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Man, it feels like even longer than it's actually been since the last time I posted. I don't even have a good excuse, really, except that I'm even lazier than I thought I was. :P
The job's going well, though it still hasn't picked up much; about a quarter of the time there's nothing for me to do, and another quarter of the time there's stuff I ought to and/or want to be doing, but I don't know how to do it, or whether I should. The remaining half is split between stuff I find really satisfying, like taking the godawful and practically unnavigable page for the athletic handbook and filling it with internal links, and the stuff I find incredibly tedious, like adding new students to the website database by hand because the place that does our data processing is ridiculously slow. (To be fair, it is August, so I assume they're getting a lot of new student processing requests right now. But still.) I've also started daydreaming about being able to make my own database and fill it with minor characters and details from the great HP AU. Seriously, you could do great and hilarious multimedia fannish/RP things for Harry Potter, with a fully functional school website. (Teacher pages! Grades and comments! Schedules! Quidditch games on the athletic calendar! ... I am totally losing my sense of perspective.)
Anyway. Fannishly, I finally got off my butt - and the weather was good enough for long enough - for me to get mostly caught up on Burn Notice, Covert Affairs, and The Closer. I'm not caught up a hundred percent on Rizzoli & Isles, but I'm working on it. Now I just need to catch up on Warehouse 13, and I'll be all set. ( A little nattering, mild spoilers. ) Mostly, though, I really do not have any deep thoughts.
Which is possibly because the part of my brain responsible for deep thoughts is too busy buzzing around Arabic. Now that I have actualfax money, and - at least for the moment - no regular bills except gas to spend it on, I splurged a bit on a Rosetta Stone. I'm pretty sure it's Modern Standard Arabic; there are times when some of the speakers are a little difficult to understand, and I think it's partly because of dialectical differences that aren't being covered in the program in general. Anyway, it is, of course, fascinating. I'm only on the fourth lesson, so I haven't gotten a lot further than, you know, "The girls have bikes. The girls do not have bikes. There are three yellow bikes." And the phonetics are tripping me up a little, which I was expecting; I can't always hear the difference between emphatic and non-emphatic stops, or between the velar fricatives and the pharyngeal fricatives. And I definitely can't produce them very well. :P But I'm sure practice will help, at least, even if I'm too old to really get good at it.
Mostly, it's just a ridiculous amount of fun to do. There's nothing I like better than learning languages, and with a computer program, I don't have to do skits or dialogues or worksheets or any of the other stuff that I don't like about regular intro language classes. But I haven't gotten far enough to say for certain whether it works, either. ^^ (If it does, though, I ... may have already composed a prioritized and weighted list of the languages I want to get next. :D)
I'll conclude my wall of text by saying that I have never listened to so much NPR in my life as I have commuting to and from work - which is part of the reason I'm experimenting with taking my pretentious post titles from the Writer's Almanac poem of the day, instead of songs. I could seriously listen to Garrison Keillor talk all day.
The job's going well, though it still hasn't picked up much; about a quarter of the time there's nothing for me to do, and another quarter of the time there's stuff I ought to and/or want to be doing, but I don't know how to do it, or whether I should. The remaining half is split between stuff I find really satisfying, like taking the godawful and practically unnavigable page for the athletic handbook and filling it with internal links, and the stuff I find incredibly tedious, like adding new students to the website database by hand because the place that does our data processing is ridiculously slow. (To be fair, it is August, so I assume they're getting a lot of new student processing requests right now. But still.) I've also started daydreaming about being able to make my own database and fill it with minor characters and details from the great HP AU. Seriously, you could do great and hilarious multimedia fannish/RP things for Harry Potter, with a fully functional school website. (Teacher pages! Grades and comments! Schedules! Quidditch games on the athletic calendar! ... I am totally losing my sense of perspective.)
Anyway. Fannishly, I finally got off my butt - and the weather was good enough for long enough - for me to get mostly caught up on Burn Notice, Covert Affairs, and The Closer. I'm not caught up a hundred percent on Rizzoli & Isles, but I'm working on it. Now I just need to catch up on Warehouse 13, and I'll be all set. ( A little nattering, mild spoilers. ) Mostly, though, I really do not have any deep thoughts.
Which is possibly because the part of my brain responsible for deep thoughts is too busy buzzing around Arabic. Now that I have actualfax money, and - at least for the moment - no regular bills except gas to spend it on, I splurged a bit on a Rosetta Stone. I'm pretty sure it's Modern Standard Arabic; there are times when some of the speakers are a little difficult to understand, and I think it's partly because of dialectical differences that aren't being covered in the program in general. Anyway, it is, of course, fascinating. I'm only on the fourth lesson, so I haven't gotten a lot further than, you know, "The girls have bikes. The girls do not have bikes. There are three yellow bikes." And the phonetics are tripping me up a little, which I was expecting; I can't always hear the difference between emphatic and non-emphatic stops, or between the velar fricatives and the pharyngeal fricatives. And I definitely can't produce them very well. :P But I'm sure practice will help, at least, even if I'm too old to really get good at it.
Mostly, it's just a ridiculous amount of fun to do. There's nothing I like better than learning languages, and with a computer program, I don't have to do skits or dialogues or worksheets or any of the other stuff that I don't like about regular intro language classes. But I haven't gotten far enough to say for certain whether it works, either. ^^ (If it does, though, I ... may have already composed a prioritized and weighted list of the languages I want to get next. :D)
I'll conclude my wall of text by saying that I have never listened to so much NPR in my life as I have commuting to and from work - which is part of the reason I'm experimenting with taking my pretentious post titles from the Writer's Almanac poem of the day, instead of songs. I could seriously listen to Garrison Keillor talk all day.
