To me, and to a lot of people, September/Labour Day is like the New Year, only more so. It's a beginning, dating back to the first day of school, and throughout the school career, the back-to-the-books feeling. New beginnings, new routine, new resolutions. So I wish you a productive new year, starting now. But I can't dwell on it now because I'm up to number 9 on the list of things predicted to disappear in my/our lifetime. Things. Right, things, But the list I read considers things to be cultural things, not things like spoons or pillows or furniture or gadgets or tschotschkes. My spell-chek tells me I spelled that wrong. I can't stop now because my battery is running low. What an excuse! Very thing-y. The idea of this prediction is that we don't own the things we have, things like books or music or movies or documents (files, papers, reports, news) because they're all delivered to us electronically, hence evanescent; iCloud wasn't named on a whim. I've already mentioned how attached I am to books, how the presence of them in my home comforts me with their vibes. I don't feel that way about the e-books locked in my reader. Recently I've been going through a lot of the books I own, looking for my seed-beds, tiny germs waiting to be fertilized and grow with me into a book of my own, that is, a new one that I will write. I derive a great deal of pleasure in coming across my own snail-trail across books I've read, with the notes and comments in the margins and the post-it notes studding the pages. I OWN those books. They will disappear, of course, eventually, when I lose the power to read and study them. I use the word power advisedly because I am now running on reserve battery power and must sign off, until tomorrow. Happy New Year.