The Zereps

hi

why am i blogging about the books i read? hm…i’m not sure, but they’re good books! read one!

several weeks ago there was a book swap while i was at work and the folks were nice enough to let me take home several. one of them, which i finished several days ago, was richard russo’s empire falls.

i won’t give a quote from amazon ’cause i didn’t find any that were suitable, but *i* thought it was a nice, funny read. it has some funny characters in it and is easy to relate to, and somebody mentioned that it was a mini-series on hbo? or something? ::shrug:: but that’s what it felt like. like i was watching a middle-of-the-road series on network tv, but it was ok. certainly not phenomenal or groudbreaking, but funny. there are other books of his that i’d rather read. but this one is well-suited to the middle-aged, middle american. kinda white bread.

aaaaannnddd….there’s also another book i’ve had my nose in, elisabeth robinson’s the true and outstanding adventures of the hunt sisters. this, too was from the book swap.

again, no amazon quote…and try as i might, i just couldn’t work my way through this one. i gave it my usual effort, i read one-third of the way through before deciding to put it down. it’s one of those books that looks all cute and girly at B&N, but i just didn’t like it. dull modern fiction. it’s like drinking water when you’d rather have coffee. fluff (not the yummy marshmellow kind, the empty kind). anyhoo…

that’s about it! i’m reading ‘the mists of avalon’ right now since ‘they’ decided to put off the paperback publication of ‘eldest’ ’till MARCH 2007!! and the 11th WoT book doens’t come in paperback till november. BUT, while at the theatre this last weekend, i noticed a poster for “eragon” the movie! woohoo!!!

OK, OK. I know what you’re thinking… a gross, food-covered, foul-smelling pentium-3 laptop that somebody threw away because they couldn’t even run windows xp home on it, but think again! Read on for the facinating details of how I found this computer of miniture stature and how it changed my life…

I was just walking down the stairwell in the building I work in (I’m on the second floor and the elevators are extremely slow, so I take the stairs.) On the ground floor, there are dumpsters beside the freight elevators. (We’re not talking about huge dumpsters here.. just the waist-heigh ones that are like 4×6′.) I was walking past, like I do every day on my way to lunch, when I saw it, and did a double-take. But there were people around, so I couldn’t draw too much attention to myself. The super was there talking loudy to the mailman who had just dropped off some mail, so I stood outside the building inconspiciously (well, sort of) for I would say almost 10 minutes. Then, he vanished so I made my move. I ran back in there and snatched it–the laptop was mine!

Now to inspect my newly found treasure. I took it back upstairs and back into the office. I turned out to be an HP ze4560US (and it only had minor food spillage on it!) I couldn’t really find any good pictures of one, unfortunately, but here’s one:

It has an AthlonXP 2500+ (1.87Ghz) Mobile Processor, 40GB Hard Drive, DVD-ROM Drive, No Ram (but I’m going to add 1GB to it!), 802.11g wireless built in, and some sort of ATI Radeon Mobile video card, and a battery.
AND, the best part of all is that IT TURNS ON! When I first saw it, I thought, “oh, maybe I’ll be able to sell it on eBay for $200 for parts” but no! oh no! Luckily for me, my work has several similar models of HP laptops that use the same power adapter. I plugged it in (and put int some RAM,) turned it on, and boom! I was in business with somebody’s old spyware infested Windows XP Home OS (which will be promptly wiped out as soon as I find the time.) I’m pretty stoked that it has DVD and wireless built in. But, how lucky is that!? Finding a working (and not too shabby) laptop in a dumpster!

If you happen to be one of the 80 or so people who visit this site every week and you happen to work in my building and are missing an HP Laptop–too bad!!! Finders Keepers. ]:)

…and it’s almost over! 🙁 or 🙂 …. i can’t decide.

on the 🙁 side, i’m working a bunch of double shifts this coming week as the boss-man is out of town…but that’s also a 🙂 thing, too–porque necessito dinero!

to add to the :)s, eric and i saw a movie that we both really, really enjoyed. it was “the science of sleep” and i highly recommend it! it was so sincerely cute and genuinely funny. we both can’t say enough good things about it.

oh, i finished another book, but i’ll post about it later.

