Caching In: A Geocaching Love Story

Ally Cooper has dumped her cheating boyfriend. She wasted many years on him. She works with her best friend Chelsea at a bank. Chelsea has work luck in love, as she was dating a guy that recently got engaged to another woman. To make matters worse, Ally's friend Chelsea got pregnant.

Ally is into fitness. On one hike, she met some people who turned her on to geocaching. This is a game where you try to go find caches that people hide around the world. While on her first caching trip, she meets Seth, a good looking guy that works at a bed and breakfast.

Ally would like to get a promotion at work. However her boss seems to want her to have sex with him to get the promotion. Eventually Ally's friend Chelsea also tries to get the same promotion. And Chelsea is desperate due to the impending pregnancy.

The main love story revolves around Seth's past marriage, and we come to find out he had a daughter through that marriage that died. This makes it difficult for Seth to commit to any new relationship, as he continues to grieve the loss of his daughter. Strangely enough, Seth and his ex-wife are still good friends.

Bad Haircut

This is another set of stories by Tom Perrotta. I previously enjoyed his Nine Inches book. These stories almost seem autobiographical. The settings is the 1970s, where Buddy, our main character, is mostly going to high school.

Perrotta has the ability to quick bring you into the scene and feel like you are part of the action. There is nothing astounding about the main character. The beauty lies in the details that Perrotta decides to include in his stories.

You know Perrotta is the master when he can end the book with a funeral that keeps you on the edge of your seat. However, once again, there is no real unusual piece of the story. Just masterful storytelling here.

I know I said this before. But I got to get myself more books by this author.

Fail-Safe Investing

There are a couple premises in this book. One is that nobody can predict the future. Even advisors that have a stellar track record could fall flat tomorrow. Speculative investing should be avoided, or limited to money you are not afraid to lose. Instead, a four part investment technique can keep you gaining over the long haul with minimal risk.

Browne thinks you should split your investment into complementary areas such as gold, treasury bills, stocks, and bonds. Any one of those could be falling. But usually the complementary ones would be rising at that time. And vice versa. You can take advantage of occasional big gains from any one of those categories. These are holdings you can acquire and forget.

Browne also has some side notes. You should keep some funds in a foreign account. Don't make any money overseas so you don't have to report the earnings. Don't leave a trail or link that account to your other current accounts. And don't get any regular correspondence from the foreign bank holding your funds.

Lessons From a Third Grade Dropout

I saw a video of a college commencement ceremony. It was by Rick Rigsby. Previously I had never heard of this guy. But he was very inspirational. So I decided to buy his book. Rigsby explains the philosophy of his late father. While his dad only made it to the third grade, he had wisdom.

There were several useful ideas from Rigsby's dad. One of them was to always be an hour early. Another was to always do the very best job. A theme of his actions was to always be helping people. These are all signs of great integrity.

Rigsby needed the lessons from his dad as his wife died and left him with two young sons. His dad had little to say to him - "Just stand." Rigsby's father passed away shortly after his wife. I am not sure if I wholeheartedly recommend this book. You should definitely look up his commencement video on YoutTube.

Nine Inches

Nine Inches is a set of short stories told by one Tom Perrotta. It was kind of nice ready a lot of different unrelated tales. I will focus on one of the later ones. Dude is a high school student. He got a job illegally taking SAT tests for other students. He worked for a boss that set up the tests.

Normally this dude would be taking tests for strangers. But this time around, it was for a kid in his school. Obviously the kid came from money. The boss paid our guy $500 to pass the SAT test for his clients. Passing the test was easy. He also had to go to sleep early the prior night, not drink any alcohol, etc.

There was one other problem with the current dude he was taking the test for. The guy went to a party the night before, and hooked up with the girl our guy had the hots for. Oops. You know what that means? Even though our guy knew all the answers to the SAT test, he made sure the client failed the exam miserably.

Now there was a lot more to this story. But that was the crux. The true genius of the stories like this one in the book were the details. It is hard to convey these details in a summary book report. I know I will be looking for more books by Tom Perrotta. Hopefully they will be short story anthologies too.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

This book was subtitled "The Origins of the Internet". It was a tough read, as they covered a lot of detail. The origins trace back to the Arpanet. ARPA was a department of defense division that looked into future technologies. They initially set out to connect a few computer sites. The contract was won by a small company that did a lot of due diligence for their bid.


Once the few sites were connected across the USA, many others wanted to join. The hardware was expensive. And it took the contractor time to debug the hardware produced by the manufacturer. But they got computers networked. Programs such as email needed to be developed to work with the networked computers.


As more and more sites needed to be connected, and sometimes the sites had different computers and/or networks, there was a need to figure out how to connect disparate networks. That was researched performed by more scientists. And a little after that, local networks needed to be connected. This gave rise to Ethernet networking.


The original contractor for the first work arranged for an anniversary to celebrate everyone involved. They had to invite around 25 different people based on all the work done at different times. One of the principals had already passed away. Others were joining or creating companies to make money off the Internet. This is all prior to the invention of the world wide web. That is a story for a different book.

Emily the Strange - the Lost Days

In this story we meet Earwig. She seems to have lost her memory. She is in a strange town. When she gets hungry, she goes to a diner and ends up doing odd jobs for food. She sleeps in a makeshift box behind the café.


Earwig gets evidence that her real name is Molly. She goes back home in the middle of the book to meet her two parents. They have lot of documentation, including pictures and video, of Molly growing up with them. Somehow all this sounds wrong to Earwig. Eventually she figures she cannot be Molly.


Later Earwig gets in touch with the real Molly. She also returned to the town she woke up in with her memory gone. She then finds out she is related to the original owner of the diner, who is deceased. Things heat up when we find out that owner and some rich kids in town were from two different fighting clans.


Earwig needs to find a way to protect the ownership of the diner. One of the rich kids is trying to take possession of it by any means necessary. And it seems in this town, bribes help get things done. I need to read some more books about this Earwig, or as she is properly known, Emily the Strange.