“Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.”

This man won the Noble Peace Prize this week. He speaks five languages.

He also used to be the President of Finland.

It’s fascinating to ponder what makes some people rise to the top of society while the rest stay in relative mediocrity. Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with being average. Someone’s got to be the top of the bell curve. Heck, it’s better than being the bottom. Nevertheless, it seems like one has to be in politics or show business to gain this kind of notice. Not quite sure how I feel about that. Yes, one could be a fancy-schmancy scientist but you wouldn’t have the “CNN” name recognition.

Today’s post isn’t a preachy deal, despite the title. Spend today watching TV for all I care. It’s just interesting to see how people’s choices affect the way their lives turn out in such a dramatic fashion in some instances and in most others not at all.

Most people have very boring lives. I guess that’s why reality television, dramatic shows and soap operas are so popular.

“I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.”
~Steven Wright

 

This Just In

My mom went to the doctor yesterday for a check-up and like most people her age (72), she has to have a medical procedure done. In this case, it’s a surgery to have her bladder and uterus lifted. Now one would not even realize that such things could fall – to where could said items plummet? There ain’t that much space to move around. Apparently, it isn’t as uncommon as one might think, and the bladder-dropping happens a lot to women after childbirth.

Be that as it may, my mom might be off of work for up to six weeks AND she might need me to come stay with her for the first week after she gets out of the hospital. I love visiting with my mom but I would miss Jesse (and our cats) terribly.

At least it would only be for a week, and it would be in the spring before school starts. Jesse’s parents visited us this past May so my mom is due to visit us or have us visit her. I guess all things considered, this would be the easiest way to do it.

 

“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

I had a brilliant list of things to discuss today but I forgot to save the list while rebooting so ehhh.

On a fabulous note, I am thrilled with the latest WordPress UI design. At the very least, I can see whites and grays while I type this out, and not that horrible Institutional Baby Blue. Also the option layout – what wonderful improvements have been made! I no longer have to “trial and error” my way around some backasswards Dashboard (though that feature is still there for those freaks who choose to use it.) None of this is apparent to the reader. However, for my part, I think it will greatly enhance my desire to update my blog.

On a related note, I changed my blog theme. Hope you like it.

I still cannot stand the word “blog”. It sounds clumsy, fat, and gurgling. Like an obese toad drooling on itself. Maybe it’s because it rhymes with the words “bog” and “slog”, both of which I do not like, definitions and sounds included. Having a “journal”, on the other hand, can go either way. You’re either doing the “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret” thing, or you’re going to be meeting Dr. Livingstone in Zambia and your notes will be featured in the Smithsonian.

And now for something completely different:

“In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.”
~Steven Wright

 

“Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”

According to this piece of news, the NFL will be offering the first live game broadcast in 3-D this Thursday evening. You’ll be able to see the Superbowl-winner New York Giants play in 3-D in a New York theater. You’ll be able to see the dynasty New England Patriots play in 3-D in a Boston theater. And, uh, you’ll be able to see the Raiders play in 3-D in an LA theater. Yeeeeah…

“When I played pro football, I never set out to hurt anyone deliberately – unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.”
~Dick Butkus

It’s hard to hate the Raiders when they’re 3-9. It’s like kicking someone in the teeth when they’re already bleeding profusely from the eyes and ears. Lest ye think I’m being facetious, the Titans went 4-12 not so very long ago. It ain’t pretty. Strangely enough, the Raiders aren’t the worst in their division. That dubious honor belongs to the Kansas City Chiefs at 2-10. Guess who one of their wins was against? (See “Raiders” above.)

Even if your team is kinda crap this year, you can take heart that at least your team ain’t the Detroit Lions. What in the hell is going on over there? Besides the fact that Detroit is hemorrhaging economically, especially with the auto industry bailout, the Lions are winless so far and look to go 0-16 this season. The rest of their games are against teams with winning records. I saw only part of their game last week against the Titans because it was so depressing.

If you follow hockey, it’s like looking at an entirely different photo. The Detroit Red Wings are the current Stanley Cup champions. Talk about putting all your sports eggs in one basket.

“Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”
~Vince Lombardi

 

“But the Dutch speak four languages and smoke marijuana…”

I love the process of learning new languages. I fancy myself talented in the area of communication (at least more than I consider myself talented in the areas of cooking, car mechanics, and quantum physics – which is to say, not at all) so I am usually in the process of messing around with a foreign language. My best second language is easily Spanish. I’m part Mexican and Spanish. My mom’s side of the family is Mexican/Spanish and everyone my mom’s generation and older speaks Spanish fluently.

The fact I took six years of Spanish helps tremendously too.

