Today's entry is nonstop Nerdy Book Corner! It was inspired by the sweetie, to whom I related the story of Free Book, who insisted that I blog about it. I was walking from school to... hmm... the bank a couple days ago, and a line of people were handing out free books. Could I ever resist a free book?? No way! So without further ado...!

Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species. Wow, I thought! It's a hugely important text in science and culture! I should probably read it! ... with special introduction by: Ray Comfort. The special introduction begins with a discussion of Darwin's religious beliefs. This seems less than academic. It then starts in on an introduction of DNA and how gosh darn complicated it is! You guys, there's a LOT of DNA, and it does really complicated things. Plus, we share 50% of our DNA with bananas. Have you guessed it by now?? The introduction starts with religion and ends with religion; the last section is called "Do It Today." I shall transcribe the first sentence:

"To receive the gift of eternal life, you must repent of your sins (turn from them) and put on the Lord Jesus Christ as you would put on a parachute--trusting in Him alone for your salvation." The footnotes for this section come from the Bible. Does that sound like a scientific discussion of Darwin to yous?? Does it sound in any way relevant to the origin of the species to yous?? GAH! The "special introduction" is written in nice big 12 point font, complete with pictures (including caricatures of Darwin as a monkey, har har), while the text of Origin itself is a solid wall of 8 point font. Nice guys. Real classy.

So readers, I have a conundrum. My instinct is to tear out the offending pages, but sweetie suggested that I keep them to show them to people who may not fully comprehend how terrible the "special introduction" really is. Thoughts??

In happier NBC...

NaNo update: this totally counts as a nerdy book. It is a book, or at least a large collection of words in prose format, written by a nerd, after all. So the fictional non-fiction account of the wacky cult known as the Under Faith (aka Sympastanding, aka Synthesology) is going wonderfully. Every time I can't think of something else to add to the collection of wacky documents, something even wackier occurs to me. Right now, I'm writing what believers of the Under Faith claim to be a Book of the Apocryhpa, which is basically several of the most well-known Bible stories with a Cthulhu twist! I just did Jonah and the Giant Tentacle and the poor widow who becomes a queen of the undersea city. I'm now writing the ark and Cthulhu's 40 day temper tantrum.

David Morrell, First Blood. This is the book that the movie Rambo is based on! I've never seen the movie, so I can't tell if it's at all true to the book. I borrowed this from sweetie, so if you're reading, you should probably skip this for spoilerz. So this tale revolves around a sheriff and a majorly PTSD-ed war vet known only as Rambo. The plot is... well, they kill each other. Rambo is hitchhiking through town, and the sheriff wants him out. Rambo doesn't like nobody telling him where he can't go, so he keeps coming back. Sheriff tries to put him in jail, but cutting Rambo's hair goes too far. A killing spree ensues! So this book was pretty well-paced, but dangit, I wanted to know a lot more about the serious mental damage of these two characters and why they cannot. let. it. go. I guess this one of those books where the characters are just vehicles to deliver the plot (we read copyright cases about this), and... eh. I'm much more of a character reader. I was amazed but not really surprised at how long the characters kept going when they had torn each other to bits, and I was relieved when they died. Not for my sake but for theirs!

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It's a classic, I hear! I'm not very far into it, but daaaaang. I'm starting to see what some of these stream of consciousness books are aiming for and how far they fall short. So far, the narrator and his lawyer have taken a shit ton of drugs and picked up some poor terrified hitchhhiker. Oooh, similarity between these two books! My mind boggles at the quantity of drugs they're taking. I'm trying to ignore the twinge I feel whenever the idea of the intoxicated driver strikes too close to home.

Stephen R. Lawhead, The Saga of the Dragon King (or something). I started this book a looooong time ago, and for awhile I was reading it steadily. But then I got to the final book of the trilogy (it's one of those giant volumes with three books in one), and I put it down for weeks. I finally finished it up to a very underwhelming ending. The proselytizing just got to be too much for me. Sexism and racism I expect from mediocre high fantasy, but the unabashed proselytizing was new and repulsive. Seriously, the kingdom of the Dragon King previously worshipped a whole Greco-Roman pantheon of gods, but then the baby Dragon King and his hermit friend brought the religion of the God Most High to the people! The baby Dragon King even had VISIONS of a brown-haired man beaming at him! Then God gave him a magical sword, but he wielded it in anger, and it stopped being magic. But then he believed again, and it became magical once more!

