Abbie's Real Life Blog

I finished the last book in The Golden Compass series (actually, the series is called His Dark Materials, written by Phillip Pullman) on the trip home from Philadelphia, and want to recommend it.  Someone else piqued my interest by describing it as the antithesis of Narnia, and I agree with that assessment now that I’ve finished reading.  It is a fantasy series for young adults, but has adult themes.  (Which, you know, yeah.  Because the genre is young adult, not old child.  But not to get my librarian blood all up or nothing.)  So if you liked Narnia or Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or whatever, but you’re ok with some negative portrayals of religion, try the series if you haven’t already.  And if you have read these, why don’t you suggest something new for me?  Because, seriously, I just love young adult books.

Henry the dog is back today, but he has the choice of many other hands for petting and adoration and I haven’t seen him much.

With the Tivo out of commission, Tracy and I actually had to make a plan to watch the new episode of The Wire tonight.  Back to appointment television, yuck.  I ordered the power supply and I’m pretty sure it will work, but I won’t get it until next week.

Tomorrow is Friday, which I’d planned to work, but then someone close to me is going to have surgery, so I’m off.  I need to make up that day, though, because I just got tickets for the San Francisco trip in April, and I need to have some vacation time booked up for that trip.  But there’s important stuff and important stuff, and surgery is important stuff.

And that will start off a four-day weekend, since I get Monday off for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.  And surely I need a four-day weekend after several days out of the office.  But, really, I haven’t had much rest since the conference kept me so busy, even if I was out of town.  It will be nice to have a lie-in on Saturday, but I should come up with some things to do this weekend, like paint the bedroom or something.  Whew, that sounds like a lot of work though.  I don’t know if I’m that motivated.

In other news of recent purchases, which I can’t think why I’m phrasing like that, whatever, but I bought this DVD burner on Amazon a couple of weeks ago.  I was having some trouble burning DVDs with my Mac laptop, which was not surprising as it’s getting to be an old machine and the DVD-R in it is first-generation.  But I don’t have one in my work computer, which is my primary machine these days, and I don’t have one in the desktop machine at home.  I love using DVDs as backups for files, and it’s a pain to move everything to the Mac laptop for backups, so I decided to get an external DVD burner so that I could do backups of all these machines easily.  It wasn’t too expensive, the bundled software is fine, and it works.  If you don’t do backups, and you have anything saved to your computer at all (photos, schoolwork, work work, iTunes), you’re an idiot.  You are an IDIOT.  You are going to lose that data and you are going to be mad at yourself.  So get a DVD burner, make two copies of everything, and keep one copy at home and the other somewhere else.  (I keep the second copies at work, which is convenient!)  See how easy?  Then you’ll be safe.  Someone steals your laptop and your house burns down on the same day, and that will suck for you, but you’ll have your precious Justin Timberlake albums all backed up.