Humanities and Linguistic Arts - Today I bit the bullet and signed up to attend a Weihnachtsparty on Thursday night. For you non-German speakers (I guess that's everyone, since the Germans don't care about my blog now that the political discussions are over), that is a Christmas Party. The difference is that this is for German speakers! Not German speakers like the ones dad just bought for the family room, but people who speak the language. I haven't attended this before, but they have rented out Hall Berlin and will have a DJ, beer (of course), sausages (of course), potatoes (of course), and other German stuff. It should be fun to dust off that side of my cranium and put the German to use for once. I'll find some people that are at my level and we can pretend to be in Kindergarten and talk about the color of the floor, the alphabet, and practice counting from one to ten.
In other linguistic news, my Spanish lessons are almost over :( . I'm not quite fluent yet, especially when I've been a major slacker on the studying. Today's class had quite an impact on me, as I will get into as this blog develops. The lesson was about possessive pronouns..zzzzzzz.....and romance... zzzzzz....wait, I'm the only guy in the class! So when I was asked to say, in Spanish "The girl is an angel", and the teacher made a point to mention that there is no feminine version of the word "Angel" in Spanish because languages are prejudiced, I quipped "Well, the feminine version would be 'the devil'". I am such a lady's man. I got some giggles from around the table on that one ;o)
Musical Arts - Today, my iPod (on shuffle) decided to play a song from Phish. I'd forgotten that I'd inherited quite a few Phish songs on my computer, so, after Spanish, I returned home and decided to listen to them for a while. We all know about Phish's rendition of Snoop Doggy Dogg's "Gin 'n Juice" song (even though it wasn't really them), but did you know that Phish has a few cd's dedicated to remaking Beatles songs??? I had no idea until now, and it's filled me with loads of energy and motivation - hence the blog, and hence ---
Culinary Arts - For some reason (probably because it was on sale), I ordered a pork tenderloin from Fresh Direct a few months back. After thawing it out last week, I'd declared that I would cook it on Wednesday. And then I declared I would cook it on Thursday. Well, that didn't work, so I would cook it on Friday. Friday was a downer day, so I would cook it on Sunday. Well, I ran out of time on Sunday, so I would cook it on Monday. Monday, I was - SUPER MOTIVATED FROM SPANISH and PHISH music, so the tenderloin is in the oven. I'm looking forward to it....
Literary Arts - I am reading "The Poisonwood Bible" from Barbara Kingsolver. It's about a Southern Baptist family that moves to the Congo in the 50's to become missionaries (just prior to them declaring their independance from Belgium). The book is told from the perspective of the four daughters and the mother. It kept me awake last night because it's getting so juicy! It was a bit slow in the beginning, but I think it's going to become part of Justin's Book Club, along with East of Eden...
And finally, I'm blogging, which falls under the latter category....
The J. Riley