As I write this, I'm watching Veronica Mars. Everybody has such wonderful things to say about it, and I suspect I would too if the high school drama would DIAF, so it would be all motorcycle gangs, mysteries, and the awesome minor characters. So far I'm enjoying it, but the Pretty White Kids With Problems need to become interesting or go away. Snarking and angsting and making out do not count as interesting. Also, I keep mixing up Veronica's new boy and her ex boy. Damn you, pretty white kids! ETA: OMG kids, please stop calling Veronica by her full name. It's driving me nuts.

ETA II: I completely forgot to post about the Great Gas Scare of '09! I'll put it as briefly as possible: my CO alarm went off, and after I wandered around in confusion for a few minutes, I called 911 and told them what happened. A quartet of firefighters stomped into my apt, checked everything, verified that the CO levels were normal, shut off my stove/oven and stomped out. Minutes later, a duo from the gas company came, poked around my stove, and then discovered that I had a significant gas leak because the connection between the flux (gas pipe) and stove was lacking An Important Piece. He was shocked that I hadn't smelled gas before, and I have noticed that my apartment smells different now when I come in. Anyway, I called my landlord and then wrote a letter and sent it along with a copy of the warning the gas guys gave me, and I am once again stove & oven-less. Oh dang.

Oh heavens, time to go work on the clinic work. Have a nice weekend, all!

Gosh, I should do these weekend posts regularly. Lots of people found something or other to comment on in my last one!

First of all, thanks for all the responses to the FAQ question! It was leaked eventually that I was the "F-A-Qs" advocate and rov the "faks" advocate. It's funny - both of us were genuinely shocked to hear the other pronunciation. I never did add up which one of us won; I think he might have, by a slim margin. Ah well!

On to the weekend! The highlight was seeing Keith Hamilton Cobb, of Andromeda (and other) fame, in a reading of The Brass Butterfly. It's a very funny play by William Golding of all people, the author of Lord of the Flies, and KHC was great. Well, all the actors were great, though the female character didn't have a lot to do besides look mysterious and then proselytize. We were going to try to make two gallery shows also, ones that my art law prof told me about, but the play started late - fortunately for us because we were also late - and we wouldn't have made it back across the island before they closed, especially the way the trains were running. The weather was icky, but we sloshed our way to the original Two Boots pizzeria (very yum) and then a bar for sweetie to watch the end of a football game and me to read the Catholic pacifist newspaper a lady on the street handed to us. It wasn't as hippie as I hoped it would be, but it was a good way to kill a few downs.

Today I finished (read most of, really) Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett which I enjoyed when I wasn't depressed by it. It's a non-fiction story about the friendship between these two women, which sounds totally Lifetime. I guess it was a little Lifetime in places, but it was also about these two women being writers. It made me want to write more, but things do every so often and eventually wear off. NaNo is coming up, and I have an awesome scheme for that, so I'll indulge my "writing every day I PROMISE" urge for a whole month. And then get tired of it. Ah well.

Oh! Sweetie and I also watched Saved! last night, which was a lot of fun. There were some great lines, and the ending was totally Jawbreaker, except Jesus got decapitated. Oh man, I am endlessly amused by representations of White!Jesus because... no. Actually, at the very beginning of the movie, one of the characters calls out another one for that, which led to sweetie and I talking about it for a few minutes, which led me to say, "Jesus probably looked like Sayid on Lost." So from now on, in my head Jesus will look like Sayid from Lost.* And I think that's win.

