Prepoceros

This one’s not so exciting, just me sitting around talking again. Blah blah blah.

I’m getting much better at not saying “um” every other word in my videos, but goodness gracious, self, stop playing with your hair. Seriously, it’s annoying.

EDIT: Ok, so the first time I uploaded the video it would only play halfway through. I’ve taken it down and tried to upload it again, but I’m going to bed now, so I won’t be able to fix the link from here until tomorrow evening, probably. If you’re really anxious, you can get to the video from my YouTube profile starting about half an hour from now, if all goes well.

EDIT2: I think it’s better now.

This one’s going up out of order because it’s obviously time-sensitive, so you don’t yet know where the rest of my hair went. All in good time.

Having a summer birthday means that I almost always celebrate away from home, and this year is no different. I think this is the third or fourth birthday I’ve spent in Europe, at least. I’m lucky, I know.

The text of the birthday song is “Lang zal ze leven, in de gloria,” which means “Long may she live, in the glory.” I rather like that—it’s like I’m the queen or something.

Well, we’d *planned* to take today off, but we ended up going on a “quick” four-hour outing anyway. It was pleasant, to be sure, but by the time we got home, ate dinner, had some vla and coffee, and did a little sudoku, I only had time to finish one video.

I’m trying to upload it right now, but the wireless connection in this bedroom is a bit sketchy, and it keeps stalling out on me. Whenever the video finally makes its way to YouTube, I’ll add it here. Done!

While we wait, here’s a puzzle for you to ponder. My aunt Bettina challenged me with it at lunch the other day, and after some hard thinking I came up with the solution in about ten minutes, which is apparently a record among the people she’s tried it on. The format will be familiar to those of you who played the “24″ game in school. So:

You have three 5’s and one 1 (5, 5, 5, 1). Using only the four basic operations (+, -, *, /), how do you get to 24?

You may not use any roots or powers, but you may use parentheses. You must use all four digits. You may not combine multiple digits into a single number (e.g., 55 - 15 = 40). You may not turn numbers upside-down, do the arithmetic in base-7, or anything else similarly tricksy.

The solution is rather elegant. There’s no catch—everything in the rules is to be interpreted literally and exactly as you’d expect it—but you do have to think outside the box a tiny bit.

If you have the answer, email me (prepoceros at gmail) rather than leaving it in a comment, so as not to spoil anyone else’s fun. I’ll post the solution in a few days, but with plenty of spoiler alerts if you’re determined to work through it on your own. Happy puzzling!

P.S. If you want to see more video of wuppies in action, YouTube can totally hook you up.

Just finished watching the final. My mom complained that it was boring, but I was half-asleep and busy doing Sudoku (my whole Dutch family is SO INTO Sudoku — we all sit around and work them together, it’s crazy), so I didn’t really notice.

I didn’t have much emotional investment in this particular game, so I split my loyalties. I will always root for any team Fabien Barthez plays on, because I *love* him, for no good reason*. In the just-for-fun pool we set up before the game, though, I put my money on Italy 2 - 0. So much for that.

Ok, ik ga naar bed. No video tonight, either—I finally have a comfortable bed in my own quiet room, and I’m going to go sleep in it, gosh darn it! We’re taking a day off tomorrow to sit around the house, eat, relax, do laundry, work sudoku puzzles, etc., so I hope to get plenty of work done then. Doei!**

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* I remember seeing him in the 1998 World Cup and thinking he was just fantastic. I still have a French magazine cover with his picture that I tore off and kept.

** This is perhaps my favorite Dutch word ever. It’s pronounced somewhere between “doo-ee” and “doi” (that cutesy mid-90’s version of “duh”). When large groups of Nederlanders part ways, everyone is hollering “Doei!” at each other, sometimes drawing out the vowel sounds for effect, and the result is hilarious (to an English-speaker, at least). My brother and I used to absolutely crack up every time we got to the car after leaving someone’s house.

It seems Prepoceros is quickly turning into a mirror of my YouTube page, but with longer introductions. By the time I finish editing and uploading the video each night, it’s two or three in the morning and I’m more than ready to go to bed. I don’t have time to blog and vlog both, and as long as I’m in the world of opportunity that is world travel I’m sure as heck not going to give up vlogging.

