Where "me" is actually Victoria.

Me: I am never going to have a working computer ever again. ._.


...really, it's not like Dad does this sort of thing for a living...oh wait. He does. For the government.

Current Mood: cheerful

Talking to Vicki on Skype,
Vicki: So Mom's ordering pizza and sent me an e-mail to ask me what drink I wanted, except I wasn't paying attention to my mail so when I didn't respond after 3 minutes, she came upstairs and rather than just asking, said, "I sent you an e-mail." I turn back towards the monitor, go to my mail, read the e-mail, turn back to her and then answered her question. I'm almost surprised that I didn't just send an e-mail back to her. :V
Jo: LOL
Jo: There really is no better example of how communication in our family works.

Current Mood: amused

Long term goals:

• Develop Latin fluency
• Work on knife skills (speed, care, and artistry)
• Practice drawing
• Learn more about Bento boxes, and start packing them
• Practice sticking to short-term goals (like working on this paper I've been meaning to work on for 2+ hours and haven't made any progress on because I've been looking at bento boxes.)
• Find more cold soup recipes
• eliminate store-bought bread, and make my own more often

To Do:

• decide if I'm going to convention this summer and fill out the packet
• find out if I can audit the archaeology field school if I don't get a job
• be a huge nerd for even considering auditing a field school (it involves digging up a parking lot on campus before they put a building in over it).
• Find some sort of job for the summer?
• Insert more productive hours into the day without sacrificing my 8-9 hours of sleep

My classes this semester are all pretty okay. Individually, I enjoy them and the professors teaching them. All together though, they're a bit overwhelming.

I'm taking

• Introduction to Ancient Rome, which is good. The novelty has worn off, but I would still like to grow up to be the professor. He seems like a fun guy to hang out with. The material is all pretty great too. I especially like the Satirycon, Psuedolus, and Cicero's Phillipics.
• Introduction to Archaeology. I love the professor for this class. She's really entertaining, and knows her stuff. It's more cultural/historical archaeology and totally different than what I was expecting. The professor has been doing research on Mardi Gras and the redistribution of beads over areas and years. She's also done a bunch of stuff on mothering and American culture.
• The Emotions in Ancient Thought and Philosophy. I like this class a lot more now than I did in the beginning of the semester. We started the semester with Desire, then did Grief, and now we're exploring Anger. I understand Anger and the language involved a lot better than the other emotions. The philosophies we've looked at also make a lot more sense here than they did with other stuff.
• Greco-Roman Magic. This professor is the absent-minded professor of the Classics department. He's really wonderful. The texts are all pretty good too. We read Apuleius' The Golden Ass, which is hilarious, even in translation.
• Latin. It's really easy to get distracted and totally lost. The material is really good though; we just finished up a segment of the Pro Milone. Cicero is a pompous ass and I love him for it.

On the up side, I've found out that I only have 5 required classes left to take at Berkeley. So I get to have light loads next year. I'm sure I'll busy myself with figuring out whether or not I'm going to grad school, applying to grad school, taking the GRE, and figuring out what I need to do to teach. /sigh.

Current Mood: nerdy

http://www.rochester.edu/Warner/programs/teaching/newteach/latinoverview.html


No time to post more. Maybe I'll post over Spring break (1-1/2 weeks)

Current Mood: exhausted

http://www.apaclassics.org/Administration/Placement/jobscurrent.html

I was wandering around trying to find information about Grad schools and came across job listings for classicists. It seems to be a page full of cancellations and budget cuts. :(

Current Mood: sad

Take the first sentence of the first post of each month of 2008. The result is the summary of your year.

Jan: I hate weddings and wedding planning.

Feb: n/a

March: n/a

April: And yesterday was my 21st birthday.

May: I'm in.

June: n/a

July: n/a

August: Perhaps I'll start updating more regularly, but probably not

September: After weeks and weeks of waiting and hoping, we finally got news on 2 really big important financial things.

October: Teaching Latin to Deaf kids- Crazy?

November: n/a

December: I feel very blah.

Moral of this story: I don't update LJ very much, but last year was a busy year.

Current Mood: busy

that I haven't purchased a single thing.

Yikes.