I also sped through Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape in just a few days. I enjoyed all the essays in that book (my former roommate wrote one!) even though some of them didn't really resonate with my experience. It's a borrowed copy, but I should really get one for myself. On the whole, it fit pretty well with my brand of feminism, somewhere between radical and empowerrific. While I was waiting on the subway platform after writers group, a dude hit on me while I was reading it. He started conversation by asking what I was reading, and his response to me showing him the book was "Oh, like Take Back The Night." He got props for that and for being generally respectful and friendly and not creepy or condescending - and then for taking it gracefully when I told him I had a boyfriend. He should try that on a single lady, and I'm sure he'd have excellent luck.

And then I got home to annoying issues with former roommates and Time Warner and then insurance issues the next morning. Ugh. But these things are inching toward resolution, and the weekend has gone a loooong way toward restoring my peace of mind. Today was beautiful!

*Or possibly KHC. He was in a movie where he played a guy who thought he was Jesus. He had his awesome hair in it, which makes it even better.

Okay, people. I have a question for y'all's expertise. rov and I have discovered that we have different ways of saying "FAQs." One of us insists that you say each letter, so it's "Eff Aye Kyooz," and the other one insists that it's pronounced like "facts."

Which do you say??

All the cool kids are recapping their weekends, and I had a pretty interesting one, so I thought I'd follow suit.

The highlight was my third and last Family Day at the law school. The event itself isn't much of a highlight; seeing my mother is. She's come out for all three of them, and this time sweetie joined us for the afternoon activities. In the morning was a mock class on sentencing law and policy, which was interesting, but we did not quite appreciate that one of the case studies we read and talked about was about a drunk driver getting into an accident and killing somebody. Thanks for that stark reminder of family tragedy! Lunch was okay, a sampling of some of the cuisines associated with different parts of the city (I think the knish and the weird egg thing were my favorites).

I think all of us dozed off at some point during the afternoon panel at which three professors (and another, who moderated) nattered on about the problems facing the Obama administration. My former tax professor was the most interesting speaker of all of them - not his subject but his delivery - which says a lot. And then they served amazingly decadent desserts from the Dessert Truck, after which we waddled around the chilly and windy sidewalks until meeting sweetie's parents for dinner. Now all our parents have met all our parents! We had a fantastic dinner at the Gotham Bar and Grill, which I was still slightly too full from the Family Day eatins to completely enjoy.

My mother came in Saturday, so after we met her at Penn Station (how we would have done so without cell phones I cannot imagine) we hung out at my apartment, drank tea and espresso and ate cookies. Saturday night sweetie and I watched The Shining after my mother left, and I was scared.

Thursday rov and I saw Phantom of the Opera, which was tons of fun. We also had a revelation at almost exactly the same time - the Phantom is the ultimate Nice Guy (TM)! Think about it... he insinuates himself into Christine's life by claiming that he wants to help her with his music, but then he starts killing people, abducting her, threatening to kill her fiance, writing an opera in which he gets to seduce her because he wuuuubs her. And the world was rly rly mean to him! Okay, well, the world WAS rly mean to him, but that's no excuse! Anyway, it was a lot of fun. I did lose my hat on the subway, but such is life.

This entry is not very linear, is it? I think that's all for now, and international law is about to head into the make-up class. Blech. He and my art law prof cancelled class for much of the last two weeks, and today I suddenly have five hours of class. Blech! I know, I know, none of you who work will have sympathy for me. Ah well.

My NaNo novel is looking more and more awesome every time I elaborate it. It'll be the best fictional non-fiction book ever!

Some of you may have seen this on ze facebook, but I'll repeat it here: today (well, Sunday) was the one-year anniversary of the day Sweetie and I started dating. ZOMG! Amazement! I got a decadent TWO cards - one hilariously bad one and one very sweet one (with no pre-printed text!), Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro (author of the best free book I've found yet, The Remains of the Day), the soundtrack to Wicked, and some lovely potted mums. I love it - that conglomeration sums me up pretty well! And goodness, it was a liquor-soaked weekend; I imbibed every day from Thursday to Sunday (never enough to be hungover, woohoo!). It helped that we went to our first date restaurant last night and told the owner that - he gave us each a drink on the house!

