Here is what I thought I’d be using an iPad for:

Books
E-mail
Newspapers and magazines
Watching my photos scroll by in slideshows set to my favorite music
Word processing, spreadsheets, and Keynote presentations
Solitaire and Bejeweled

Here is what I’m actually using it for:

Streaming movies with Netflix
Watching TV shows with iTunes
Mind-maps with MindNode
Paid content from The Financial Times, PressDisplay, Wired, and GQ
E-mail
Creating blog posts
Plants v. zombies

What surprises me the most is that, after curious experimentation with the iPad book-reading apps, I now do very little long-form reading on the iPad. When I want to read a book, I pick up my Kindle. It’s simpler. It has fewer distractions. The paper-like calmness of the screen lures my mind into a slower, more receptive state. My mind on iPad is like a monkey in a cage, rattling the bars, trying everything at once. My mind on Kindle is like an owl that seldom blinks.

The other big surprise is that the iPad has restored my lost love for television. Sometime during the last five years, my wife and I simply stopped watching TV. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because watching the tube has come to seem lazy and vegetative. There is always something more interesting going on somewhere else in the house, especially at the computers. I’ve seen media buzz about hit shows like The Wire, Glee, and Mad Men, and I vaguely sensed I was missing something. With the iPad and iTunes, I’ve purchased a couple of shows and found them wonderful, especially the premier episode of The Wire’s Season 5, titled “More with Less.”

Ditto for how Netflix has revived my love of movies. With the monthly paid streaming service, I often take a break from whatever work is on my To Do list and watch a not-so-old foreign film, or an embarrassing favorite starring Meg Ryan and/or Tom Hanks. I’ll watch for 15 minutes or so, then get back to work. It’s fun. And it’s fantastic on long flights like this one from Minneapolis to Fairbanks.

The print that I read on my iPad is mainly from my Financial Times subscription. I love how they’ve replicated the distinctive apricot color of the paper version. I sometimes watch the videos of the smart reporters talking about their stories, but I find these clips hang up and buffer too much, even on our fast home WiFi. I’ve purchased two copies of Wired, just to see what they’re up to, but I don’t love it yet. Same with GQ. Too expensive and too many ads.

A promising newcomer to my iPad habits Flipboard, which makes it easy to flip through My Twitter and Facebook feeds, as well as other content. I don’t really understand how it works or what it can do yet, but my fingers seem to enjoy playing with it.

About the only thing that has NOT surprised me is how handy and fun it is to use my iPad for e-mail. I’ll be glad when the operating system catches up to that of the iPhone 4, so I can see all my e-mail accounts in one inbox.

In another four months, I expect that my iPad list and habits will have evolved some more. At least a couple of times a week I check for updates to my apps, as well as the top-ranked lists to see what new creations are breaking through. The Apps Store is still my favorite app, because that’s where all the surprises come from.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I believe in biking. I rode hard each morning this week, usually at 5:30 in the morning, when the streets and roads were mainly clear of vehicles, except for the street cleaner in Old Orchard. I found the East Coast Greenway, which follows an abandoned railroad track through the woods and across a marsh. Sweat is good. Riding the waves with just my body is good. Having the cottage full of young teens is good. Having a lull before the next wave of family arrives is good.

Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540)

I’m reading Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel, a tasty, layered tale set in the reign of Henry VIII. The protagonist is a real person, Thomas Cromwell, portrayed as a sly survivor who is maybe wise, too. I’m reading the novel on several e-readers, to compare them, but I returned the Kindle version because for some reason it didn’t have a table of contents. The nook so far beats the Kobo, because the latter is slow to load the book and has no way to look up words or search. Same with the Sony Reader Pocket Edition, which comes in last, because the screen is too small. You get about the same number of words at a time as on an iPhone book app, but you can’t really put the Sony Reader in your pocket unless you’re Captain Kangaroo. After a couple of gee-whiz days of marveling at the gorgeous e Ink Pearl screen of the new Kindle DX Graphite, I’m not using it much, because it’s too big for my taste. I’ll probably return it within the 30 days that Amazon amazingly provides for free evaluation of the Kindle, and they even pay for shipping it back, no questions asked. I want to see the high-contrast Pearl screen on a new Kindle six-inch, which I bet will be out before I turn 60, on August 30.

The dog is dozing, and the wife is still reading. Is there anything I’ve neglected to tell you about this moment? No doubt, but this will have to do for now.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Getting ready for tomorrow’s iPhone 4 launch, I’m trying out Flickr as an easy way to post to my blog from the iPad.

The plan is to upload a photo from my iPhone, then go to my Flickr page and edit the text with the photo, so I’ll be creating the post all in Flickr. This is because I’ve had difficulty posting to my blog using Safari on the iPad and my normal WordPress dashboard. Likewise with the iPhone/iPad WordPress app. This may be completely due to operator error. In any event, here goes…

Claire strikes a pose on a bed big enough for a collie, provided for her here at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs.

At the Broadmoor Hotel, Colorado Springs, originally uploaded by LenEdgerly.

There are lots of kids running in the Natick Collection Mall today.  A girl runs ahead of her strolling father on the lower level.  A boy runs up to a woman in a chair, taps her back, then runs away.  Soon afterward, a girl does the same thing.  There are four of them, running a circle tag team, each touching the back of a woman sitting in a chair, twirling the pigtail of another child, talking with another woman.  We are all in a sitting area just outside the Apple Store.  “Alex, two minutes!” yells the woman whose back has been touched a dozen times by running children during the time it’s taken me to write this paragraph.

Darlene has been shopping somewhere for the past couple of hours.  She must be hot on the trail of something to match a jacket she plans to wear to Thanksgiving at my parents’ home tomorrow, because I haven’t received any TXT messages from her.  When we parted at P. F. Chang’s, she was headed to Macy’s.