Actually that helps most of all. My mom’s side of the family, my mom included, didn’t really teach me much Spanish at all. It wouldn’t have been practical, considering my father was not a native speaker. And while he did try to speak Spanish, Lord knows he probably shouldn’t have. While I loved my father dearly, the man didn’t have much of an ear for accents. When you hear Spanish spoken without any care to accent – spoken only in an American accent – it is like having a frying pan repeatedly smacked up against the side of your head. Painful and irritating.

Getting to my point, I have the Rosetta Stone program, which I think is kinda meh. I have worked with a handful of European languages on it and it’s all very similar. Starts you out learning “boy, girl, the boy drinks, the girl eats”, etc. I discovered that I had Arabic Level 1. Installed that.

Egad.

I knew they didn’t use the Roman alphabet. I’m cool with that. However, even the simplest words felt like someone throwing several Ping Pong balls at my head at once and expecting me to catch them all. “Whoa, what?” went through my mind many times.

Sometimes it takes a spin with an incredibly challenging language like Arabic that makes you appreciate the progress you’ve made in your chosen second language. It makes you get over yourself really quickly too. Ah, la experiencia humilde.

“And I learnt French at school, up to the age of 16, and then I just kept talking it endlessly after that. And at school, the first page I ever learnt in French was full of things that are quite difficult to get into conversation, thinks like “the mouse is underneath the table” – la souris est en dessous la table. Just slip that when you’re buying a ticket to Paris: “Le train à Paris, oui? C’est ici? C’est maintenant? Cinq minutes… la souris est en dessous la table…”

The other line was, “the cat is on the chair” – le chat est sur la chaise – slightly more easy to fit in; and “the monkey is on the branch” – “le singe est sur la branche.” Very difficult to get into a conversation! Not a lot of jungle in France… monkeys thin on the ground… thin in the air… just generally pretty trim!”
~Eddie Izzard

 

“If you talk to God you’re religious. If God talks to you, you’re psychotic.”

So you go to the internet, the bastion of all things good and gracious in this wide world, in search of a tasty yellow cake recipe. The internet is tricksy, however. It has other plans for Ye Olde Google Searche. Instead of your goal, you get side-tracked looking in awe at this real recipe for Tufeen Hushani (Vulcan Wedding Cake). This blew my mind only slightly less than when I found out that Klingon and Elfish (from Lord of the Rings) both have complete and extensive linguistic rules, structures and alphabets.

I think I need to start updating this in the morning. In the evening, I’m too easily distracted by people or things. My brain has more momentum around 6 a.m. from morning chores than it does around 10 p.m. Speaking of chores, I still have to brush the cats.

I started on my math review project today. My major at TMCC is going to be Computer Science, which will require a good amount of math. Plus, I’m going to have to take an ACCUPLACER exam before school starts. The test is mandatory and is used to place students in math/English courses when they haven’t taken the SAT/ACT (or in my case, haven’t taken it in many moons.) I’m not sweating the English side of things at all. My math skills need work though. I’d like to place high so I have less math to take before transferring to UNR. So long story short, I’m starting back at Algebra to review what I used to know.

It’s amazing what your brain retains, especially at the mechanical level. So much information came back to me today which I thought I’d forgotten, and I felt oddly at peace doing my math problems – it was almost meditative. Since it was all review, I found myself doing my math problems back the way I used to when I was 14. Only when I started stressing about the placement exam did the process get sour. I am pleasantly surprised that my brain hasn’t completely gone south on me, and that there is still some processing power in it yet.

I think the secret to success for this whole project, and math in general, will be to embrace the subject, rather than avoiding it as I did for so long. I think that if I meet these challenges head-on, apply myself, and have confidence, I will have great success.

“A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars. That’s subtraction.”
~Mae West

 

A Day of Thanks

“I love Thanksgiving turkey… it’s the only time in Los Angeles that you see natural breasts.”
~Arnold Schwarzenegger

Another year has almost come and gone and we arrive at one of my favorite holidays: Thanksgiving. I love this holiday, despite its rather shady/awkward historical beginnings. The modern meaning is what matters to me. Screw what the pilgrims thought – they were a bunch of weirdo religious extremists anyway. I’d have been the person who stayed back in England.

Thanksgiving is wonderful because we celebrate three joyful things in life: a bountiful life, a bountiful harvest, and American football. One cannot really be happy, I think, without a full heart, a full stomach and a full mind. Thus, the trinity of “all things good” comes to pass on this most auspicious day. Also, and this is somewhat of a side note, I do love autumn colors, which is frequently used for Thanksgiving decor.

As a child, I enjoyed Thanksgiving because of the artwork – the turkey/hand montage – and the charming pilgrim/Indian propaganda. In some sense, it is sad when that propaganda gets smashed to bits – almost as a coming of age as an American nowadays – the innocence of the first “American dinner party” is ruined.

“I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.”
~Jon Stewart

As a teenager, I couldn’t have cared less about the holiday because I was an extremely picky eater back then, and Thanksgiving brought no presents. It did bring annoying or hated relatives, all of which are gone in some fashion now.

