Maybe I've been wrong about summer time. Maybe it will never go away. At least, that's what it seemed like yesterday, as I went to my favorite beach again and took a dip or two in the cool sea. At home, back up in the hills, the thermometer kicked up to 91 degrees. I don't mind being wrong about predicting the weather. Mother nature can do what she wants, paint her days any color she desires, and I will be plenty willing to admire the work in progress.

While on the beach, hovering under my over-sized straw sombrero, I fiddled with the software on my new Samsung Galaxy tablet PC. I talked the wife into letting me buy this thing for myself for an upcoming birthday. It looks as if I will be engaged for many long hours with this new toy.

Besides loading all my music, some six or seven hundred albums, onto a chip about the size of the nail on my pinky finger, I am finding that I can also load many apps that allow me to do tasks I never thought possible. It has an eight-inch screen, which is a little bigger than that of my Kindle, but is much bigger than the screen on my iPod touch. The iPod was too tiny for me, so it has been sitting quietly in a drawer by itself for a year.

I never signed up for a smart phone because I don't talk a lot on the phone--it makes my head hurt--and the signal into my forested area is pitiful. The worst part of the smart phone for me is the idea that I must be tethered to it, when the screen and the buttons are so small that I cannot see them or push them the way they want to be touched. The new Galaxy Note 8.0 seems to be fixing all my complaints. I can actually see the screen, the buttons, and it has a built-in stylus that I can pull out and use to touch the places that are untouchable on my iPod.

My Apple-loving friends have tried for long to talk me into buying an iPad, but I didn't like that Apple had so much control of what goes on inside. With this new tablet, for example, I like being able to load my own music on my own chip. I resisted most of the world of tiny electronics for so long that I had nearly written it off as being "too small for success", as opposed to "too big for failure". And now I have this handy little tablet PC, which is not too small to lose, but too big to put in my shirt pocket.

Since I only have two desktop computers, two laptop computers, two Kindles, an MP3 player, and an iPod touch, I guess this was the missing link in the family. The wife thinks I have a mad obsession with electronic gadgetry and she might be close to being correct. Being able to resist the smart phone revolution, so far, makes me feel as if I am still able to control myself.

These new tablet PCs do come with phone call making capabilities, but I opted not to buy one because of the extra monthly fees for subscription to a service provider. If I had a business need, it would make sense. With my tiny, simple, dumb cell phone, for example, I talked on it last month for a whopping two minutes, and I don't even remember what I said.