Close Meditations of a Visual Kind

( Popper & Dredd Phredd Arrive in Vegas )

And overheard from two travelers riding the opposite slide-walk (departing Vegas) ... "Hey, where are those guys going?"

Things done today, not a lot. A big handful of small trees which would become problems taken down. Three more which are or are nearly problems to go. Those will want assistance to encourage them to fall in the desired direction, and Herself is off to SCA this weekend. As good as they are, the Bros are not quite good enough to herd falling trees. Errand run, replacement hose bibs purchased. Not replaced yet, but purchased. And a book read.

Robert Parker's Now, & Then in his Spencer series. One of my favourite detective/mystery character sets. Ever since the television show & movies, when I read Hawk I hear Avery Brooks voice. He be Hawk.

Well, let's see.

First, no it isn't a meme. Just, hey, like a lot of other folk on LJ I read a lot. And some of the folk I read occasionally post what they've been reading.

An assortment of books which came from Oldest Sister's home. In fact, the book I'm reading currently came out of this box. Mercedes Lackey provided two of these, and no I can't recall the titles or the whatevers exactly. Makes me a great reviewer, neh? I'm making this post simply because I'm somewhat irked at myself for having it on the to-do list so long.

Oh, I did enjoy the Mercedes Lackey books. One was an anthology of short stories. Ah... Fiddler's Fair may be the title of the other... or one of those stories... like I said, great reviewer, eh?

Jim Butcher, of course, since I picked up his newest Dresden back in April, while visiting the San Diego Mob. *G* Great visit, and great book. Overall on the Dresden series, they've been getting better with each one so far. OK.

Also from the San Diego trip, World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide. Much fun. Well written. Spooky.

I also read Sean Astin's auto-biography There and Back Again: An Actor’s Tale (co written by Joe Layden) which ... hm. OK, the cover blurb touted it as his experiences playing the role of Samwise Gamgee in Lord of the Rings. It covers that, and more, basically leading up to that role, playing the role, and his other aspirations. He is also a film director and producer and claims those aspirations as more significant to him than his acting. This book didn't come out of the box from Older Sisters home; I purchased it off the price reduced stand in the Campus Bookstore.

I found the tale entertaining. I also found it to lead myself to a lot of 'Meh' reactions, as to how tough his life is and how people don't understand the big dollar figures actors receive for their work really isn't theirs because they need to hire so many other people...

Meh.

Suffice it to say, I did enjoy the parts involving the production of Lord of the Rings, as well as other things revolving around that (his filming the short feature The Long and Short of It. I'm also rather glad I purchased it price reduced. I'd of been disappointed if I'd paid the full price.

Another book which did come out of the Box is Jimmy Buffetts A Pirate Looks at Fifty, another autobiography. Some of my regular readers already know I consider myself a Parrothead, though not an extreme Parrothead. I enjoyed Buffetts other book, Where is Joe Merchant which involved travel in exotic locations by amphibious aircraft. So does this book, plus a lot more. I found I read it in short bursts, and felt very comfortable with that. If one likes Jimmy Buffett, one should enjoy this work as well.

More later.

So onward to another boring entry, which follows a que from other people I read here on LJ who post what it is they're reading. After all, one of the reasons I read (and write) on LJ is because I've got this monkey on my back, called Reading. Rather redundant use of words, and hey, get over it.

So what have I been reading? For the past couple of months, I've been reading a batch of books which came out of my Eldest Sister's house. Sue would periodically box up books and send them along to her siblings. Got to say it that way because I wasn't the only recipient of this largess. When I went up to Cape Cod to say our goodbyes, Bro-in-Law kept insisting to select some books and he'd ship them along. Which I did, and he did. I'd only selected paperbacks, but there are a couple hard-backs in the box. Those I've not read yet.

( Here's the List, cut for the Non-Interestingness )

Yesterday I spent in quite boring not quite catalog work for my photographs. Not quite catalog work because what I actually did was compare files on the Laptop HD with files on backup HDs (plural) so as to thin out and create space on the laptop. Available space was down to just over 1 Gb, not particularly an optimal situation. Since I've been moving about with a convenient, small USB HD of significant capacity, I decided a lot of things could move off the internal HD. So now I'm up to around 15 Gb open space. I can probably create more space than that with some additional, ruthless culling since files are backed up. I'm holding out briefly to see if I actually work with the files I've left on board.

Herself is happy with here desktop PC back from the PC doctor, functional again. Her only stir being she though she'd saved some files onto Venerable Old Laptop instead of onto the external USB drive I'd set up for her use. This proved not to be the case, rather an instance of saving the files to a different directory than she'd intended. Now that she knows where they are, she's happy.

There's still a bit of follow-up I need to do for her, to see if she saved locally an application she downloads, or simply installed it. If she installed it, then she's going to have to revisit the source website and do so again. Oh for the days of DOS, when one could very easily copy a program from one PC to another simply by (compressing if necessary first) copying the directory the application lived in...

Enough of that. Time to head out and check on the Ranch, later today another supply run and Laundry. Joy.