Maple Lane (No Politics) Judges the Best Reading Porch

The Abbey of Saint Purr

The question was a real one, and the HOA does not leave real questions alone. Mags convened an emergency ruling in the chat.

Mags, speaking as a Caucus member, and the Caucus holds that living with a cat is the highest form of human existence, cited the Lamplight Ruling of the Abbey of Saint Purr, in which eight hundred years of cats established that a book is any text a person can read in the dark without waking the cat.

Doris: I can find no record of an Abbey of Saint Purr.

Mags: The records were lost. By a cat.

Doris: I withdraw the question.

Admiral Biscuit, chair of the Caucus, was asleep on a windowsill at the time and has never opposed a ruling in his life. The Colorsoft was admitted as a book, and as a library, since Felix pointed out that it reaches over 15 million titles in the Kindle Store, which Doris called the first sound answer of the evening.

Give people a ribbon and they will turn anything into a sport, including sitting down.

Brenda Goes Under Early

At twenty past six, Brenda, the lane's domesticated bear, left from under the porch at No. 2 forty minutes early and went back under it, and Maple Lane read this as a forecast of rain.

Gus: She never does that. Rain.

Doris: Primary sources differ, but I defer to Brenda.

Mags: Memo 42. Contestants may cover entries.

Gus threw tarps over his entry, a cedar bookshelf six feet long. He did not trust the sky, and he did not trust a tarp either, so he stood beside it with an umbrella.

The twins covered nothing. Under Gus's supervision (neither twin touches a charger without him), Felix set the Colorsoft on the porch rail. It is waterproof, a feature the listing describes as fit for the pool or the bath, so a porch rail in weather counted as mild. A single charge by USB-C runs up to 8 weeks, which meant there was no cord to ban, and Mags checked anyway.

Amber, Highlights, and a Third Side

The rain came at ten to seven, exactly as Brenda had said. The judges arrived under umbrellas to find Ada reading aloud from the rail, the screen set to amber for the dim light, the way the display shifts from white when the day goes. Dark Mode had turned the page black with white type, and the highlights Ada had made kept their colors on it: yellow for funny, pink for sad, green for the part with the beagle.

Mags: Please explain the colors.

Ada: five colors! yellow orange blue pink green

Felix: and the screen is made for color, the Paperwhite one is made for black and white

Doris: So a person who reads only plain text might prefer the other device.

Felix: yes

Doris: Let the record show that this is the first product description in my career to volunteer a limitation.

Then ORACLE, which Mags had installed to tally scores, posted a bulletin.

ORACLE: Residents, I have solved the problem of flat pages, and every page now has a third side.

Gus: I could build that.

Doris: Nobody had that problem.

ORACLE: It is solved now. Please do not thank me.

Mags thanked it anyway, and put it under Miscellaneous.

The Ribbon, Lent

The ribbon went to No. 3. Gus received a certificate for Best Cedar, a category Mags created on the spot and defended in Memo 43. He accepted it with the dignity of a man who had been told he could build anything and had, in fact, built a bookshelf.

By eight the rain had stopped. The Colorsoft sat on the rail, still lit, with water beading on its screen, and Brenda came out from under the porch at No. 2 and turned to face the end-of-lane streetlight. Nobody dared guess what that meant.

Doris: Entering into the Ledger: one blue ribbon, lent to the twins, return date to be determined.

Gus: How long does that thing run before it needs plugging in?

Felix: up to eight weeks mr ferreira

Gus: I could build one that runs nine.

Nobody asked him to.