1 Final down, 2 to go. Grocery shopping in t-2 hours. Baking frenzy to commence tomorrow. I'm excited.

I'm feeling better; the thought of creamy things still makes me nauseous, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

Current Mood: calm

I feel very blah. All I really want to do is bake and cook, but never clean. I have a paper to write and lots of reading to do, and not a lot of desire to do any of it, even though I know the reading is good and I'll enjoy it. At this very moment I'm avoiding doing laundry, which I've sorted to avoid writing this paper. There are layers. I know the things I'm not supposed to do, and I'm pretty good at not doing them when I'm not supposed to. Like, what I really, actually want to be doing is running new dungeons in WoW, but I won't. I would like to make tiramisu cupcakes, but I won't. I want to experiment with potato candy and peanut butter fudge, but I won't. Instead I spend a lot of time clicking the "check mail" button, and wandering around the internet and sometimes I just sit, and stare for a while because I really just don't want to do anything. I'm also coming down with something, which doesn't help. 

In other, less depressing news:
I made a pumpkin pie for thanksgiving. As well as pumpkin-cranberry scones (which were vegan, shhhh don't tell anyone) and molasses cookies. Oh! and Brandied Whipped Cream to go with the pie (which also went very well with the scones and cookies, and pretty much every other food I've dipped into it). Mom bought me a stand mixer, which I very much appreciate (and used to make all of the above), and will repay her with peanut butter fudge. After I finish this paper. :(. I chickened out on the pie crust though, I bought a frozen one. There's a little left over custard though, so I think I'm going to try making mini-pies in my cupcake thing with home-made crust. I've also made so many pumpkin-based things in the past couple of months that Josh is really tired of pumpkin. So I'll have to find a new ingredient to become obsessed with...

Tuesday night Uncle David was in San Francisco on business so we went out to dinner at R&Gs, which was really good. We had fresh steamed prawns and they were AMAZING. Prawn eggs are also super delicious. Then we wandered around china town for a while and stopped at a tea place, and sampled some $100/pound Oolong tea. It was really good and interesting. It tasted almost mustard-greeny. The leaves turned back into leaves when it had hot water over it, instead of just still being dried leafy remains. We did not buy any of it, despite how hard the sales lady tried.

Current Mood: drained

I got my very first paper back yesterday. I got an A, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I mean, of course, I'm happy to have gotten an A, but I don't feel like this paper was any better than any other paper I've ever written, and it wasn't really remarkable in any way (though I am pleased that I had the opportunity to use the phrase, "being covered with battle-gore"). I finished it at 2am the day it was due, and didn't really revise it. I did a lot of summarizing and a less than equal amount of analysis. On the other hand, it is a lower division class and most people taking it aren't Classics majors, so the expectations aren't tremendous, I suppose. I think part of my confusion is that I thought Berkeley would be a lot harder and that I'd really be challenged in a way I've never been challenged before. While there is a lot of reading to do, and I certainly haven't done all of it (or even most of it), I feel like I'm just catching up on old information. I think part of that is just the nature of Classics, and that I'm vaguely familiar with the material already. I also don't have the difficulty with suspension of disbelief that a lot of people seem to have. The notion that people really believed in this unbelievably complex system of deities and those deities were in no way similar to current religious beliefs (the sovereign male figure is a philanderer, and the gods are not intended for people to model their lives after- and as such it's totally different from any way that religion is practiced today) is really hard for a lot of people, especially non-classicists, to wrap their minds around. Frankly, I find today's religious systems more difficult to grasp than those of the Greeks and Romans. I have a lot of thoughts about religion that I need to organize a little better, and I might post it later, but I have a feeling it'll be very lengthy. I have noticed that I've been thinking very differently about Latin than I have before, and I'm picking up on a lot more of the subtleties (and that they exist at all). There are days when it makes all the sense in the world, and days that it makes no sense at all, but part of that is just the nature of the pace of the class. We completed two units last week (4 quizzes!), and moved on to the third. We aren't doing as much reading as I'd like to be doing (like, any, really), but there just isn't time! Also, the exercises are really good at making little enough sense in English that you really have to know what the words are doing in Latin. You can't just get by knowing what it's supposed to be about, which is how I got through 5 years of Latin in high school and don't remember any of it now.
Next semester I think will be a lot more interesting (and stressful). I'll be taking 5 classes (I'm taking 3 now), and one of them is about Greco-Roman Magic and I basically have no background knowledge in that aside from that it existed and I know of a couple witch-figures in mythology, but that's basically it, so I'm really excited about it. I'm also taking a class about Literacy, which I think will be interesting, but I'm not sure. It might also just be BS.

Current Location: The Village
Current Mood: pensive

Teaching Latin to Deaf kids- Crazy? or Crazy enough that it just might work?

Current Mood: curious