This will be brief. Day 25 of NaNoWriMo is 2 hours old, and I am 5,685 words behind. That's about 3.5 days of writing. I am going to try my damnedest to get to that coveted 50,000-word target. I've made it every year since 2010, and I plan to make it this year, too! Last year, Hurricane Sandy knocked out power for a whole week and severely ( Read more... )

Quite the good Memorial Day weekend has happened! There were two awesome get-togethers and one whole day off from work. Friday night nothing major happened. At work we had a little cookout/in thing. Dewey grilled some burgers and hot dogs outside on the grill that Scholastic puts out there for special occasions. We chatted amicably while we ate for ( Read more... )

Well, I tried to participate in Fort 1T this weekend. I wasn't very successful. I had the soylent, but I had no means of channeling it into a useful form. So, I resolved to eat it. I didn't care that it was made of people. Long story short, it didn't work. The only thing that happened was a stomachache. Lesson learned. Oh well. Nicer weather is ( Read more... )

There are about as many Spanish words beginning with X as there are words that start with W. They are both pretty rare letters to begin with in Spanish, but the letter X at least has some purpose and precedent. And this time, the Spanish word I chose should be fairly obvious. Xilófono [zee-LOE-foe-noe] is the Spanish word for xylophone. In Spanish ( Read more... )

I have a gigantic Spanish dictionary. Literally, this dictionary is in Spanish. From its cover and table of contents to its definitions and appendix, the entire tome from start to finish is in Spanish. Literally, this dictionary is gigantic, too. It weighs in at five pounds and has 1,503 pages, and that's not even counting the twenty-three Roman ( Read more... )

It seriously feels like I just finished writing last week's entry not even two days ago. Now I have to write another one? Well, actually, I never HAVE to write these, but I like the once weekly editions of my life on a website barely anybody reads. And barely anything changes from day to day in the first place. Maybe I should make my own life more ( Read more... )

I'll keep the Spanish lesson brief today. Originally, I was going to entitle this entry 'nada' because I was hoping that would make for a delightfully short first paragraph. After all, chances are good that you already know that 'nada' is the Spanish word for 'nothing.' But when I poked my nose inside my Webster's Spanish-English Dictionary, page ( Read more... )

Well, two thousand twelve is almost over.The world did not come to an end. No ba-boom. No radical switch of the Earth's magnetic poles. No gigantic mass solar ejection knocked out a majority of the world's electrical systems. In fact, all we had was some strong wind and some light rain. If that's what the Apocalypse is, then the world has actually ( Read more... )

I am halfway done with the book of Genesis. It's a somewhat complicated read if only because there are tons of characters that are introduced and forgotten more quickly than the Nintendo Virtual Boy. I rely on the stories to tell me who to pay attention to and who to forget about just like we did about VHS. So, if there is a future story in the ( Read more... )

Jabón is the Spanish word for 'soap.' It's pronounced ha-BONE. I don't really think I need to provide an example, but I will anyway. Jabón is a masculine noun, so it is always preceeded by 'un' or 'el' depending on the context of the sentence. 'Give me the soap,' translates to 'Dame el jabón.' Similarly, the sentence 'Pass me a (bar of) soap,' ( Read more... )