I spent an hour talking with the sales guy at Sony’s gypsy-wagon retail presence 15 yards from the Apple Store.  I spent another hour in the store, buying a Christmas present for my sister and a Magic Mouse for myself.  I also talked Kindle with an Apple sales guy who had just bought a Kindle for his wife.  He didn’t know that you can download 30,000 free Project Gutenberg books directly to your Kindle using James Adcock’s Magic Catalog and the Kindle’s experimental web browser.  Neither the wireless-enabled Sony Reader Daily Edition (coming next month) nor the Barnes & Noble Nook (coming next week) will offer wide-open, though slow, Internet browsing the way the Kindle has ever since its introduction just over two years ago.

“Where r u?” comes a query from my TXT-savvy wife.  “Where you left me…” I type back.  So my blogging time is probably coming to a close.  I’m not really ready to go yet and hope she takes her time to find the real me.

“How’d you do?” I ask as she appears at my side. Not well, as it turns out.  Even in this high-end mall, retailers seem to have trimmed back their inventories to average-sized shoppers, leaving slim pickings for Petites.  She has visited about 10 stores, but there are a few more left.  She has walked a mile or more while I’ve remained on my geeky butt the entire time, except for a foray to Au Bon Pain for an oatmeal cookie and a coffee. Now she’s off again, to check out the final few stores.

I wish I were a better shopping companion.  In the old days, I used to move from store to store with her, jotting notes in pocket notebooks for my would-be novel or memoir.  We’d enter a store and look for a chair.  Then she’d be free to roam and shop without any time pressure.  The other husbands would stand around looking impatient and glum, because they had nothing to write with.   I could replicate this pattern with my iPhone, checking email, twittering, feasting on Google Reader.  But it’s not as satisfying a gambit as the paper notebook used to be — I’m not sure why.  Maybe I’m just lazier and am not willing to cover that much terrain in a mall anymore.  I love camping out with my MacBook Air, plugged into an outlet on the floor, surfing Apple’s Internet connection, dabbling away somewhere other than my study at the house.  The screen’s the same, but the air, the sounds, and the lights are all odd, making me feel anonymous and right.

Gratitude is not a list. If it were, I’d have an endless one.  I heard a guy this morning who will celebrate Thanksgiving at a halfway house say he feels grateful this year, despite having less money and possessions than at any time in his life.  I believed him.  The gratitude which enlivens me most surprises me with small knocks on my door.  Hello? Is it time to go?  An Asian toddler walks across the mall floor in her bare feet to check out the Apple Store display.  Her grandmother, by the looks of it, pretends to hide behind a column and spy on her.

No big Thanksgiving message here. Just a few words written at a mall, with photos.  From a time in my life when things were going better than I ever expected they might.

At this point, I had a lucky break. The head of the NH Democrats, Ray BUCKLEY Butler I think, was standing near us. I asked if he had any tickets to the town meeting and he said no, but he pointed to another guy and said “Michael may have some.” I caught up with Michael and told him Ray had suggested I talk to him about tickets. A while later he quietly slipped a pair into my hand, and we headed for the line forming to enter the high school.

We joined 1,800 in a gym and heard an impassioned, sometimes humorous, highly informed talk and Q&A by the health care advocate-in-chief. His confident, energetic performance reminded me of the rally we attended in Golden, Colorado, when I first allowed myself to believe he could win the presidency. Then the topic was the complex, dry and crucial matter of the financial collapse. I noted that he had the audience cheering for securities reform. Huh? And today we cheered for colonoscopies, that insurance companies should be requuired to fund them and other preventive procedures to provide smarter, less costly health care than the current system.

So today is the day I am allowing myself to believe there will be sensible health insurance reform by the end of the year. Reform won the mainly good-natured battle of the shouted slogans and hoisted signs – supporters outnumbered opponents by roughly five to one by my count. But the real win was in the gym. Two opponents sitting behind us never stood for the ovations. I interviewed them for my Audio Pod Chronicles podcast. The younger of the two said he was surprised at how informed Obama was and that he made a point of calling on people who were suspicious and opposed to the plan. He’s still an opponent of the public option, but he left the gym knowing the President is a formidable proponent of change.

UPDATE: Click here for interview with Ray and Mark.

We’re settling in at Ocean Park, Maine, a place I’ve been coming off and on since single digits. For the Yorkie Claire, settling in means lots of new sounds to bark at, no matter what the time of day or night. She’s not allowed on the beach during the day, but come 5 p.m. she and her kind get to romp in the surf and sand. In this photo, she’s looking reluctant, or else using that little Yorkie brain to figure out the best way to obtain one of the treats in Darlene’s pocket.

My perch on the second floor of the old cottage gives me fast Internet and a view and sounds of the slow waves. This is the best room for sleeping I have access to in any state. The waves slosh and thump all night, and in the morning I roll over to see the first orange light arriving over Casco Bay from the East.

My grandson will be coming over to play tomorrow, but it will be high tide, not the optimum time for creating lakes and castles on the flat. But we have some other activities on tap that he likes, especially the one where we drop pennies through a hole in the second floor down into the dining room. Last year that was good for an hour of constant giggles and anticipation, but now he’s three, so the intervals of new fun may need to come faster. We’ve got a red wagon and a Yorkie who loves to chase balls, and more.

I find it disorienting and grounding at the same time, this returning to a place on earth where I’ve been coming for decades. My mother yesterday fished out a photo of me on the beach at just over a year old, sitting on the sand at low tide wearing a wide-brimmed hat, with my cousin Peter. And now comes this three-year-old boy looking at the same beach with eyes of his own, and yet somehow I look out from them, too, and remember.