Prepoceros

The last couple days have sucked fat hairy donkey balls, motivation-wise.

See, look. I wrote that sentence nine hours ago, and I couldn’t even muster up the stick-to-it-ive-ness to finish the post. It was going to be about the things I *had* accomplished in the last two days, like eating a lot of cookies, and also about the odd series of scary/funny/hot dreams I had when I fell asleep on the couch the night before last. (I should really stop doing that.)

But now I have to take a shower and go to work, so you’ll have to use your imagination. Apologies. Unless you have a good imagination, in which case you’re probably thrilled.

This just in, from the “No shit, Sherlock,” department:

Cats and dogs? They don’t play nicely together. Very like bulls and china shops, baking soda and vinegar, tree-huggers and Bible-beaters they are.

Last night we tried to introduce Millie to Wendy & Michael’s pet-children. The results were predictably explosive, with much chasing and hissing and clawing and flying leaps and end-over-end tumbling. No blood, but plenty of flying fur.

When we finally pried them apart, the cats got shut in the bedroom, and Millie ran laps around the house for the next three hours looking for them. She must have tired herself out (which I hadn’t thought possible), because she didn’t start jumping on me this morning until 7:00 and then spent most of the rest of the day asleep. We only had to go on three walks before Toni came to pick her up about an hour ago—a level of calmness I didn’t know Millie was capable of. Ok, dog, I’ve almost forgiven you for being such a little bugger yesterday. Almost. But, though I haven’t talked to him today, I think it’s safe to say that Gizmo still hates you. Some things just weren’t meant to be.

I’m watching Millie again this weekend. I haven’t seen that lil poop-machine in a couple months—it’s good to see her crazy hyper adorable face again. I swear she’s learned to jump *even higher* than she did the last time I saw her. She could make a million billion dollars in the circus, seriously.

Yay for having a warm snuggly body to cuddle up with at night, but boo for that warm body jumping on and off the bed and barking its little head off during quiet-time. We woke up for our first walk at 4:04 this morning. Since then she’s been pretty good, but dude, that’s nighttime. That’s not right.

I got her a new squeaky toy, and so far it’s a hit. That and doggie biscuits help assuage the guilt I feel at leaving her alone all day. She stares so pitifully at me every time I leave, it just about breaks my heart. But then I remember those five or six extra hours of sleep I could’ve had, and leaving her alone with her squeaky toy becomes much less painful.

Right now she’s lying on the couch with her paws crossed, watching me type and infusing the room with a general sort of cuteness. Looks like it’s time to go beddy-bye. Let’s try to make it to 6:00 this time, k hon?

You all know (or you will at least pretend you do if you know what’s good for you) that an adjective describes a noun or pronoun, while an adverb describes a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. The quick and dirty way to tell between the two parts of speech is to look for the -ly ending: most adverbs end in -ly, and most words ending in -ly are adverbs.

As always, there are exceptions. The list below is concerned only with the false positives (”Type II errors” to all you statisticians out there) which crop up when an adjective, waggling its -ly tail, tries to masquerade as an adverb. The two examples I’ve commonly heard are “lovely” and “friendly.”

When I spot one of these little buggers, I chuckle inwardly (because I’m a dork) and add it to my mental list. Thing is, I can never find that flingin-flangin list when I need it, so about a week ago I started writing them down. I thought of seven or eight right away, then kept adding to it a couple at a time until I got to 37 earlier today. I didn’t think it would go this fast, but I guess there are a bunch of them out there.

I excluded certain categories of words I felt weren’t “fair”, like slang (bully, fugly), hyphenated words (touchy-feely), and words whose legitimacy I couldn’t confirm without a dictionary (warbly, marbly).

I’ve hidden the list itself in case you’d like to play along. If I could think of 37 in just a week, there are sure to be a least a couple hundred more floating around out there. Feel free to leave new words in the comments if you come up with ones that aren’t in my 37.

(more…)

Tonight, on a whim, I wrote my first limerick. (Hat-tip to Mr. Sun for the inspiration.) It’s certainly not a masterpiece (it’s too straightforward, for one thing—most good limericks have a clever twist or pun to them), but at least it scans.

I’m working my way up to this.

1. Foil + Paper + Microwave = FIRE. On the upside, if you rub them with a wet paper towel, those scorch marks’ll come right off.
2. Potatoes rot. When I was younger I remember we always had a huge bag of potatoes in the pantry that stayed good forever and ever. Those must have been some good drugs I was on, because just one month in *my* pantry turned two whole potatoes to black mush. Corollary: If you notice that your potatoes are black and mushy, DON’T OPEN THE BAG. Moron.

CNN posted this article today. Why today? I don’t know, but woo anyway.