What else? Could it be time for the long dormant Nerdy Book Corner?? ( Why yes it is! )

The most important update is, of course, that I got the clerkship position I interviewed for! Woooooo! It's for a magistrate judge in the southern district here. I had the interview Friday, and though I thought it went well, I've thought that enough firm interviews have gone well that I wasn't expecting much either way. Monday afternoon he called me (while I was on the subway!) and left a message that was so laconic in tone that it wasn't until he said, "I'd like to offer you the position," that I realized he was hiring me! So I called back and confirmed and may have squeaked just a bit.

So woo! Job for next year! Will not starve in the streets!

As for the minor updates...
-Cable has been banished and replaced by Netflix. Of course, my first Netflix disc was unplayable, but I got the replacement promptly and watched it just last night. It was Enchanted, loverly!

-Boston weekend coming up! Wooooo!

-I've been getting back into running a couple times a week, now that it's not meltingly hot during the hours I'm awake. I'm also doing yoga in my bedroom a couple times a week, hooray! Because I have all this fitness stuff available at home, I'm not signing up for any fitness classes at the gym, at least not for this quarter. By "fitness classes," I of course mean fencing. I know, no fencing! I just want to see how living in Brooklyn and having my clinic work especially work out time- and convenience-wise. I'm hoping to get back into it.

-NaNo looms large! I'm thinking of yet another excursion into the UFPE-verse, but also, a recent Wiki-surf ended up on the page of some wacky racial supremacist religion, and I thought... gosh, I could invent one of my own! It's tempting. I've been pondering.

I guess that's all for now. My clinic had a big pizza party lunch, so I am thinking of doing something very restrained for dinner. I had shrimp on pizza for the first time! It was win.

I was watching Monk on my DVR just now (cleaning it out before I give it back Friday, sob), and I sat on the remote, and it switched over to one of the Disney channels. I have no idea what the show was, some sort of a cartoon, but they totally made an obscenity joke.

Girl: What is 'cute,' anyway?
Boy: I can't explain 'cute,' but I know it when I pick it up on my cute-o-meter.

WOAH THERE KIDS.

Also, I have a clerkship interview Friday. Wish me luck! Unlike firm interviews, where they can have dozens of associates interviewing tons of people, there's just one judge to interview people, and they have, you know, judging to do, so they only pick a handful of people they're genuinely interested in. Funnily enough, one of the young ladies I worked with as an RA last year recently started as this judge's clerk. A good sign, I think!

I've been meaning to re-read my paper again before my interview, and in the spirit of "Machinima, Music Videos, and Fan Fiction: Proposing a Collective Rights Regime to Regulate Fan-Generated Content" (which is the name of my paper), I present you... pure distilled Trek/Monty Python awesome. Hey, it's relevant!

Considering the stressful afternoon I had reading child porn cases for art law, this evening has turned out much more pleasant than I would have thought. Obscenity in the adult context is endlessly fascinating; these child porn cases almost make me physically ill to read. Blech. Moving on.

OMG look, writing that is inspired neither by NaNo nor impending writers group workshop! In that it's vaguely urban fantasy, I've written stuff like this before, but in that it's a cannibal (sort of) romantic comedy... not so much! What's that? You want an excerpt? Very well! Here are the first few lines, as I have them right now. I have no idea where this is going, but so far it's so much fun to write.


( CannRomCom )

With a day off class (I have Tuesdays and Fridays off this semester, but I suspect that my clinic will take up a good chunk of that time) and my student refund check safely deposited, I decided to stock my kitchen a bit more. Why didn't I think of restaurant supply stores sooner?? I went to Bowery Restaurant Supply, which is cramped like any of them and hard to navigate, but they have some great stuff for cheap. Like what??

For just under $35, I got:
A mixing bowl--I've been using various dishes for this until now. Yay real mixing bowl!
A colander--The lid method scares me. I may once have dropped my eatins in the sink. I got one of those metal ones, which they called a Chinese colander.
Bamboo skewers--partly for skewering food and partly for suspending seeds for sprouting.
A big plastic cutting board--Alton Brown has told me twice in the past week or so of taped Good Eats episodes that glass cutting boards are bad for knives.
Vegetable peeler--Okay, I don't peel stuff hugely often, but I hear it can be a useful thing to do.
Bread loaf--BREAD! Also, meatloaf.
Muffin tin--MUFFINS! Or tiny pies! Alton Brown also uses them to cook meatballs. Wacky dude.
Tongs--Unlike Gondor and a king, I do need tongs.

