The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

I still seem to want to wake up (the first time) between 3:00 and 4:00, but hopefully I can get over that by the end of this weekend. It did come in handy this morning, though, because I woke up and my alarm clock was blinking 2:30 at me. Apparently the power went out just enough to kill the alarm clock. So I reset it and went back to sleep. I have no idea when I would have woken up if the alarm hadn't gone off.

Besides that minor anomaly, I think things are back to mostly normal again, and the next thing on The List is the shoulder. It's getting better, but it's doing it very slowly, and there's a lot of range of motion I don't have that I think I could improve upon with different exercises. The general guidelines for healing time is 3-6 months, and six months would be the end of August. I don't want it to be that long.

Last weekend I bought a book in French, because I can still read French and because I was interested in the subject (and because, since I now have all the academic degrees in French I'm ever going to get, I'm allowed to read books by living authors who aren't Making A Statement About Something). The book is called HHhH and it's half about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in WWII and half about the process of writing the book. It isn't actually funny, but it's made me laugh twice so far: once when I discovered that "zoom" in French is a regular verb (je zoome, tu zoomes...), and once when the author described Himmler as a hamster with Hitler's mustache and then referred to him as "the hamster" two paragraphs later.

I can read French a lot faster when I read it in French, instead of trying to translate it as I read. Unfortunately, my brain defaults to translating it and I keep having to remind myself to stop doing that and just read it. It's comforting that I can do that when I remind myself, so I haven't lost all the skills I ever had. All the language skills I use these days are in English, and most of them are in scientific writing (which I never actually learned, and am picking up by exposure and osmosis). But at least three articles I've done heavy revisions on have been published, so I must be doing it reasonably well. I still am not a statistician, however, so the current article is giving me fits. I'm supposed to be writing the Results and Discussion sections, and while I can figure out what the data analysis says, there are so many variables that I haven't a clue what the analysis means. Maybe I need a Statistics for Dummies book.

There are, it seems, a ridiculous number of dental schools in Central and South America. I've got a list of 800 dental schools and it seems like most of them are in Brazil, Mexico, or some other place that means its web site will either be in Spanish or in Portuguese. Fortunately I can mostly figure out where to find contact information in those languages; I gave up on the German ones because they're all medical schools and I don't know the German for "dentistry". I think it's a multi-word term that's abbreviated ZMK, but I could be wrong about that. I was also wrong about the Indonesian sites; those were easy once I figured out that "Fakultas Kedokteran Gigi" means "Dental School". Generally speaking, if a language uses the alphabet I'm accustomed to, I can figure it out. Except for German.

The reason I got saddled with this list is so I can send them spam, pretty much. We're having a continuing education course in April and my boss wants an international audience. So I'm supposed to be finding contact info for all of these dental schools so I can send them the course brochure and registration form. I do NOT want to know what my inbox will look like when a third of the email addresses bounce (although 600 schools down the list I've only got 165 email addresses, so it could be worse).

In other news, last night I stayed up until 1:00 this morning. Overall that was a bad idea, but I was having fun. I was assembling my Lego Millennium Falcon (the reward for losing all that weight), up until I did something wrong and couldn't figure it out. When I looked at the clock I said "Oh, that's why." Hopefully when I get home tonight, I'll be able to fix whatever the problem is, and then I'll have an entire Lego Millennium Falcon. I can't remember the last time I bought myself a new toy and didn't mean that figuratively.

Given "carpenter bees" and "badminton racquet", I leave it to you all to figure out why I haven't been able to stop snickering for the last fifteen minutes.

I had an extremely weird dream last night involving a college class in Korean, 55 pages of Korean grammar exercises in English, and a Korean/French dictionary (which I used to fill out the grammar exercises, in French, since I didn't understand the Korean).

Speaking of things I don't understand, one of them is me. If I don't want to end up as a crazy cat lady, I had better sit down one of these days and figure out what exactly I want, anyway, and whether what I want is actually possible, or whether I'm happier not chasing something impossible and ending up as a crazy cat lady anyway.

(Wow. Run-on sentence, much?)

Am I the only one who isn't having a rather severe case of Monday? My day so far has been downright pleasant. So much so that I'm considering braving the mall after work, because the second of my two old pairs of jeans is giving up its inseams in a rather dramatic fashion.

On a semi-related note, there's got to be something I can use the rest of that pair of jeans for. The fabric everywhere but the inseams is still perfectly fine.

The Kennebunkport Brewing Company should've called their darker beer Kennebunkporter. But they didn't, so I didn't buy any yesterday.

(Why isn't productivity the opposite of conductivity?)

I've got to get back into the habit of wanting to cook things with more than three ingredients. I just threw together stirfry for lunch this week, and now I wish I hadn't eaten dinner, because it smells good and I've got leftovers. And I didn't adhere more than one layer of rice to the bottom of the rice cooker. I got this rice cooker secondhand, and I think I know why. Last time a good half-inch of rice stuck so hard I had to soak it off.

The other things I did today were: go to the Super 88 (sorry, quezz, I didn't see your reply until after I'd come back) and pick up the art I'd taken to be framed two weeks ago. Framing is still expensive, but I feel better having these two things framed, finally. Both are prints I got from various Arisias. Now I need somebody to come hold my hand while I hang pictures and remind me that the entire wall isn't going to fall down just because I'm putting a picture hanger in it. The hangup (pardon the pun) about that is yet another complex I got from living in Roxbury. I'm starting to really resent the number of bad habits I acquired from the second year of living there.

I was supposed to clean things today, but that got put off in favor of doing what I wanted to instead of what I should've done. That felt good, but I'll never get this place clean all at once that way.

I have no idea what the answer to this question is, but it's been bugging me for ages now.

Which is correct:

1. "Proposal to appoint John Q. Public, M.D., as Professor of Medicine"
2. "Proposal to appoint John Q. Public, M.D. as Professor of Medicine"

If it were "proposal to appoint John Q. Public, superhero, as Professor of Medicine", it would need the comma. But since M.D. is a title, I don't know what to do with it.

Opinions?

I am an idiot. I should never have said I could get this translation done today, when today is the day after the SOP meeting.

I really hope R.A.F. stands for "rémunération annuelle forfaitaire", because if it doesn't, I have no idea what it does stand for (in French, at least. I knew, even before Google decided to tell me umpteen times, that it stands for Royal Air Force, but I don't care about the Royal Air Force right now.).

Just to add to the day, the powers that be have decided that the committee meeting about which I said "ain't no way it's gonna happen on Friday" is too gonna happen, so I had to send the packets out today. Good thing I had most of it assembled already and it was only a matter of making copies and re-assembling things in the right order. It still took me an hour, though.

At least I managed to call the dentist's office today. I've only been trying to do that for about three or four weeks now...

In the process of researching potential evaluators' ranks for a committee, I ran across a Dr. Wah Chiu, professor of biochemistry, and haven't stopped snickering yet.

Yes, I admit it, I'm 12.

One of the things I have to keep track of for everybody who's getting promoted is a list of comparable people. Most of the time I get names, but not degrees or titles (it would help if the committee would actually send me the lists when I ask for them). I've spent a good chunk of this morning so far trying to track down degrees and titles for comparable people in Finland and Norway. It's all sorts of fun trying to figure out which link on a page in Norwegian might get you where you want to be going. I'm just linguistically competent enough to try it. I didn't try it in Finnish, but Finnish is incomprehensible, and their link to the English pages was easier to find, too.