Today’s video is from a quick walk along the dunes near ’s-Gravenzande I took with my uncle Rijk on Tuesday morning. They live five minutes (by bike) from the ocean—how lovely! I apologize for the shaky camera and for the fact that more than half of the video is scenery (and not people)—I don’t think my uncle wanted to be on camera too much. But it’s all good.

Tomorrow we’ve got a full day of visiting and culture-soaking-up, and then in the evening I’m going to a popconcert with some of my cousins, so I probably won’t post a video tomorrow. I imagine you’ll survive somehow.

So, without further ado*, here’s the video. Bon appetit! Eet smakelijk!

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* One of my pet grammar peeves is when people say (or write) “without further adieu.” What?! What in the world do you think that means?! Think, people, think.

Some very rowdy teenagers have been yelling and throwing bottles somewhere nearby for the last two hours. I don’t mind, since my video is taking forever to render and upload anyway, but my mom is getting pissy.

She has to get up early tomorrow because it’s her birthday, and she and her siblings are all meeting up . . . to celebrate her sister’s birthday, which is in August. Everyone knows it’s her birthday, of course, so I’m sure she’ll get plenty of presents and attention anyway—it’s just that she’ll be 62 and her sister will be 60, and multiple-of-five birthdays are a big deal in Holland.

I’m not invited (nuclear family only), so I’ve got some free time tomorrow. I might spend it shopping, or maybe hanging out with my uncle, my cousin Anouk, and her boyfriend. We’re borrowing my aunt’s car for the week, and my mom won’t need it tomorrow, so I can go wherever I want. Woo!

Here are a few clips from the first couple days of vacation. They take a while to edit, so there’s a lag of several days between when I film things and when I can post them. Today, for instance, we wandered around a few cute little towns nearby, but unless I spend all of tomorrow working, you won’t see that video until the middle of next week. Meh. Enjoy this one.

It’s not much, just trying out this whole embedding thing. I’ve got plenty of video already, but editing takes SO LONG (hi, I’m a perfectionist, nice to meet you) that I don’t have time to put any of it up right now (it’s 2:00 in the morning here).

Everything’s still going well—visiting more family, watching some voetbal—except that this is the one week of the year that it’s HOT, and no one here has “airco.”

Ok, really really bedtime. Video for you!

So we’re here. I haven’t slept yet, but it’s already 4:40 in the afternoon here, so I’m going to try to stay up at least until dinner. There’s some sort of big party for my cousin’s birthday tomorrow, and I’d like to be at least half awake for that.

I’m at my aunt and uncle’s house right now — it’s so lovely. I’ll show you once I get some video together. I’m near-delirious at the moment from stress* and lack of sleep, and I don’t feel like doing anything but sitting out in the garden, sipping tea, eating dark chocolate, and watching the sheep and goats wander along the dike. This is the LIFE, I tell ya.

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* The first leg of our trip (Houston to Toronto) was on a little regional jet, and we took off into a thunderstorm, the combination of which was NOT OKAY. I probably spent a quarter of the flight crying into my mom’s shoulder. Seriously, I do not like the little planes and the bumping. The big plane was fine, totally fine—moderately stressful, yes, but no freaking out. I was planning to write so much more about this, but my whole left arm HURTS and I’m TIRED. Going to go smell the flowers and watch the sheep now.

We’re fixing to leave for the airport in about two hours, but I got all my packing done yesterday, so right now I’m mostly just taking care of a few piddly little things: getting my hair cut, writing up a list of “things to know about Sam” for my dad and brother, who’ll be running a Sammy-camp while I’m gone.

My mom and I are jetting off to the Netherlands for a couple weeks to visit family and friends (hers—she’s Dutch, born and raised). Usually we go as a family every other summer, but we haven’t been since 2002. This time around my dad’s recovering from shoulder surgery and my brother’s being lame, so it’ll just be us girls.

In between seeing all of our gajillion family members and celebrating like five birthdays, we’re planning to spend a week or so in Germany sometime. I’ve never been, so that should be nifty. We won’t be there until after the World Cup finishes, which is nice.

