Week almost over....

This week has been way to long. At least I won't have to do another essay test in that class. Plus one more translation quiz out of the way. I felt pretty good about this one too. Writing out the translation the night before really helped.

Tomorrow my Student loan refund check should be here and I can pay my HOA off for the year. Tomorrow evening a plan on having my butt in front of the TV to watch the second season of Doctor who.

Great Escape

*face palms*

Somehow Pumpkin got outside and went into be neighbors condo. She just walked him back over. I'm such a bad mummy because I thought he was still out on the balcony enjoying the weather.

But no he'd somehow sliped out when my girl-friend left this afternoon. Or when I was carrying a case of water in.

I really need to get his tags updated and have a chip put in him.

And Matlida says I must show her as well.

Recipe Friday: Main Course

This is a dish my mum threw together on night from leftovers and became a family hit!

Being a family recipes none of the amount are exact.
Chicken-Pasta

Some chopped bacon
Some chopped chicken breast
Bow-tie pasta
spoonfuls or so of garlic
Bit of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO)
shredded Parmesan and Romano Cheese

In a saucepan on med heat put in the bacon. When the bacon is brown drain off the grease. Add EVOO, garlic, and chicken. Turn down heat to med-low and stir occasional.

Put pasta water on to boil. When water comes to a boil add pasta. Cook pasta to the package specs. Drain and add to saucepan when chicken is cooked. Stir pasta into contents of saucepan.
Take off heat. Stir in shredded cheese to taste.

Plate and serve with a white wine.

It's an easy recipe to tinker with, and you can substitute ham for the bacon or not use it at all. I've also made it without the pasta, with seafood instead of chicken, and with different cheeses. Have fun playing with it and let me know what you think.

Carnival of Education

The 85th Carnival of Education is up over at The Median Sib

Read for Fun Wednesday

My 'fun' book for the week as been A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin

It is fiction but at the same time a 'true' story about the lives Kurt Godel and Alan Turing.

It was featured on the Colbert Report. So far it a interesting read, even if I don't full understand some the theory that is mentioned. I'll let you know my thoughts on it when i finish.

Yes! and No!

I was approved for a student loan!

This means I'll be able to finishing paying off this semester tuition without borrowing from mum, not to mention paying my car insurance and hoa for the rest of the year. That I'll be able to put some money aside for property taxes.

Now if only I could get my Chaucer translation quiz grades to go UP not down. (Granted it only dropped from a 8 to a 7, and most people in the class had a 6 last time and a 7 this time. But STILL.)

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Ahoy, there you mangey rapscalions! It be talk like a pirate day*!

In honor of this here day, I be telling you a pirate joke:

Why couldn't the boy see the Pirate movie?

Because it was rated ARRRR.

Be sharing your pirate jokes with me, me hearties.


*Which I observed by speaking Middle English and will further celebrate by playing Monkey Island.

Friday Recipe Blogging: Side

This is one of my favorite recipes. It's simple fast and can taste different each time you make it depending on the beer you use. In fall I like using some of the pumpkin and pumpkin spice beers.

This recipe original came from a very odd source: Dragonlance's More Leaves from the Inn of the Last Home by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman/
Beer Bread:

3 Cups of flour
3 tbs sugar
4 1/2 tsp baking powder
12oz of beer or ale
1/2 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 350F. Shift dry ingredients. (If you use self-rising flour you can leave out the salt and baking powder). Shake up the beer or ale so it's nice and fizzy and pour it into dry ingredients. Warning failure to shake beer will result in tasty rocks. Stir mixture thoroughly.
Spoon batter into greased bread pan.

Bake 45-50 minutes. Let bread cool for 15 minutes before turning out of the pan.

Hot for the Teacher?

At age 26 that I'm near the same age as some of my potential professors. Some of which who will be (male or female) attractive, interesting, and someone that I'd like to get to know better outside of class. These in some ways are my peers, but only not.

I've never really thought about that before now. I never thought it would be an issue, because it didn't really occur to me until this past birthday that 'I'm one of the grownups now'.

There are lines that cannot be crossed even on the level of just being friends with a Professor while still in their class. That is a given.

When though is it appropriate to have outside social contact? When your out of that class or when you've graduated?

What are the rules of this sort of thing when you hit grad-school?

In conclusion, I admit nothing.

Butterflies? Feels more like elephants

I don't think its possible for me do any more preparation for my second translating quiz tomorrow. Or to read out my section of House of Fame.

But I'm still panicking. I can feel it in my stomach, that worry knot.

It doesn't help matters that I left one of my text books that I need for tomorrow at work, with no way to retrieve it until Friday.

I'm going to finish my cup of tea and head to bed. If I'll panicky in the morning I'll take some St. John's Wart.

Damnit I really don't want to go back on lexapro. I can't afford it.

(I also just realized I've been doing really boring blogging lately. An undergrads life just isn't that interesting.)

Note to self:

Do not over think yourself on the next translation quiz.

On another note: One page papers are hell. It was agony only having one double spaced page to talk about the correlation between the hunting and bedroom scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I could have spent a page just talking about Reynard!

Kitten!

Did I mention my mum has a new kitten?

He is so tiny, only six weeks old. Him and his brothers and sisters were left at the local petsmart with note saying their mum had died. He's been checked out for feline leukemia and AIDs, and he was completely free.

I spent most of yesterday with him either hiding beside me under a nest of pillows or climbing over me mewing. He eats some wet food and can drink milk, but mum's still having to bottle feed him some.

He makes me want a new kitten but it would be very unfair to the kitten since I have so little free time and to my other two cats. Empress Matilda would think it was some new toy I'd gotten her most likely.