I remember when this episode aired a couple years ago. I nearly peed my pants when I saw Anderson on “Jeopardy.”* And then he won, of course, because he is VERY SMART. Mass fabulousness.

———

* I totally used Anderson’s article as a cheat sheet to figure out how to punctuate “Jeopardy!” at the end of a sentence. Unfortunately it appeared twice, once with an exclamation point and once with a period. Curses. I held the two next to each other at arm’s length, squinted, and went with the period. The exclamation point made it look like I’d written a run-on with a capital letter in the middle.**

** Yes, this footnote is longer than the body. Deal with it.

Why thirty-seven? Because that’s how many there are. There are undoubtedly at least a couple more I haven’t thought of, but I’ve been working on this list for two or three weeks now, so I figure it’s complete enough to be worth posting.

Needless to say, I am not a movie person. I don’t go out to the movies often, and if I see one I like, I usually just think, “Huh. That was a good movie,” and then go on about my daily life. I’ve rarely been motivated to spend time watching a movie I’ve already seen, much less pay good money for the privilege. The exceptions comprise the list below.

[I should note that some of these, particularly the children’s movies, I didn’t *chose* to watch more than once. I just happened to be around when they were playing, usually at school or at a friend’s house.]

1. The Little Mermaid
2. Apollo 13
3. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
4. Homeward Bound
5. Homeward Bound II
6. Death to Smoochy
7. Dead Poets Society
8. The Man Who Knew Too Little
9. It’s a Wonderful Life
10. The Wizard of Oz
11. Forrest Gump
12. Peter Pan
13. Back to the Future I
14. BTTF II
15. BTTF III
16. E.T.
17. The Lion King
18. Home Alone
19. Home Alone 2
20. Austin Powers
21. Austin Powers 2
22. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
23. Ocean’s Eleven
24. Grease
25. The Parent Trap (the original one)
26. The Sound of Music
27. Rocky Horror Picture Show
28. Bambi
29. Mary Poppins
30. The Music Man
31. Fantasia
32. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
33. Wet Hot American Summer
34. Miracle on 34th Street
35. Billy Madison
36. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead
37. Cool Runnings

I’m planning to make this a regular feature. I like lists, but I usually think of interesting things one or two at a time, and by the time I think of something else that fits into that category, I’ve already forgotten the first couple. I want to pick all these formerly-unconnected tidbits out of the dark corners of my brain and scrape them into orderly little piles, mostly for my own entertainment…and now for yours as well.

To this end, for the last six months or so I’ve been maintaining a huge-ass text file of lists. This is the first of them I’ve deemed complete enough to share. From now on, whenever another of the lists hits the big 3-7, I’ll publish it. It’s the perfect filler for those uninspired days when I have class early the next morning and need to get to bed. Like this one.

Ok, so when I said “go out on my patio,” apparently I meant “flop down on the couch and take a 7-hour nap.” And now it’s bedtime.

I’m not so sleepy right now, so I took out the trash, picked up the mail, and got some stuff from my car. Walking around at night in the cold reminds me of astro lab—I feel like I should hop on my scooter, ride down to Pomona, open up a dome, and start slewing a telescope around.

Fall! It’s here! It was summer for so very long, until the day before yesterday—poof!—it wasn’t hot any more. The mercury finally dropped below ninety and hasn’t looked back.

When I walked out the door Friday morning, I cried because the air felt so delicious. Crisp and cool, and best of all, it smelled like Christmas.

This is good news for my closet, too. Sweaters! Socks! Scarves! Layers! And did I mention socks? I *love* socks, but I haven’t worn them in…I don’t even remember how long. Months. The enormous pile of warm fuzzy heavy things I’ve been tossing back and forth across my bedroom trying to uncover tank tops and short skirts will once again be called into action.

It’s the perfect weekend for a season change because, for the first time in a long while, I’ve been able to enjoy it. The SAT was yesterday, so I had only ONE lesson and NO classes or tests to proctor all weekend. I taught the lesson this morning and got back around noon to find a gorgeous afternoon just waiting to be enjoyed.

Usually when I’m at home by myself I just crank the thermostat up to 82 and sit around the apartment in my underwear, and I’m perfectly comfortable. There’s a different sort of comfort, though, in feeling the chilly autumn breeze blow through the open balcony door as I sit snuggled in my fuzzy socks and pajama pants and fleece. I dislike being cold, but I love being bundled up and warm when it’s cold outside. But not too cold—I’d be happy if it didn’t go below fifty all winter long.

Anyway, the sky is clear and brilliantly blue, and I don’t want to waste the afternoon tippy-typing away inside. I’m going to go out on my patio and read about China/write some SAT questions.