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November 28, 2005So many books!
I'm moving soon, into a beautiful studio apartment that reminds me of my Riverside apartment in terms of greenery and tranquility if not in terms sheer square footage.
I moved a bunch of stuff from Riverside to North Hollywood that never came into play, and I'm not about to make that same mistake now that I'm heading to Los Feliz. Thus, I've decided to be really ruthless when it comes to making the constant decision of what gets packed and what gets tossed.
Anything I always thought might be useful but haven't actually used yet is getting tossed. Clothes that are either too old or too big to wear anymore are going out the door. And I've already gone through my filing cabinets, although there always ends up being less antiquated paperwork to throw out than new papers to be filed.
But this is all small beer compared to the real challenge brought forth by my impending move, the battle being fought across my living room as I type this entry: dealing with my books.
They make up most of what I own, and they're everywhere. And, love them though I do, I'm not looking to pack and tote a single small box of them more than is necessary. I'm being much more ruthless with them than I've ever been before, and I'm scraping together a goodly pile of stuff to donate, but to look at my shelves, you'd hardly notice anything was gone. I'm hanging onto:
Sci-fi novels
Plays and theater books
Fiction and poetry anthologies
Reference books that might come in useful someday
Anything I've already read that I think I might revisit
Anything I haven't read that looks good enough to warrant keeping it
Oddities (a la "The Big Book of Meat" or "Germany Will Do It Again")
It's open season on everything else, including:
Duplicate copies (more of these than I care to admit)
Anthologies with a large degree of overlap
Pop fiction (as I already have the sci-fi)
Anything heavier than it is pertinent
You'll notice that the second list is shorter than the first...
Posted by patrick at 11:08 PM | Comments (5)
November 11, 2005
WiFi? Say whaaaaat?
I forgot to mention it in my post a little earlier, but I discovered that somebody in my immediate area has WiFi--which is how I'm typing up this post from my couch.
It makes no sense. It's like something out of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel, where the basics of decent living have been ignored, but everybody's wired for full internet access. My floors squeak and I have to wade out to my car when it rains, but I can get connect at 11Mbps anywhere in my apartment? Surreal...
And who the hell in this complex has WiFi, anyway? Is there some kindred spirit, similarly locked away in his or her unit for fear/contempt of the neighbors. If only I'd known. We could have wailed and gnashed our teeth together.
Posted by patrick at 11:03 PM | Comments (1)
Oh, yeah...I have a blog.
So, here's the problem with blogs. When something noteworthy is going on, either it's nothing I can't comment on and/or I'm too busy to sit down and make an entry. And I don't hate my friends enough to bludgeon them with the minutiae of the boring times.
That said, I'm about to regale you with the details of my marginally interesting day. I had breakfast at Griddles, about which I'd heard much but in which I'd never actually been. When my apple-cinnamon pancakes arrived, I wasn't sure if I should eat them or flag down a low-flying chopper and have it try to make a landing. They were that huge.
Griddles is the place to eat, judging from the packed dining room and the crowd waiting to be seated. I had Ian Ziering (Steve from "90210") pointed out to me, which prompted two memories--the first two measures of the show's theme song, and when my host family in Fukuyama asked if I liked Kelly or Brenda better and I wondered to myself why it had taken over half my lifetime for the show to migrate to Japan. I didn't realize until I checked out his IMDB page just now that he was doing VO work. Shoulda given him the secret handshake.
I followed breakfast with a hike in Runyon Canyon, along the tougher of the two paths. It kicked my ass but proper, but nothing like how it would have punished me 25 pounds ago. There were a few really steep, really iffy spots near the top, but I managed not to hurt myself--my right ankle, again--until we were on completely level, paved terrain, some 30 feet away from the exit to the hiking area. I'm hoping it's just sprained, but given that ankle's unfortunate history, nothing would surprise me.
The big news these days is that I'm eyeing apartments, hoping to move out of my current ghetto-fabulousness before the end of the year. I've narrowed it down to two finalists, both of which I'm giving a second look tomorrow afternoon: A studio apartment in a beautiful complex packed to the gills with amenities that's probably just too small for me, and a much larger one-bedroom apartment in a much more run-of-the-mill complex. I'll probably opt for the latter, which is fine, as it's still worlds better than my current pad. The one-bedroom might win out just by virtue of it having central air-conditioning, the importance of which during the hot months can't be overemphasized.
I still haven't beaten "Romancing SaGa," and I've got a hunch I'm nowhere close to the end. I keep having to refer to walkthroughs and the like for quests--not because I want to know how to solve them, but because I sometimes can't figure out how to activate them in the first place.
Posted by patrick at 09:43 PM | Comments (0)