birthdays (other people's) are stressful

Birthday shopping for my mother is always faintly stressful, as she is of that class of people that say "anything!" and honest to God, means it. Which does mean everything; she will love socks as she loves kindles as she loves badly glued panoramas. It's annoying.

I've been wanting to get her an ereader or a tablet thing for a while, but the expense froze me; not on my side, on hers. It's one thing, in her head, to pay largish amounts of money for birthday computers or birthday vacuums (don't ask) for her (or birthday origami paper, which possibly was the best gift I ever got her; it almost hurts that all of it was on sale because amazon at the time had no idea that they had the only gold-backed origami paper in the known universe. *sighs*). But even the small birthday camcorder a few years ago made her uneasy. Computers and vacuums (and apparently, origami paper) justify their expense. Small camcorders, even very inexpensive ones that are hardy, are looked upon with suspicion for their apparent fragility and their potential for breakage. This is why her cell phone is like, five thousand years old. It's not that she wont' love it; it's that she will never use it for fear of breakage.

Then I found this:

A tablet thing

It has many, many, many key features to argue in its favor. The most important of which is for the next month to disapprovingly talk about the horrific expense of tablets and casually have amazon open to the current iPad price. Then, subtly, show her a Motorola galaxy and shake my head. Finally, the coup de grace, talk about how I could not survive without my Kindle and loudly talk about how I take my library everywhere. As she knows the cost of the Kindle (as she bought teh first one for me), why, this will look like a bargain!

It'll come early enough that I'll have time to learn to use it myself and load it with things she likes before I hand it over. There's a workaround to getting a kindle app on there, thank God, so we are not at the mercy of Barnes and Noble.

The only thing that annoys me is that this one has gone down four dollars since I bought it. You may wonder about why I don't cancel it and buy again. I tried that. Within ten minutes it went back up and I knew I was beat.

I'll report on it after I have a chance to play with it, but I do like the reviews, especially those who have iPads who give an honest assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, since the main functionality for her is probably going to be as an ereader and some light surfing and playing games. She's not going to want to watch movies on it or television; she hates small screens for that, so from what I can tell, it's ideal for the stuff she does like to do. I'm hoping the app store for this has some crossword puzzles and logic games since she's an addict for those. It's Android, but apparently some of the android games on the regular android store do not work well, but other reviews said they worked just fine, so--*hands*. And if it utterly sucks, I have time to return it and find something better. I'm kind of devoted now to the tablet idea now.