Two nights ago while getting out of the bathtub, I knocked my beloved Kindle from the side of the tub into the water. Amid my gasps, curses and frantic attempts to pull my beloved e-reader from the water and get it out of its dripping leather cover, I felt convinced that the end was near – for the Kindle that is.

(Oh – disclaimer time. That is not my bathtub. I wish!)

Can you guess what book I had been reading right before this mishap occurred? Dark Waters by Toni Anderson. How ironic is that? The title should have warned me against just such a mishap. Perhaps, if I had been reading the first in the Barclay Sound Thrillers, Dangerous Waters, I would have been wiser.

Anyway, back to the fateful plunge. The Kindle screen blipped and flashed and went blank. Later that evening, a lamenting-my-loss Facebook post resulted in several friends suggesting I put the e-reader in a bag of rice and let it dry out. I’ll give any suggestion made by at least two reputable sources a try. It wasn’t like I had anything to lose.

The next morning, I pulled the Kindle out with grains of rice clinging to the dead looking screen. With doubt in my heart, I slid the power button over, the green light came on and the page of the thriller I had been reading showed up. Wow – the power of rice.

I happily read for a while but, I must admit, I had a sneaky suspicion that the page turning function was a beat slower than it used to be. I got up to answer the phone, got busy with a couple of other tasks then returned to my comfy chair to read some more. The Kindle would not come back on. It has since refused further rice efforts to dry it out and remains stuck on a black and white photo of Jules Verne striped over with odd white lines. This may in fact be how all e-readers give up the ghost – hand in hand with Jules Verne. Who knows?

A new Kindle is definitely in my future. I can’t say I’m not somewhat pleased about purchasing a more updated model. I’ve had my eyes on a Paper White for a while now. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a rabid consumer seeking after the most updated devices except for when it comes to the electronic gadgets I love – my laptop, my e-reader and my digital camera. Admittedly, this is a small line up.

I do not possess a cell phone and have no use for any type of device that insists I touch the screen to operate it. Call me old school. Both my granddaughters certainly do. They roll over on the floor laughing when they see me trying to operate their iPad Minis as I fumble around shouting, “How do I get out of here?” Emma almost went into a collapse when she watched me trying to play Subway Surfer. Don’t even get me started on how my daughter rolls her eyes when she hands me her iPhone to show me a picture and tells me to push across the screen to see more and I end up taking a bizarre selfie and automatic texting take a leap instead of take a look to one of her friends – all within ten seconds.

My avarice for a new e-reader is in keeping with my hope that the old Dell laptop (which is the cheapest laptop I have ever purchased – still running on Vista for heaven’s sake, with no sign of going the way of the dinosaur it surely is – given to Bruce when I updated years ago to an HP running the newly released Windows 7) will die a natural death so I may gift Bruce with my perfectly lovely HP and move on to a newer model. Though the screen flops to and fro and small screws are falling out of the bottom, the Dell shows no signs of imminent collapse.

But I digress … all gadget avarice aside … I will miss that older model Kindle. I feel a bit naked without it.

I’ll leave you today, on a wonderful sunny afternoon where I live, with a photo I took the other morning. Spider Web Overlay. Enjoy.