September News, Part Seven
What an exciting weekend.
Saturday was plain, but we did go to Best Buy to get some stuff for Miriam’s work computer, and later watched Mona Lisa Smile on TV. It was okay. Kirsten Dunst is nice to look at, but she’s not a great actress. Her performances always seem effortful.
Sunday I wanted to go the Friends of the Library book sale, which I thought was this weekend, but it must not have been. When we got all the way over to that side of town and found the place closed, we decided to go driving around looking for houses. We were glad to find so many John Kerry signs posted in yards. We stopped in a wooded park and sat on the swings for a while. The weather had turned cool, and the breeze was so refreshing, that my mood was quite good. The sound of the wind through the pine needles made me happy. After that we went and had some lunch at our favorite restaurant, Zaxby’s. Then, as if that weren’t enough fun, we decided to go to the new McGuire Center for Lepidoptera Research on the UF Campus. I had been eagerly awaiting its opening for years. In fact, I would drive past the construction site on a daily basis just waiting for it to open. We listened to a lecture by the center’s director which included dozens of slides of butterflies, and information about their behavior and natural habitats. The center is at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and I haven’t been there in a while. It was surprisingly good. They had some great exhibits about native Florida Indian tribes and ancient Florida fauna. There was a skeleton of a fifteen-foot-tall sloth. Oh, and a bear-dog. Oh, and as if that weren’t enough, we then went walking down by Lake Alice.
Here’s what the computer has been looking like a lot recently. It has been a lot slower than it should be. The hard drive always seems to be spinning out of control. Programs take a long time to open. The internet connection freezes, and so on. I had jettisoned MS Office some time ago, because Excel had stopped working, and I thought I could get a program just as good for free. Open Office seemed like the right choice, but, alas, it wasn’t cutting it. Miriam couldn’t open certain work documents, and I was annoyed that, although it could open .doc files, it wanted to do some re-formatting, and wanted them saved in its own way. So, MS Office is back on the computer. Now spell check works again for Outlook Express, although that program still blows.
I mentioned earlier that the weather is cooler. It’s amazing how fast this happened. On Friday it was miserably hot. So much so, in fact, that Miriam and I were about to go to the beach. Today it is my favorite kind of weather: cool, breezy, with overcast skies and temperatures in the mid-70s. How I would love jolly old England.
Filed under: Animals, Film, Gainesville, General, Meteorology, Technology on September 20th, 2004
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