And then I wandered around Chinatown some more and got some of those Ramen-like noodles (which I cooked tonight, lucky I got some hoisin sauce a few days ago) and spring roll wrappers, which were a lot harder to find than you might think in freaking Chinatown. I'm planning to cut them in half and make little dumpling-esque things with them, also inspired by an episode of Good Eats. When I have another completely free day, I might go back and get some peppercorns to put into a grinder I've not yet purchased. I <3 freshly ground pepper.

Oh and! From one generous Brooklyn freecycler, an infomercial kitchen toy called a GT Express. It looks like it cooks small sized things very quickly, which is perfect for a single (well, single-person household) person like me.

I'm still dreaming about a food processor, and then I'll be kitchen happy... for the moment!

ETA: OMG!! I was just looking through the channel guide and found the original Ugly Betty. I've seen parts of the two series that sprung from it, and now I'm watching the original. This makes cancelling my cable at the end of the month a little harder, I must admit. I have to say, though, that this is the least ugly Betty out of all of them. She's just a pretty brunette in glasses, a boring (not even poorly fitted) suit, and slightly frizzy hair. It is freakish how well the Alicia in the Mexican version channels this Alicia, or whatever her name is (so far, they're pretty similar). Fernando, sadly, is way less hot and probably way less hilarious.

... um, I'm watching this solely for the sake of maintaining a bare comprehension of Spanish. Yes. That's it.

It went well! I made/bought just the right amount of food, and now I own spirits for the first time ever! The cookies were the most fun to make, though squashing chickpeas is also good times. I've also never used this many glasses at once (nor had to wash them all at once!). I also got greenery--a plant from bestest friend and flowers from my mother. Hooray, color! Thanks everybody who came! My apartment is officially warmed!

And now I am astonishingly tired; I think drinking in the afternoon confusing my body horribly. I'm going to go to bed and wake up early enough to read my (hardly extensive) homework before my 11 am class. I love that 11 am is my earliest class this semester. Gosh I love law school.

And tomorrow night I get to be flayed. Hooray! Um, or something! I've found that, like movies, it's best for me to go into my own workshopping with exceedingly low expectations. This I think it's actually warranted, but I guess I'll find out!

Ahhh, a week of (mostly) freedom before classes start next Wednesday. It's been... okay, I've been moderately lazy, but with this weather, can you blame me?? I did get some residual RA work cleaned up, including a presentation in front of the lawyering faculty of two awesome charts I made. The highlight of that was getting a poppy-seed cookie sandwich with red filling and much applause.

Is that all I did? Oh no! I bought fabric for my second sewing project ever, and it's halfway done. The second half will go a lot more quickly if I don't sew up the whole thing and rip out most of the stitches, which I don't plan to do. It's a slip cover for each of these two pillows I got with fairly ugly and itchy covers. It's all hand-sewn, and I've never had a deft hand with a needle, so it may all fall apart in a month, and it gaps a little in the back, but I'm absurdly proud of the first one. Related to this, I walked up to the store (about two miles during the early afternoon WHY???) on Monday, only to discover that they're closed Mondays. I took the subway back.

I had my one law interview today, hooray? I think it went okay - the guy and I basically chatted about fanfiction, the subject of my writing sample - but who knows?? I've also been watching a boatload of TV, especially the Star Treks, knitting, and writing a story for a friend of mine. I guess that's productive enough!

And now for some sad news. As I post this, the 20th passes quickly into the 21st, which is Amie's birthday. And guess what? As I was posting, an MSN spammer decided to spam me from her IM account. GAH. This is not permitted. I remember that happened a few times before, but never since she passed away. I'm planning to call my parents tomorrow and then hang out with people.

Um. In happier news, come to my party on August 30th. Exotic Clinton Hill, people!

