Holy Frickety-Fracking &%@$!

ND 38-Wake Forest 0; K State and Oregon both upset in late stunners.  Light the #1 on the top of Grace Hall, boys...ND is first in the AP rankings for the first time since 1993 and first in the BCS for the first time ever!!

You Know What They Say About Assumptions...

While shopping in a department store the other day, I happened to pass by two sales clerks who were having a conversation in Mandarin Chinese.  This being highly uncommon in my part of the world, I tuned in just for practice as I was going about my business, and was pleased at how much of the conversation I actually understood.  It was nothing exciting, just a discussion about what the store had on order for the holidays.  But it reminded me of one of the ways I entertained myself in graduate school other than playing practical jokes on Texan football fanatics.

Now, I am close to six feet tall and clearly Caucasian.  Not exactly an obvious candidate for a Chinese speaker.  However, my father's career landed us in Hong Kong while I was in junior high and high school, and I studied Mandarin as my foreign language in school.  Despite the difficulty of learning Chinese--very interesting article, if a bit long--at one point I was reasonably fluent, and a good bit stuck with me through college even though I took German for my required language credits there.  (I did mix the two languages together fairly regularly, though, much to the amusement of the TA teaching the German class...my brain would crap out and insert a Mandarin word or phrase in the middle of a German sentence.)

At any rate, by the time I got to grad school, my Mandarin was still there but a bit rusty.  In any scientific institution pretty much anywhere in the world you will find an abundance of Chinese researchers, and my grad school was no exception.  As I did my lab rotations the first year, I eavesdropped on the conversations going on around me--not out of any prurient interest, just to get my fluency back.  (These were normal-volume conversations held in the same room with me, nothing secretive.)  To the credit of my colleagues, I have to say that I never overheard anything that couldn't have been said in English...not the case with foreign-language conversations in a lot of nail salons, I'm sure!!  But it was really, really funny to casually throw out a sentence in Chinese after about the fifth or sixth week in a lab and watch the look of blank horror as people mentally scrolled back through everything they'd said in front of me...yes, it probably wasn't very nice of me, but grad school sucks and survival mechanisms are survival mechanisms!

Crazy and Crazier, You Pick 'Em

So, this morning Himself ran 22 miles in preparation for the marathon he's doing in a couple of weeks.  He got up at 5:30 to do this, in 30 degree weather, and came home limping and shivering.  Does not sound like the actions of a sane individual to me!  However, when I mentioned that to him, he pointed out that he was not the one who spent a good chunk of his Friday evening at the dojo working on board-breaking techniques, and who subsequently returned home with a bruised hand requiring much ice and ibuprofen, plus a sore elbow.  To each his own form of physical insanity, I guess!!  At least we are a matched set of nut jobs...

"Me And My Boy Joe Can Do It"

My dad's father had a workbench set up in the back corner of his basement; I remember going down the creaky wooden stairs with him as a little kid to keep him company while he puttered around with it.  He would give me a piece of wood, some nails and a hammer, and I would amuse myself with those while he was doing whatever he was doing.

Despite having all the tools and equipment (and apparently the desire as well), Grandpa was just not good at fixing things.  Dad is the youngest of his three kids, and profoundly not-handy as well.  When Grandpa would tell Nana that the two of them were going to tackle some job together (the title phrase was how he usually put it), Nana would immediately run for the Yellow Pages and call a professional in to keep the house from being flooded or one or both of them from electrocuting themselves.  A lesson she had learned the hard way!

Now, by comparison, my mother is pretty good with basic home repair and maintenance, and she's taught me a fair bit.  She and I are the primary toolbox-users in my house (Himself is handy enough when he is home and puts his mind to it, but that just isn't how he enjoys spending his free time.)  And for what the two of us can't do between us, I have both a handyman and a contractor on speed dial.  Mom and I are a much safer bet together than Dad and Grandpa ever were, though!

The Absolute Best Petraeus-Related Comment EVER

From Will Saletan of Slate magazine:

"I just don't understand how anyone arguing for intelligent design against evolution explains the dick."

His point being that important men with a great deal to lose cheat so often despite this fact (clearly, counter to their own best interests!) that no "intelligent designer" would saddle his menfolk with the particular piece of equipment that leads them to act this way.  I have to wonder why so many powerful men seem to think that the rules don't apply to them...and if they really do feel compelled to change their companion, why they can't do it upfront and honorably via divorce (or at least as honorably as that gets.)  Total "I-can-have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too-because-I-am-special" syndrome?

Apparently Holly Petraeus is furious.  As she should be.  I am so glad that she is not silently standing by in the public circle of shame...it positively turns my stomach when wives do that.  If my husband dragged me through 23 moves in 36 years in the advancement of his career, while constantly deploying and leaving me home to handle the family, and then had the nerve (and selfishness, and ego) to pull this stunt on me, I'd be absolutely livid.  And there would be hell to pay.  

Well, What Do You Know??

Learned something interesting today in an elementary school science lab: A can of regular soda sinks in water, while a can of diet soda floats.

I would not have predicted that.  I watched it with my own eyes...try it for yourself!  Apparently the density of the sugar in the regular soda makes the difference--there is so little artificial sweetener in the diet soda that those cans float.  Go figure...

  

If Women Are From Venus, Men Are From The Absolute Edge Of The Known Universe

Had one of those moments with Himself last night--I was yet again reminded that we will never be 100% on the same page when it comes to cleanliness, tidiness and general order!

I do the laundry.  Generally, I am the one to fold it as well.  I put away the clean clothes belonging to four of the five family members, but I do draw the line at his.  I figure that as a grown and able man, he should be able to handle putting away his own clothes!  This not being a priority of his, his clean clothes often accumulate in a stack on the floor by his side of the bed for weeks at a time--this to the absolute horror of my mother--but I figure this is not a battle worth fighting (with Himself OR my mother) so I ignore it.  The mess is on his side of the bedroom, out of my way and not in a common area--I have barely enough energy for the 'battles' that involve keeping the common areas of the house habitable as it is.

Not sure what exactly happened last night while I was at my meeting, but the cleaning bug apparently struck my husband in my absence.  In addition to the laundry folding and kitchen tidying and dishwasher emptying I mentioned in my last post, he also put away every item of clothing in his laundry pile (which was approximately the size and shape of Jabba the Hutt by that point) and even cleaned all his clothes off the side chair for good measure.  I was stunned when I went upstairs to bed--the room looked fantastic.

But then I looked closer at the area of the floor where Jabba had formerly been, and noticed a dead fly.  On white carpet, I might add.  Very visible.  Plainly visible.  Curious, I enquired whether he'd noticed it.  Of course he had, was the reply.  I can only assume that he just didn't think it was worth the effort required to pick it up and get rid of it after all the effort required to put the clothes away??

After all, what's a single dead fly compared to the mess that had been there before?  Positively Martha Stewart-like decor, I guess...