The other day I checked out some books from Suzzallo Library, one of which happened to be in German. I started reading it on the bus ride home and instantly got a wave of sort-of-homesickness just from reading the words and constructions that only German has. A language consists of more than just vocabulary and grammar; there are conventions and styles of speaking and writing that are intrinsic to a certain language and which translate very badly. For example, this is the reason I said last spring that a certain French professor (nationality, not department, he was actually teaching European Studies) of mine was speaking French with English words, and in fact it was easier to understand him if I imagined he was speaking French. Anyway, this little German book is so full of formalized language and inbred clauses that it made me smile with fond memory.
I guess maybe I'm more poetic than I thought.
On a completely different subject, yesterday I made chicken cacciatore (with $.99/lb chicken, w00t!), which turned out very nicely. I even managed not to make a horrible mess, at least until I got to the tomatoes. The directions said to take canned whole tomatoes and crush them with my hands, so crush I did, and the first tomato took that opportunity to spray juice and seeds all over the stove. I wiped up the messiest bits and henceforth squeezed more carefully.
In other news, this afternoon one of my profs forwarded me a spam he got for love potions. I had no idea why. Subject: "happy valentinse day!" Feeling that I was going to go insane if this wasn't explained, I emailed him back asking if he had a virus or something - that was the only semi-plausible cause I could think of! It turns out his wife's name is Laura too, and somehow his email software decided that "laura" was me instead of her. So now I have had the honor of being part of one of those embarrassing wayward-email stories that people make so much of every once in a while. I read some of them a while ago (that's the kind of thing that passes for News on AOL), and I wasn't very impressed by any of them. Misunderstandings, mild embarrassment, yadda yadda. I'm not embarrassed about this, and I hope my prof isn't too embarrassed either. It would be too bad.
This afternoon I downloaded and installed OpenOffice. This is good. Now I can open spreadsheets and PowerPoint files without paying M$ lots of money! But I'm nowhere near solving the problem I actually downloaded it to solve. See, I want to keep track of my budget, how much money I spend on what day and on what category of stuff, but I couldn't figure out how to give columns or rows more meaningful names than letters or numbers. This should be possible, yes? If someone knows, please tell me, for I am desperate weary of reading unhelpful help files.
Post a comment