I'll be posting this Around The Way, so I can catch just about everyone who would be interested in The Event.

Not this upcoming Sunday but Sunday August 30th I'm thinking of finally hosting my month-late apt-warming day! You reading this - yes you! - are probably invited! Because my apartment is a fairly small place, I'm planning on spreading it out over the course of the afternoon, so people can come and go and not burst the seams of the place. Ha ha, as if I actually know that many people!

So if you can come, let me know! If you can come and have my email, email me for my address. If you can come and don't have my email, leave me yours in the comments and I'll email you. We'll make this work, guys!

And this gives me a deadline for cleaning up the place. Hooray!

In just under three hours, after inflicting a number of tiny nicks upon my poor fingers, covered in sweat and sawdust, I put together my nice new green loveseat and carelessly threw thereupon the lighter-green throw pillows. I also brought in my blanket from the bedroom to put on my lap so my laptop doesn't roast my legs, and it happens to be green as well! My next scheme, after I get all these boxes out of the way, is to sew little slipcovers for these two fairly ugly throw pillows I acquired. Hooray! When the boxes are gone, I shall try to remember to post pictures! I also need to get a curtain rod and two hook deals, and then I will have a Very Cozy Living Room.

And yes, cozy means so small that I had to get a loveseat instead of a real couch. Very cozy.

Now to bed, a little earlier than usual. Friday I have to get up two hours earlier than usual for the legally mandated ethics exam all lawyers have to take. But then birthday party and my first weekend here at apartment, with Sweetie and new loveseat!!

I got box 2 of 2 of my loveseat today; the other was misrouted by UPS. Jerks! Oh well - I can work from home tomorrow, too. And grocery shop with my old lady grocery cart and wait for other packages and drink chocolate skim milk. I am very excited for my loveseat - without a functioning wireless router, I am relegated to sitting on the floor, on a rolled-up area rug I have yet to unroll, on a pillow, on another pillow.

So another Craft adventure tonight! This time it was craftsteak, where I had a new kind of steak. Hooray! Also, I was bought another anonymous drink. Hooray! Also, I had a chocolate souffle for the first time, ZOMG hooray. Also, I ran into a NaNo friend on the way home - so random! And now I am watching DVRred Star Trek, one of the first episodes I've actually watched. It's awesome and bizarre, full of flower-tattooed hippies who want to jam with Spock. Not that I blame them. There is a blond guy in a blue loincloth with short cape wearing thigh-high boots who is singing incomprehensible folk music. Is it the four drinks, or is that really as incoherent as I think it is??

That's the extent of the news. I'm slowly moving myself in, and I am now attempting to grow various things in various containers. I'm very excited! Who knows, maybe something will actually sprout! Cotyledons may be the cutest non-critter thing ever. This upcoming weekend shall be my first weekend spent at this new apartment, and I'm just delighted. There's a farmers market Saturday! And a flea market!

Okay, the suspense on Trek is building. The crinkly-eared hippie has connived to take control of the Enterprise! Gasp!

I am thinking of completely giving up on greeting cards that already have stuff written in them. I don't send a ton of cards because I am a bad correspondent, and I have such a hard time finding ones that I think are appropriate to the situation and relationship between the recipient and me (mainly, that aren't horrifically stupid). I always like it when people write stuff in cards in addition the printed material, and I often try to add something personalized when I send out cards. Not that I mind receiving pre-printed cards - sometimes they are very nice. Another part of it is that I like sending postcards in lieu of greeting cards, especially thank-you cards. I have a whole stack of thank-you cards that I never use because postcards are way more fun. I'd ask if anyone wants to join me in this boycott of pre-printed greeting cards, but it's not really a boycott. I have no moral protest against them. I just find most of them really dumb - finding good romantic ones is especially hard when you're not actually QUITE at the "forever and ever" strage.

Of course, if I ever acquire huge coterie of card-sending cohorts, I'll have to reconsider this stance. Oh well, that's a ways away.

Now back to work!

Hmm, I can't tell what the majorest of the news is, so bullet points!

