is supposed to resemble Jillian Michaels from "The Biggest Loser". She's brutal. In this week's episode, it bothered her that the food at camp tasted good. She didn't think it could possible help the campers lose weight. The unspoken message was that only food that tastes bad can be good for you. Uh huh, I've heard that one before.

I hope I'll be able to write down more thoughts on "Huge". Right now, I'm going to go do something else.