Books, shelves and a new laptop

Dear Diary,

So, instead of saving money, as I should have been doing, or buying some ISBN numbers, I went online and did some shopping. First stop, the Classics Bookshop. There is a particularly well referenced and translated work of Apuleius, the subject of my master's degree dissertation. I have wanted to buy this book for a long time now (certainly it was more relevant to my 12,000 word master's dissertation, but I couldn't help but buy up all six volumes of Virgil's Aeneid, along with two volumes of Cicero, and several plays by Euripides: Oxford Reds, critical editions, a dying breed, out of print for years now).

So, I bought one book (albeit a rather expensive book, weighing in at £170 brand new). I purchased a first edition, for nearly half that price, naturally, Martin Shorrock being an amicable, reasonable and erudite bookseller and classicist (an Oxford man).

Then, I looked around at the sloping towers of bookshelves, cobbled together by my (and believe me that I am not the Son of Joseph, a carpenter's son, like the song by Tim Hardin If I were a carpenter). The shelves I knocked up out of bits of old wood and a one-way Japanese saw are rickety, bowed, perilous, dangerous even, looming over me like some mocking Fury which screeches at me in redemptive retribution.

So, I had to sort that out, £150 later comes nine perfectly sized well constructed wooden boxes. This means I can do away with the wobbly shelves leaning over my desk like the tower of Pisa (I have already had one book fall and damage the laptop, which is three years old now, and was second hand when I first bought it).

I need a new laptop as a result. Mercurius (as I've named it) has been making weird noises for a while now, ever since I had a bag which fell apart and it dropped on the floor one summer. The other morning Mercurius wouldn't even boot, not even in Safe Mode, but did a two hour surface scan, twice (once each hour). So I needed to sort that out as well.

So, I went for the AMD (Walter Jeremiah 'Jerry' Sanders the Third's brainchild and outstanding legacy). I remember when (finally!) AMD merged with ATI. These are some specs of this little beast of a computer just I've bought (weighing in at £450).

Acer Chromebook 514 CP514-1HH

Processor: 2.1GHz (Ryzen 5 3500C)
Graphics Card: [ATI] Radeon Vega 8

It has the amount of RAM I need (at least 8), and although its drive is not SSD (Solid State Drive) it has no moving parts, using Flash RAM technology. Nice for a mid range laptop. Beautiful, in fact. The wide screen is made of tough Gorilla glass, and the machine folds in two like a tablet: nice. It looks pretty gooky compared to the other, more expensive laptops, but cool enough to not be dated for at least a few years yet (I admit, the keyboard looks like it's straight out of Blake 7 or the original Alien movie), yet its got guts. AMD, ATI Gfx. I might even try out all the TW series again, Medieval: Kingdoms or Empire, maybe even old Rome (the original, Barbarian Invasion). It's pretty cool actually.