No Roman numerals today, just little lists, some notes and reminders, and a day recapped before Ms. S. and I go shopping.
Why don’t we, Ms. S. wondered aloud around 7:30am, get jobs teaching English in China or elsewhere?
Why not, indeed? I wonder.
I was back to the apartment main office early this afternoon during the traditional lunch break so that I could say nice things about Larry, Dudley, Archie, and Kenny, but also report that the hot water heater was still leaking. The woman in charge assured me that Kenny would be out shortly; I returned home, dealt with a meal for Ms. S., and sure enough, a bit later there came a knock at the door.
Kenny climbed up on the dryer, looked at the water heater, and noted and noticed that the elbow joint he’d replaced the other day was not set properly and it was leaking. He reaffixed and seemingly fixed it before heading on his merry way.
At 4pm I heard a drip from the living room sofa; I got up to investigate and discovered a damp dryer, which I then covered with a towel before putting on my sandals and wandering over to the apartment complex main office again, where the same faces greeted me.
I’m in a Hallmark card/special version of a Kafkaesque tale. It’s absurd but sweet.
It won’t end with deaths, gruesome or otherwise.
The woman in charge assured me that Dudley, who gets things done right the first time, would be by Monday. I nodded, smiled, thanked her, and hummed my way back home.
It was bright and sunny out … why shouldn’t I hum?
In other notes:
- Dec. 4, ‘Reservoir Dogs’
- Dec. 6, ‘Pulp Fiction’
In ‘honor’ of the 20th anniversary of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ both movies are receiving a brief theatrical rerelease, and lucky for us both are playing in town on those dates, so Ms. S. and I will make a date of it. It’s my job not to forget … and so this diary is a string around my finger.
I’ll need another string to remind me to check this diary come the end of November.
It’s ‘Homecoming’ this weekend, I believe, and I suspect campus is insane … and it will be more so tomorrow, as two undefeateds will be squaring off in the evening. We all know Mississippi State will leave in tatters (though I’ll be amused if they stage an upset), so there is no real sense of suspense. Ms. S. and I plan on staying off the roads tomorrow … it’s just not worth driving on such days.
I’m back to working with Calibre this afternoon after my ‘serious’ work. The other day I raved about how Google Books does a decent job with metadata (and better than JSTOR). Let me correct that to: they’re always better than JSTOR, but sometimes the data is just missing. Especially for older books, and so it’s seemingly understandable.
On the other hand, the great thing about intact copies of rather old books is that their publication information and the like is stated quite boldly on the interior cover page. Year, publisher, city. There is usually only one edition; if there are more it is listed (as well as by “second, revised …” or similar), reprints are noted, and there are prefaces to second, third and further editions included at the beginning. When dealing with 18th and 19th-century German texts, for example, you often have to deal with the print face, ‘Fraktur,’ known by others as ‘Gothic script,’ but other than that doing bibliographic work for such texts is pretty much a joy. If only online repositories had better data or did a better job with what they have.
A few weeks ago I received a ‘new’ to me replacement digital camera. In the summer of 2005 I bought a Canon PowerShot A520, a 4 megapixel delight, before going abroad for a year, and except for [1] a glitch with the lens-cap and [2] more recently battery issues, it’s worked fine all these years. But the Stylus now in my drawer does 11 or 14 megapixels, I forget, is considerably smaller, and ‘docks’ via a USB cable in manner similar to iPods and the like … in other words: a complete and welcome improvement. But what to do with the 1GB SD card in the Canon?
Format it and put it in the iRiver Story HD I bought more than a year ago. Since then the device has been discontinued, but that’s hardly an issue: it works, it has a great screen, it covers all manner of formats, and it works well with Calibre. And now it has twice the storage it had before.
Tonight after shopping, dinner, and the regular rotation (only 3 more episodes of SG-1 before hitting the two made-for-TV movies and the end of the run!) we should return to the Die Hard franchise … we like watching a complete series. But Halloween is also approaching … so bad horror/slasher movies await us!
That and, perhaps, ‘Cloud Atlas’ in the theaters: it’s one of my favorite books of the last decade, and the movie-book relationship should be analyzed with regard to Lessing’s Laokoon. Win-win!