-New apt!! Crap is scattered to the eight corners, I managed to track floor wax or polish into the kitchen already AND mar the nice new floor wax/polish, and I'm slightly worried about how my finances are going to work out this year, but I have a wonderful little apartment! The move was accomplished in one impressive haul, with minivan and car - or would have been, had I not sillily (why isn't that a word?) forgotten my microwave. I was waiting for the young lady who's going to take over my room when I remembered it. So sweetie came back in his car and got me, and we dragged the last bit of the move over to the new place just as the cable guy was finishing up.

-In related news, does anyone know if DVR can work with just broadcast? Would TW even let me do that with their rented DVR? That would be ideal for me. It chaps my hide that the cheapest cable package with TW is 130 channels for $56/month. What the hell do I need with 130 channels?? I do like having a DVR, though, for the few shows I will regularly watch (with sweetie) when they come back on. Well, we'll see how my first couple of months go.

-I was thrilled to see my dad over the past few days, but I am a little resentful. You see, he and my stepmother left me at about 6 this evening, despite not flying out until tomorrow. Their flight was an early one ('was' because they just found out it was cancelled), and I know that my dad doesn't believe in things like getting enough sleep. We're pretty sure he's physically incapable of doing so. I would bet money that they left because my delicate flower of a stepmother was too tired to spend any more time with me (and too delicate a flower to go back to their room on her own). Yeah, see you guys at Christmas! She was also way anti-social at our dinner with sweetie's parents Saturday night. She can be perfectly friendly when she wants to be, but while she's under strict orders to be nice to me, she has no such compunction about anyone else.

-New apt!!

-New (to me) TV!! It's the giantest TV I've ever owned! Also, new to me kitchen cart with stools and coffee table + two end table set! The latter two things were free, courtesy of Brooklyn Freecycle and sweetie's car. Giantest TV set me back $150, which is pretty good!

-OMG unpacking! Somewhere I have a wireless router, but it's not hooked up yet, so I'm stuck to the living room wall. This obviously means I can't be actually doing things besides eating cherries on the floor.

-OMG school credit kerfluffle taken care of. It turned out to be nothing - I had registered for more courses than necessary, and the registration system gave me a hard time about it. But I don't need one of the courses I signed up for, which means my schedule will be a little freer. I did want to take that class, but I like the other ones I'm signed up for even more (except evidence).

-OMG long entry! Stay tuned for news of house-warming when my loveseat arrives!

Thanks to everybody who wished me happy birthday via facebook or some other medium! It WAS a happy birthday! I won't jinx things by saying that there's no way 25 could be worse than 24 for me, so I'll just say that I'm sure 25 will be a rockin year!

So as many of you know, my mother came to visit me over my birthday. We ate out a whole bunch, I treated her to Magnolia Bakery, and we both went to the Bronx for the first time (for the awesome zoo). On my birthday, we lost each other after dinner, but it was a minor hiccup. We procured a (free!) kitchen cart and stools for my new apt, but I was sad that she wasn't able to actually see the apt, especially considering that she's my guarantor. Oooh, and we went shopping at Macy's. The clothes shopping went well, but then when I found a pair of shoes I wanted to try on, the saleslady gave me a box with two right shoes! And then in ten minutes, she never came back to check on me! We tried to go to Shakespeare in the Park, but as NYCers know, it has been simply madness this year. I was willing to wait 4-5 hours for tickets, not 10.

She and I officially have a Favorite Restaurant, which is Henry's End in Brooklyn Heights. It's awesome! They had petite syrah by the glass!

The other Giant News is that I won a legal writing competition with the paper I wrote for my copyright class! Now, I'm not sure how many other people entered it - it wasn't very well advertised - but who cares?? I was sharp enough to see the sign a few days before the deadline and to get everything put together (well, with prof's help). There's a money prize, a smugness prize, and a resume line prize, all for me! I'm waiting impatiently for my mother to get out of her meeting and fax it to rov, who will email it to me as a PDF. With my prize money, I believe I shall actually try to get a reasonable sort of couch. Or I could get a cheap couch and a coffee table. We'll see!