Random updates

I survived my reading in my Chaucer class fairly well. I only really butchered 'countenauce', which was slightly embarrassing because I'd been saying it correctly when I was practicing. The teacher pronounced it twice in class, so of course, I said it completely wrong. I won't know how my translation went until Tuesday, at but least I'll have it back before my second translation quiz.

I did enjoy The Book of the Dutchess. In a 'modern updated' version I could see the Black Knight saying something along the lines of "She's DEAD you imbecile!", in frustration at the narrator near the end of the poem. I'm of the mind that Chaucer as the narrator here played dumb, in part, to provoke the Black Knight into plainly stating his lose. Parts of the poem also reminded me strongly of a scene from Sleepless in Seattle where Tom Hank's character is talking about his dead wife.

Also, Chaucer is a bit of a show off. Yes, I know film at Eleven.

I only wish I could say the same about my first commentary (getting it back before the next one is due that is)from Hist of Brit Lit. I have a second one due on Tuesday over Sir Gawin and the Green Knight (and really I don't remember it having this much 'sex', so to speak, in it when I read it back in Highschool) and I'd rather have known how I did on the first one before starting on the second. But what can you do? It's only a page long so I can't bugger it up too badly.

On a side note if I hear another population stat in the next month, it will be too soon. I'm rather disappointed in the fact that my texts for my Early Modern Europe class are more interesting than the lecture. I've already read most of The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe.

I'm going to start the 'reading for pleasure Wednesday' for my sanity I think. I have several books on my 'to read' pile, the least of which are The Historian, A Mad Man Dreams of Turing Machines, and re-reading The Time Traveler's Wife before I need to give it back to my friend (not to mention one or two Doctor Who novels).

Lanval

This really didn't belong with the other post so...

For some reason the end of Lanval with the Lady showing up at just the right moment to save Lanval, then him riding off with her to live happily ever after reminded me strongly of part of the end to Brazil*.

In both cases the 'hero' is saved in very fantasy like way just when things look at their worst and then they ride off with their loves to live happily ever after in some far away place never to be heard from again. Now in Brazil clearly the Sam is being tortured and retreats into his own mind, back into his fantasy world. In Lanval, Marie is writing a lai, so such a fantasy/magical rescues fits in with the reality of that world.

Really there is not to much commonality between the Lanval and Brazil other than this feeling I have on the 'un-realness' of the happy endings.

I'm not sure why my brain even made the jump and similarity is mostly in my head. Oh well.

*I have not seen the movie in several years so forgive me for any mistakes about the plot.

No, I'm not speaking in tongues...

I have to read some of the Book of the Duchess aloud in my Chaucer class on Thursday, not to mention the translating quiz. I'm completely freaked out that I'm going to butcher it and look like an idiot. Or at least more of an idiot after my attempted comment on Lanval and how it relates to courtesy and justice, History of Brit Lit.

Did I mention both are taught by the same teacher and have some of the same students in each? I don't even remember what I was trying to say just that it didn't come out how I wanted it to, plus I could tell if the look the teacher gave me was 'that interesting' or 'dear lord shut up'. I wanted to sink into the floor.

It seems I need to re-train myself to raise my hand after a few years of classes where no one raised their hand, you just sort of spoke up when questions were asked (never interrupting the teacher though).

I had someone ask me today why a history major was taking junior and senior level English classes, because you know there is no reason what so ever that a history major would be interested in the History of British Literature or Chaucer. Plus, never mind that I do have two history courses this semester; Early Modern Europe and History of England to 1688.

Where the intro to mythology fits in all this?

I wanted to, it was open, it vaguely fills one of my requirements, and I've frankly have been wanting to for a few years now.

Get Tom Leykis off the air

On my way home tonight my radio was tuned to one of the local talk radio stations. Now normally this station has very funny, very liberal people on. Hell they hoist love-lines. While some of their people can be assholes they tend not to be misogynist asshole as the guy I heard to night.

Tom Leykis.

First thing I heard one his show was a guy calling in talking about dating a girl that had blamed the holes in her walls on her abusive ex, then said two years later she'd turned me into that guy.

My reaction was pretty much....The fuck?

I waited for the host to smack the guy down and when he didn't I changed the station. Normally that be the end of it, but later while flipping around I landed back on the same station.

Right in the middle of his lovely rant about never ever owning or buying property with a woman. That you should only let a girl move in if your going to marry her, and in opinion you should never get married. And how most women he's been involved with try to get you to buy property with them, and he says it has if these girls are just after his money.

While I was still in shock over the stupidity of this, he took a female caller. She's railing on him about his women hating ways, and when he asks her for examples she cites him saying that men should never date a woman with kids.

To paraphrase him: "I don't want another mans garbage."

I wanted to rip the radio out of my car and throw it at someone. Namely Tom Leykis.

I've emailed the station, with the strong request to replace him with ANYONE else. I'm going to email one of the women on the morning show about it, along with the woman that co-hosts the mid-day show. Give their general personality I'm pretty sure the might at least be able to give me the right numbers to call to make my voice have the most impact.

He isn't local but syndicated so hopefully if enough people get pissed he'll be replaced with a different show.

If Tom Leykis is broadcast in your area call or write that station to try and get him off the air.

I would like to say this in closing: If you move in with a guy and are helping or making the mortgage payment? Make sure your name is on the deed.

If he refuses to but your name on the deed but wants you to pay, get a rental or lease agreement with him. I don't care if you love him, protect yourself.

If you own the place? Make sure your name is the only one on the deed if you marry him. In joint property states get a pre-nup or if you don't and thing go to bad get a good lawyer that will fight for you.