so….yeah….eric spent today planning our trip out to CO in december. it’s coming up fast! there’s only one more month were we can do what we want. once november hits, there’s no fun times, visitors, or trips for us! november has to be all about selling, packing, cleaning, and moving!

toodle-loo ya’ll

aaahhhh…..sarah dunant’s the birth of venus was the perfect book to read on a warm, sunny afternoon in late summer.

here’s what i found on amazon: “A luminous and lush novel, The Birth of Venus, at its heart, is a mysterious and sensual story with razor-sharp teeth. Like Alessandra (main character) , Dunant has a painter’s eye–her writing is rich and evocative, luxuriating in colors and textures of the city, the people, and the art of 15th-century Florence.”

i would have to agree. i found the first third to be just your basic modern fiction, but then it rounded out into the ‘lush…and sensual’ book described above. the setting for this historical novel is 15th century florence during the end of the medici rule and on thru the period following. so…..just a warning…..but it will make you want to vacation in florence so very badly!

if you’re wanting a nice, fulfilling novel to read in your spare time, this is it! 😀

(go read the review on amazon! i’m tired! :))

I got sick this weekend. 🙁 I don’t know how either–feels like a mild cold. I mean, I don’t feel that bad, but I do have a sore throat and feel kinda tired all the time. Friday was pretty stressful–it was raining too and that always makes things worse, especially when you have to walk around so much. Candice and I are signed up for a thing called “CSA” or Community Supported Agriculture. Basically, you pre-pay $10 a week for 25 weeks and you get a bunch of fresh, organic vegetables from a local farmer every Tuesday. It’s kinda nice though because they distribute the veggies at the Freeze Peach Cafe where Candice works, so we usually end up getting tons of extra vegetables that are left over when they start packing up. Last week we got tons of ‘canning tomatoes’ so I decided to make some fresh salsa at my work during lunch time–that was pretty fun.

On Saturday, Candice and I went for a walk around the city. We didn’t mean to make an afternoon of it, but that’s what it ended up being. We walked around the southern end of Central Park and stopped by ‘Time Warner Center‘ which was pretty fun. Candice walked around Williams-Sonoma, while I perused the ‘Samsung Experience‘– a huge showroom outlining all aspects of Samsung’s different technologies, from cell phones to plasma TVs. They had some pretty cool stuff there like an interactive display that you can control just by waving your hand over it, and a ::drool:: 80-inch plasma HDTV.

Today, Candice went to work and I took it easy at home, spending a lot of time configuring and playing around with my new cell phone, the T-Mobile SDA. One of the coolest thing about it is that it has wi-fi built into it, so anywhere there is a wireless network you can surf on it in high-speed for free (and there is VoIP software for it–how cool is that!) The only other high-light of my day was cooking my own spaghetti sauce for my dinner this evening. I had just had Prego spaghetti sauce on Friday and I was not very impressed–I knew I could come up with something better. So, using more tomatoes from our share, along with some other fresh ingredients, I whipped up a recipe for some of the best spaghetti sauce I’ve ever had. I was very impressed by the results. Does anybody care? Probably not, but it was fun for me. TTFN.

Update: Link to the Recipe: Here.

i’ve finished it! finally! i turned the last page of george eliot’s the mill on the floss this afternoon at work.

here’s what amazon’s book description had to say: “This novel’s unsentimental evocation of childhood in the English countryside stands as an enduring triumph; but equally memorable are its portrayal of a narrow, tradition-bound society, its striking, superbly drawn heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and its dramatic unfolding of tragic human destiny.”

and here’s what i have to say: “i liked it!”

the first half is the part that took me a bit of time to work through, mostly because it’s just painting a picture, setting the scene for the last half, sorta…just generalizing…but the last half was a page-turner. i really started to sympathize with maggie, the main character. it’s a great, classic book. 😀
but you know what? i liked middlemarch better. ::shrug::

oh, eric and i made it to see wicked yesterday. eric bought the tickets about a month ago to surprise me so a big thanks to eric! 😀 i really liked it! being a big fan of the book, i thought they might clean it up too much, and although i’ll admit that i *did not approve* of the ending, and thought it should be ‘grittier’, i totally enjoyed it. it was tons of fun!

[but if you haven’t read the book…READ IT! it’s 10 times better than the play–and the play was good!]