Also, my dad is coming into town two weeks from last Thursday to help me move, hooray! He just emailed me that he sold my car, which is nice for him but a little weird for me. I plan on going home again for Christmas, and now how will I get around?? Oh well.

So that's the news! OH AND! I received an email that the New York Law Journal is sponsoring a fiction contest! Sadly, it's only open to legal folks and only for legal stories. But I'm a legal folk, and I can write a legal story! Hooray deadline!

ETA: Letter was not quite what I thought, but that's okay! That was for the local competition, which I won by default because no one else from NYU entered. Now it goes into the national round! Don't worry, some moneys is still involved!

Okay, posting fail on my end. Because I've been looking for apts for awhile now, I keep saying to myself, "As soon as I make some progress on my apt search, I'll post about it," because otherwise there's not a whole lot to say about my day-to-day.

So progress is made! Today I signed about a zillion papers, forked over too much of my dwindling 08-09 loan funds, and made arrangements to pick up my key next week to my new apartment!! Woohoo! It's in Clinton Hill (Brooklyn), right near a train that'll take me straight to NYU, at the top end of my price range (which is significantly less than my dorm room first year), one-bedroom with a nice-sized bedroom, on the fifth floor of an elevator building, with laundry in the basement... hmmm, I think that's all. I'm really excited! I've never lived in my own place before! And now I cannot spend any unnecessary monies until student loans get in, like woah. The landlord is way nicer than my current landlord - I guess she's a landlady - and she reminds me of a French professor I once had, who was at first intimidating but turned out to be awesome.

But there is other news as well! My mother is coming up in a few days to visit me for my birthday, and I'm scheming things for us to do. I'm very much looking forward to seeing her and spending time in Brooklyn doing fun things. Also for my birthday, sweetie took me to see Wicked July 1st!! I'd read the book awhile back, and I wanted to see it since then (and before, really, having heard a lot about it). It was fantastic, of course. I love the story, changed as it was in the musical version, and I want to get the soundtrack so I can learn the songs.

What else? The life of a research assistant is a good one - make my own hours, search apts and see doctors any time I need, wear whatever to work, work with just a handful people (all of them very pleasant). The pay is a little weak, compared to what my classmates at firms are raking in, but as I've been visiting doctors about my headache situation, I've been glad to have such a flexible job. Headache situation?? It's not as serious as it might sound - for a few years, I've had increasingly frequent but not at all severe headaches. They're more annoying than worrisome, but as often as they are, I figure I should seek treatment for them so they recur at a somewhat more normal rate. I have discovered that generic Aleve works wonders on them.

Well, that's my news. I'm about to go to a birthday party and hope sweetie is willing to buy most of my drinks. Brooklyn represent!

I just caught up on all my friends' journals (but no community ones), sitting here at the NYU liberry because my home internet died when I got back. Alas! But the cable guy is coming tomorrow (I know, a Saturday!) to fix everything.

The big news is, of course, my trip to Disney World with sweetie! You'll be terribly amused to know that the weather was better in NYC than Orlando - we got rain everyday, and during our first two full days there, ALL day. I was blowdrying my shoes every night!

So let's see, what's the easiest way to sum it all up?? First: (  a cut. )

Today... waking up too early. Oof. And then I came back to non-working internet. But in between then, I met sweetie's brother (they don't look much alike but they have some really hilariously similar mannerisms), ate even more food, watched more Lost on DVD aaaaaand... that's about it. This silly laptop needs a system restore like woah, but it gives me an error message when I try. Drat! Now time to head back, think about taking a shower, and sleep for like a zillion hours. Then a weekend, and then my summer job begins, yay!

First, read this post at Language Log. It's fun, believe me! Just reading it made me smile. And then tell me what your favorite/least favorite words are!

I'm not sure if I have any least favorite words; a lot of people seem to hate "moist" and/or "panties," but these seem like perfectly serviceable words to me.

My favorite word ever is "chagrin." Someone in the comments mentioned "lascivious," which is another word I like. Also, "mischievous," which I like both ways I've heard it pronounced. There are others, but of course I can't think of them right now.