Of course, we have to fly across the ocean to get there, and…eek. I am *not* a good flyer. Yes, I realize that the plane is perfectly capable of making it all the way to Europe, and that hijackers are ridiculously unlikely to single out my flight for their mischief, but I’m still anxious. Trying to keep myself busy so I don’t have time to dwell on it. I slept in until 11:30 this morning, which is good for cutting down on thinking time, but terrible for the trip, since it pretty much guarantees I won’t be able to sleep on the plane and will be horribly jet-lagged the first day or two.

I’m bringing several pounds of electronics along—camcorder, still camera, and laptop—to record the trip and generally stay in touch. I wouldn’t have brought the laptop along, as heavy as it is, except that I want to edit my video footage as I go along so I don’t have to do it all when I get home. If I get good videos, I’ll be putting them up on YouTube and embedding them here, so watch this space.

Ok, I should go now. It’s a Natalie truism that I always forget my hairbrush when I’m packing for trips, and I’ve gone and done it again, so I have to run to the store. Next update from Holland!

It doesn’t feel like it should be July already, does it? Yesterday I accidentally wrote the date as April 30. Seriously.

Haven’t posted much lately because I’ve been busy*. Finals yesterday and today, which went as well as could be expected. I got the single paper assigned in my three summer classes (two PoliSci, one US History) back—it was a 95, with “excellents” all the way down the rubric. The only comments anywhere on the paper were that I used the wrong citation style (MLA instead of Chicago) and that “Civil Rights Movement” ought to be capitalized. I’ll take the grade, for sure, but this was *not* an A-caliber paper. Le sigh.

This might sound boastful, but I got a 73 on my PoliSci I final (which will probably curve to a B), after attending only 2.5 class sessions and never cracking the textbook**. I am by no means a political science whiz—I’m generally disinterested in politics and government—so this reflects more on the low standards of the class than on any special skills I might have.

I know they have to make the class mind-numbingly easy so that everyone can pass (it’s required by state law), but it’s still sad. The final exam, 100 multiple-choice, computer-graded questions, was scheduled for three hours. I finished in 40 minutes, behind at least half a dozen other people. And I had to get up at 6:45 for this? Ugh.

I wasn’t thrilled with the quality of the question-writing, either. I do actually feel qualified to opine on this—if I had to declare myself an “expert” or a “specialist” in anything, it would have to be multiple choice tests. Sad but true.

The sloppiness (slop?) was occasionally beneficial: for instance, as far as I could tell, whenever “all of the above” or “none of the above” was listed as an answer, it was correct. That got me through several questions full of terminology I’d never heard. Some of the questions were annoying, though, in that you clearly had to have been in this particular class to answer them. Like this one (more or less verbatim):

Q. Texas residents with Hispanic surnames have historically shown a dislike for the

• A. Houston Astros
• B. Chinese food
• C. Italian-Americans
• D. Texas Rangers

I’m sorry, what? Is this common knowledge? A trick question? Some sort of inside joke?

My personal opinion on exams in intro-level courses like these is that any subject-area (PoliSci, in this case) professor should be able to get a perfect score, within a margin of *maybe* one just-for-fun trivia question, though IMHO those are better left as bonuses. Any upperclassman in the major should easily pull off an A (90%) with little or no studying. This test wouldn’t have been *too* far from that ideal, but it still irked me.

If you’re wondering, I chose (D), only because I figured it might be plausible if it referred to the actual Texas Rangers (i.e., not the baseball team). I still don’t know the right answer—they had to turn off the feature that shows you all the questions and answers after you finish because people were sharing the answers with the later section. Well, duh. I hate that students cheat, and I wish they could be trusted, but when you make it that easy . . .

Ok, wow, I was totally planning to write a quick note on a completely different topic, but I just rambled on there for a while. Apologies. I’m exhausted and should go to bed now, as I’m leaving for a 2.5-week vacation tomorrow. More on that later.

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* I’ve noticed that, oftener and oftener, I’ve been leaving off the subjects of sentences (or even the subject and main verb, as in the sentence after that one). I think this habit is bleeding over from IM, where I do it ALL THE TIME, for shortness’ and casualness’ sakes, I suppose. I haven’t decided whether I’m okay with this; it’s obviously ungrammatical, but perhaps I can bend the rules a little for the sake of bloggy conversationality?

** I did remove the plastic wrap, though, which is tragic. Fifty bucks right there.