As a young adult, I had moved off to college and could pick and choose which holidays I returned home. Later, I got a job at a retail record store which was open 365 days a year. At that point, I could not choose what holidays I went home for – I found I was working on most holidays, including Thanksgiving and Christmas. Working in retail made me realize what I really liked about Thanksgiving: the lack of presents – which was what I didn’t like about it years prior.

It’s hard to commercialize a holiday where you’re supposed to give thanks instead of get stuff like Christmas. As Americans, Thanksgiving is one of our only true United States holidays, yet it’s one of the holidays we’re the most disinclined to enjoy. We hate making the effort to see others, and we hate the idea of having to appreciate what we have and be content. Almost everyone, myself included, so very often thinks of what they don’t have instead of what they do. Is it human nature, or is it part of our cultural paradigm? I am wont to think the latter. We are so busy trying to gain, achieve, get, and amass that it becomes a problem when we take our minds off of the idea of being thankful.

“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”
~Thornton Wilder

With this economic crunch on many of us, I wonder if people will be more thankful for what they have this year or less?

I have a loving, wonderful husband who puts up with my constant stream of lolcat links on AIM. My relatives, friends and cats are well and healthy. We have money in the bank. We have a safe residence and our landlady did not raise the rent on us for next year’s lease. My football team is 10-1. Our favorite sushi restaurant is open today and we shall be able to eat there instead of having to attempt to make Thanksgiving dinner for two.

Also my husband just informed me that Tennessee is beating Detroit 38-10. For that, Lord, we are truly thankful.

Amen.

“Stand up, on this Thanksgiving Day, stand upon your feet. Believe in man. Soberly and with clear eyes, believe in your own time and place. There is not, and there never has been a better time, or a better place to live in.”
~Phillips Brooks

 

An Update on Life

Better late than never, says I.

Jesse’s almost fully-recovered. I can’t seem to get my sleeping hours in order. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow at 9 a.m.

For Monty Python fans, this YouTube change is a breath of fresh air. Or maybe it’s more like a fresh loaf of bread. Or a clean pile of clothes.

Good night.

“I have the world’s largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world…perhaps you’ve seen it.”
~Steven Wright

 

What a long, strange week it’s been.

Jesse and I have had an unusual week, to say the least. On my end, you never know what exactly you have forgotten to backup until you see it being deleted during your reformat. Specifically, I forgot to backup several hundred fonts and my birthday reminder list on my Firefox. Hopefully, both will not be too painful to reconstruct.

Jesse, on the other hand, knows the meaning of the word “pain”. His facial infection, which the doctors suspect started as a clogged tear duct in his left eye, grew to be so painful and swelled, that we went to the emergency room on Wednesday. As per usual with all services in Nevada, we got seen pretty much right away. (This is a tourism-based state where service is king and you may not find the people exceedingly friendly but, by God, you’ll get served faster than corn dogs at a state fair.) We had a follow-up with our primary care physician on Thursday, who said his antibiotics would still take a while longer to work, and he would not be able to work Friday. Two positive notes: his MRI came back clear and his 100 deg F fever is gone.

Now that his fever is gone, his body can begin to recover. Since his MRI is clear, it means the infection is not moving to his brain. The scary part of a facial infection is this: when you have an infection in your body, it very often moves. In your face, it doesn’t have too many places to go. Me, I’d go to Vegas, or maybe a nice tropical resort. Anyway, Jesse is out of the worst of it. It’ll just take time for the infection to run its course. In the interim, I’ve rented several films for him to watch.

The most horrible part of the process now is the fact he’s been told he can’t be on the computer for more than 30 minutes at a time, else he will strain his bad eye. That went over like a plate of veal at a vegan banquet.

Okay, better topic. I’ve decided on a major: computer science. It’ll be a good fit with my previous degrees, especially my masters. There are a vast array of fields I can work in with a comp sci degree and I’ll have a free tutor at my beck and call every night. I’m not terribly stoked about being behind a desk for eight hours a day. On the other hand, Jesse has proposed getting us a pair of street bicycles, which would help us exercise and get out and about. So it probably wouldn’t be so bad.

There was something else I was going to mention. I can’t recall now and I need to go feed the cats. I leave you now with this:

“Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.”
~Doug Larson

 

“ ‘Cake or death?’ That’s a pretty easy question. Anyone could answer that.”

I’m off to do my reformat. I have all my ducks in a row, I think. And it’s a good a time as ever. Plus, Jesse’s absolutely miserable so I may as well join him in company.

Jesse’s got a 10:30 a.m. appointment with the doc tomorrow. Morning can’t come soon enough.

See you on the flip side.

“I like my coffee like I like my women…in a plastic cup.”
~Eddie Izzard