Freebee Friday

I love free stuff. The offer of free stuff appeals to both my pack rat tendencies and my cheapness gene. And this week was a banner week for free stuff. As previously mentioned, I got to see TWO free movies this weekend - Arctic Tale (my movie review: meh.) on Monday and Skinwalkers (my movie review: I heart things that bite!) on Wednesday.

But Friday brought the motherload of free stuff! First, I got a free textbook from a publishing company. Publishing companies love to give instructors free textbooks, because if you like their book and make it the required one for your course, that's 100¹ kids who have to buy the overpriced thing. When I used to teach introductory nutrition, I received no less than four textbooks and two diet analysis software packages for free! After going to campus to pick up my free textbook, I headed out to the Georgia Straight office to pick up a prize package that I had won through one of their online contests. This prize pack consisted of 5 books, seen here sitting on my bedside bookshelf:

The book that had most appealed to me when I saw this contest was the Raw Shark Texts. I'd seen this book on a recent trip to the UBC Bookstore and it caught my eye because (a) I like sharks and (b) it had the shape of a shark cut out of the cover:

...so I read the back of the book and it sounded intriguing! I wasn't familiar with any of the other books, but I checked them out while waiting for the bus after picking them up and they all sound really good! So now I have a big stack of books to read - I'm just starting Infinite Jest³ though, which is about 2 million pages long, so it may be a while until I get to my new free books.

As an added bonus, I also got this free, snazzy new Georgia Straight bag, in which to carry my new books home:

And on the way home, I stopped by to see my hair stylist to get a free bang trim. I'm coming to discover that having bangs requires more than a once a year haircut.

OK, now as I was composing this posting, I just got a free bottle of water! I'm sitting at a coffee shop and the dude at the counter forget to make my toasted bagel so, as an apology for making me wait, he gave me a free bottle of water! It's my lucky week!

¹well, 100 kids in the case of my class, 'cuz that's about how big the class will be. If you teach one of those monster 500 student courses, that's a total goldmine for the publisher!

²the Georgia Straight, a local newspaper, was also the source of the Skinwalkers tickets.

³which I picked up at a used bookstore a while ago