Buondì.
On Saturday evening, when about to sit down for dinner with my son (Tom, voice of EasyItalianNews.com ), the women of the family having gone to the coast for the weekend, I carelessly knocked over a bottle of white wine. I guess I must be getting a little doddery.
A glass or so sloshed across the table, wetting one edge of my new laptop computer, but I managed to grab the bottle before more was wasted, and Tom passed me a tea towel to wipe the computer dry. We sat down to our burger and chips.
Dinner was fine, thanks for asking, and later, as the boy had gone out to do teenage stuff in pubs with his friends (I wasn’t asked to accompany him), I watched the 1970 comedy western ‘Lo chiamavano Trinità…‘ on Netflix, given that we have an ebook version coming out at some point this year.
Think a blond, Italian version of Clint Eastwood playing Clint’s gunslinger role for laughs, and you’ll get the general idea.
Movie over, I headed for bed, satisfied with a Saturday well spent. With Stefi and Roomie gone, I’d worked through a pile of boring but necessary tasks, and was ready to make an early start on Sunday so as to finish a couple of big projects while things were still quiet.
Seven a.m. Sunday morning, while waiting for the kettle to boil for my breakfast coffee, I opened the lid of the computer and…
Nothing!
No lights, no noises, and more worryingly, no way to access all the work I’d completed and carelessly left on the computer’s ‘desktop’, without backing it up.
Disaster!
Fortunately we have a spare laptop, but it’s noisy and slow. Tom recently reset it to factory settings, meaning that it lacked the usual applications, its Italian keyboard was mysteriously set to American English, and of course, there were none of my vital files!
So Sunday morning was wasted setting up the antique so I could use it, copying over backups made to an external drive a full week earlier, and beginning to reconstruct the work I’d done the day before.
And all the while, my resident IT expert was dead to the world, having had a late night.
When Tom finally showed his face (just in time for lunch), I passed him the dead computer, hoping that his young fingers and brain could conjure some life into it.
But no, it was probably a short circuit, he explained, and there was no way to know how much it would cost to fix, or how long that would take, even if fixing it were possible…
Sigh.
The afternoon was spent much the same way as the morning – frustrated and annoyed.
But later, I picked the women up from the station, we ate the pizzas I’d prepared, and that cheered me up. Afterwards, I read that Dennis Waterman had died, so gave up on computers and passed what was left of the evening watching the first episode of Minder, in homage.
So that was the weekend. A bit of a curate’s egg.
This morning, before taking Roomie to the kindergarten, I got down the dead computer from the shelf that small children can’t reach, with a view to taking it to the repair shop. To check the model and so on, I opened up the lid and (maybe you saw this coming), the damn thing was working again!
So now I have to clean up the dinosaur, delete all my stuff from it, and try to reconcile the files I’d worked on on Saturday but thought I’d lost with the ones I spent Sunday attempting to reconstruct from the week-old backups.
A mess, then. But a good one. It must be my lucky day! Perhaps I’ll buy a lottery ticket.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who bought our newest ebook while it was on offer last week. Colpa della terra, Libro 4, Infanzia di un immigrato is the fourth in a series of five, and the plan is to prep no. 5 for publication next Monday.
This week, though, I have a half-price ‘Ebook of the Week’ for you to read/listen to. It’s Caravaggio nei vicoli di Roma, and below is the blurb from our ebook shop.
A mercoledì!
An original Italian easy reader by Enrico Maso
Caravaggio’s in jail again, drunk as a lord and facing charges for throwing a plate of artichokes at a waiter…
ROMA, 1604 – Carceri dello Stato Pontificio
“Ancora lui? Ma come…?!”, il comandante delle guardie non crede alle sue orecchie.
La giovane guardia cerca di giustificarsi: “Comandante, noi abbiamo cercato di…”
“Non abbastanza! Com’è possibile che sia sempre qui?”
Il comandante si passa una mano sugli occhi, sospira: “Questo mese sarà già la quinta volta…”
- .pdf e-book (+ audio available free online)
- .mobi (Kindle-compatible) and .epub (other ebook readers) available on request at no extra charge – just add a note to the order form or email us
- 8 chapters to read and listen to
- Comprehension questions to check your understanding
- Italian/English glossary of ‘difficult’ terms for the level
- Suitable for students at intermediate level or above
- Download your Free Sample Chapter (.pdf)
Buy Caravaggio nei vicoli di Roma just £3.99! | Free Sample Chapter (.pdf) | Other ‘Famous lives’ ebooks| Browse our Catalog!
How do I access my ebook?
When your order is ‘completed’ (allow up to 24 hours), a download link will be automatically emailed to you. It’s valid for 7 days and 3 download attempts so please save a copy of the .pdf ebook in a safe place. Other versions of the ebook (.mobi/Kindle-compatible, .epub) cannot be downloaded but will be emailed to people who request them.
P.S.
I bet you’ve already read/listened to Saturday’s FREE bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news, so don’t need reminding, right?
Well, just in case…
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OnlineItalianClub.com | EasyItalianNews.com | EasyReaders.org (ebooks) | NativeSpeakerTeachers.com (1-1 lessons)