Barcelona!

Checking in on statcounter today, I saw that we had a visitor from Barcelona, Catalonia, Espana! Shout out to Miss Thisbe!

In other news, I did watch Atonement last night and I have to say, I'm a bit torn. When I read the book I wasn't a big fan. I think I liked the movie considerably more than the book (Kiera Knightly is always good and after Wanted, I do like James McAvoy), but I have to say I don't think the movie would have made too much sense had I not already known what was going on thanks to having read the book. It's a movie watching Catch-22. I wouldn't recommend the book, but the movie was good, but I think you'd enjoy the movie more if you have read the book. I think the movie is kind of a way to make up for having read the book!

In other book news, I'm currently reading "Audition" the Barbara Walters memoir. I haven't gotten to anything too exciting yet (I'm only on page 133), she's still talking about her time coming up in the sixties... we'll see how that goes. Thanks to Call Me Mommy my next read will be "American Wife" by Curtis Sittenfeld. I think it's a great companion piece to the current election, given that it is a thinly veiled fictionalized account of the life of Laura Bush.

In other general news (with a little bit of book news thrown in) yesterday I hit up the Princeton Hospital Auxilliary White Elephant Sale. A few years ago the sale was held at the Princeton Airport-- which was a really cool location (and at which time I got a nifty Copper paella pan and some other fun goodies...) for the past two years or so it's heen held at the parking garage at the hospital which I have to say is a bit of a lame venue. Needless to say it's rather dark and just not really the best location on a beautiful fall day-- who wants to be walking around in the lowest level of a covered garage?? But, I did get a couple of neat books and this time around the pricing was certainly right-- $1 for hardbacks and .50 for paperbacks. I got a couple of first editions and two books I had been interested in: Tuxedo Park and The Keep.

On the Kitchen front, we went back to the granite yard on Friday and picked out our two slabs! Though we had waivered from Arctic Moon when we visited the slab the day before (we were thinking of possibly going with either Champagne Pearl or Majestic Sand... they ended up having no champagne pearl for us to view and the majestic sand was waaaay too peachy/flesh-toned...) but when we visited Innovative Stone again on Friday they had four more slabs of Arctic Moon for us to see, and two of the four had no pitting whatsoever (so much for "pitting to be common" with Arctic Moon). Now it's two weeks to granite (I'm hoping it will be two weeks from last Tuesday since that's when we templated, but I'm sure it will end up being two weeks from last Friday...) And, this weekend the husband braced the wall where the tv is going so once we prime/paint we can hang the tv!

Next item: Our daughter the computer genius. The Husband's computer had recently gone off the deep end and was only exhibiting the black screen of death. It completely bypassed the blue screen of death and had just decided to go black and though it would turn on and make a bit of a whizzing sound, it wasn't making the tell-tale "I'm thinking" sound, so we were concerned (and frankly, the Husband was ready to just trash it.) Then, figuring nothing else could go wrong with the machine, the Husband let Miss B. play with the keyboard (as she likes to do). A few moments in to Miss B. randomly bashing keys and lo and behold: the screen lights up. The computer turns on. It now works. Mind you, the Husband has begun the process of backing up all of his data as we fully expect the black screen of death to return at any time, but in the mean time we were both very impressed. We still aren't quite sure what key sequence did it, but after she was done, not only did the computer work but she had also seemed to have called up the actual web-page code for AOL.