Current Music: Cheap Trick – Mighty Wings

I am in an absurdly good mood right now. Unfortunately, the only thing I’m accomplishing with it is annoying my sister, who’s trying to do homework. So I’ve turned to posting…

I have to give W another English lesson tomorrow. All I can say is, if he can read and understand these articles he wants to talk about, he does not need my help… LOL! These are even worse than Stanton stuff… the sentences are so long that even I, an intelligent, highly educated (D: and modest ;)) native speaker of English, lose track of what the point of them are.

Okay, according to my sister, we have a brother who lives in Hawaii and they’re all going to visit him and go surfing instead of coming to see me. He is the oldest, which would make me the middle child and unrelated. (Catie, then explain to me how YOU are related to him and I’m not, if I’m older than you but younger than him??? This is the stuff Jerry Springer is made of…) Sorry, LOL, this is a typical Catie and Jess conversation.

N verbally abused me via e-mail for not keeping up my Spanish… yeah, yeah, I know… and I want to, I really do, otherwise why did I work so hard for SIX #$%^&*@ YEARS?!?!?! It’s just hard to focus on more than one language at once…

Just got off the phone with P… one of those long, rambling conversations… OK, one guess what he gets to do in February? There’s a certain company that’s going to be traveling through the Netherlands ‘on tour’ and they want dog security… so guess which company… Cirque de Soleil! How unfair is that… he gets all the fun jobs, LOL! Only problem is, he has a clown phobia. (Which, I’ve just looked up because I forgot, is called ‘coulrophobia’.) The threat was something along the lines of, “So if even one clown comes toward me, he will have a very large dog in his face… and then he really will have a red nose!” LOL!

S just left for Paris again this afternoon… he’s staying with H for a few days and then they’re meeting up with A and some friends of hers and all going skiing. Sounds nice. I’ve always wanted to go skiing. But my parents are coming, and I didn’t have 250 euro to spare. Besides, I wasn’t invited. Maybe some other time, with someone else... Anyway, a plus to him being gone: I can ‘take the wall’ for the Internet indefinitely… woohoo!!!

OK, so tomorrow: English lesson and trip to Albert Heijn. Friday: nothing – I could go to class but I’m doing a paper and not the oral presentation, so it’s not really necessary. Saturday: meet R to give him his tickets and get my 125 euro (which I sorely need, so woohoo!). Sunday: go to Lopik to see P (he’s staying there for a while to take care of a colleague’s dog while she’s out of town). Monday: nothing (we’re on break so no class); I may still be in Lopik anyway. Tuesday: nothing; Wednesday: family arrives!

Oh, and hey, a package arrived today from Aunt K with a present for each member of the family. Since it was written on the package exactly what it contained (stupid international customs), I decided I could go ahead and open mine. :) And wow, did you really knit that yourself? The joke between me and S is that I have a Persian cat around my neck (he has cats back in Florida), but it’s really pretty! Plus it’s warmer than my other scarf and it’ll go nicely with my gray coat. I can’t believe you actually made that… you could start a business, you know… I’m in awe of people who can do ‘crafty’ things since I have neither the patience nor the aptitude for most of it. (Okay, photography, and scrapbooking if I’m in the mood, and yeah, even the occasional hideously ugly wall calendar, but really USEFUL stuff… nope.) So thank you very much!!!

Well, I had a nice day today – I met N and S at the library at 11 to look up that article for our papers, but I didn’t wake up until 10.10 so I was racing around the apartment like a madwoman… but yeah, whatever, I made it. Anyway, so we were absolutely hopeless in the library… first we had to put our backpacks and coats into tiny lockers (yes, because we’re going to steal books in our coats) and that was a five-minute drama of my coin getting lost, etc. Then the two of them thought we were looking for a book, and led me very competently to the English section, where I informed them that we were looking for a journal, at which point all bets were off. So we found the journals, but not the volume we needed. The journal was called, of all things, Language, making it ridiculously difficult to look up on the computers, etc. Finally N went to ask the librarian while S and I tried to find it on the computer, and the librarian looked at the piece of paper and asked, “Heet het ‘language’? Oh, wat erg!” I cracked up and called over, “Zei ik ook, ja!” Anyway, we found it, but not without making a lot of noise and disturbing lots of people. It turned out to be 50 pages long, and yes, we copied it… for all three of us. Then on the way out, we were getting so silly that we actually almost got into an argument over which way we should walk to the stairs… hard to explain now, but at that moment it was a ‘Stanton moment’, meaning that something is hysterically funny while you are doing something intellectual, and it’s impossible to explain.

Anyway, so then we went to a little café by the Dom and had hot chocolate and discussed whether the two brothers sitting next to us with their parents looked like Macaulay Culkin. But the place was out of whipped cream, which sparked a five-minute solution suggestion (“Carry a little squirt bottle in your pocket!”). Anyway, then we went to class, got bored and left after the pauze (we’re exempt from the final for high quiz grades, so we didn’t really need to be there) and S went home to Rotterdam while N and I got sandwiches and parked ourselves on a bench on the Oudegracht and just talked for an hour. It was nice to just spend time with friends… I don’t do that enough here. Anyway, one interesting thing: this clown came over and parked himself in between us – didn’t say anything, just sat there. So finally N asked, in English, “Is everything okay with you?” He said, “Yeah, with you?” then turned to me, “You too?” and then got up and left. LOL! Speaking English makes them run. :) (That’s the way to get out of those survey-people’s questions at the train station too, by the way – tell them you don’t live in the Netherlands.)

Okay, well, as much as I don’t think it’s necessary, it’s two in the morning and I still haven’t read more than one page of those two articles. (I had to call P and complain about how even I couldn’t understand them, and he was on the way home so that turned into a rambling conversation producing, among others, the incredibly intellectual conclusions that: A. Spike is a terrible name for a dog and Joey is a good one, B. I talk too much (and this is a surprise?...), and C. nothing should ever be forced against ‘natural direction’ (he had just heard a story about a guy with a Coke bottle stuck up his… ahem).

So… on that note… going to read articles now. Ciaooooo!