The other day, with no obvious immediate cause, a huge branch fell off a tree behind our condo - like, a third of the tree dropped. Today an enormous wood chipper has arrived to eat the fallen tree parts. It sounds extrememly dramatic. The tree seems to have some tough bits...

Outside the window that my desk faces is a tree with some sort of berries. The large-ish chipmunk warren is under the tree, and the little guys do a lot of scavenging for fallen berries. Today a squirrel is hanging out in the top branches - he'll find somewhere to perch, stand up to free his hands, methodically (and quickly!) eat all the berries ( Read more... )

Wow. So C. and I still need to fetch my couch and huge ugly-but-beloved naugahyde recliner from my old place, when he comes back next week. For this, we need a moving truck. So I poked around on the Penske website, as they're the closest truck-acquiring location ( Read more... )

Yesterday, walking around campus, I passed a kid headed into the library to (I think) study for an exam. I overheard the end of a sentence ( Read more... )

C's latest Esquire claims that there are 10 body parts whose names are spelled with three letters. I can come up with 9. Which ones can you guys come up with?

(They start you out with "arm, ear, eye"; slang-y words like "gut, ass", etc. don't seem to count)

Discussion of a morpheme that English definitely doesn't have:

"...a prepalatalised apico-alveolar consonant that does not appear to fit into this system appears in a number of words containing the suffix -ayte, which is used to derive the name of an edible grub from its source (usually the tree in which it is found)." (from the fabulously-titled ( Read more... )

I was talking to a good friend the other night and he mentioned that he and his girlfriend decided that if anything ever happens to them, I get their cat. I am delighted. Not that I want anything to happen to them, of course, but - Zoe is a pretty great cat : ) Apparently his mom was very sad to learn that she didn't get dibs on the cat. I'm very ( Read more... )

Yesterday I went to the doctor for a sore throat. I have penicillin and should soon be much happier. She told me I have tonsillitis - how often do you hear about anyone having tonsillitis anymore? She said it's really common this time of year, but still with the never hearing about it. Anyway, the coolest part of the whole thing was when she took ( Read more... )

The good news is that I successfully ran my first subject today, and the experiment didn't blow up. I'm not entirely sure how it could have, but I'm immensely relieved that it was okay. The one very important thing that I learned, though, is that I apparently need to tell people to TURN THEIR CELL PHONES OFF while they're doing the experiment! My ( Read more... )

A batch of homemade cookies appeared in the department office. They were remarkably...weird tasting. Like, hardly any taste, like they come from a cheap-o mix or something. Our best guess is fake vanilla plus not enough salt ( Read more... )