Via mzrowan, my OKCupid World Languages Test Results:

( 330 out of 400 )

Unsurprisingly, given that I was a linguistics major in college, I did well on the actual language questions (e.g., “is language X a member of language family Y”), and not so well on the political/geographic questions (“is language X an official language of country Y”).

So here’s a little more detail about the fabulous weekend I’ve just had:

On Friday (into Saturday), I had a particularly lovely date with cathijosephine. ( Read more... )

Then on Saturday, after I dealt with a minor problem on my Mac, we got dressed and went to the Flea (the Fetish Fair Fleamarket, which usually happens twice a year). ( Read more... )

Saturday evening,cathijosephine and I went out to dinner at Sol, the wonderful Brazilian buffet near her place, with xmelancholia, her husband, and their housemate, and thence to a fabulous and wonderful birthday party, with a spy theme. ( Read more... ) It was really nice to get the time with xmelancholia, and especially nice to finally meet her husband, who is a sweetie.

On Sunday, I availed myself of the buffet cathijosephine and I had discovered in the mall, did a little bit of window-shopping, and then came home and did some cleaning. I didn’t accomplish nearly as much as I’d hoped to, but I’m a bit less likely to trip over things in my office than I was before.

And today, I made my first trip of the summer to Canobie Lake Park, an amusement park in southern New Hampshire, with eisa and maeveenroute. We had a great time. ( Read more... ) On my way to the car after ice cream, I had a great phone call with my mother. When I got home, I got to chat a bit with docorion, who had a highly productive weekend around the house, and now it’s almost time for me to go to bed.
Sorry about the length — it’s been a very full weekend!

Continuing my series of gripping, thrilling dreams, last night I had a dream about the letter kra. (In my dream, it was a Maltese extention to the Latin alphabet. In reality, it turns out it used to be used in the Greenland language Kalaallisut, but has been replaced with q. The realization I had in the dream about its name turns out to be correct, though.)

It’s probably a good sign that I’m remembering my dreams more, however boring they may be.

What is it with me and weird dreams? I almost never remember my dreams these days, and now I remember dreams two days in a row. Unlike the previous one, this one (while weird) isn’t going to be that interesting to anybody but me.

I dreamt about an amazing college Russian textbook, with things like samples of written Russian throughout history, and sidebars comparing Russian with other Slavic languages, and sections on specialized forms of Russian like legal language and newspaper writing. And it was printed in full colour, with lots of photographs and interesting design elements.

Maybe my subconscious needs to get out more, but I really wish that book were real.

(This was actually only the tail end of another dream, but I don’t remember the rest of it, alas.)

I had a hard time with this, because lots of my friends have similar interests, but I did my best:

1. Given a 40-minute presentation in Chinese, a language I had only studied for two years. [Edit: This was for work, to people who didn’t speak much English, rather than in class.]
2. Dropped out of high school to go to college (OK, I bet a bunch of you have done that).
3. Seen an original Old English manuscript in the flesh (well, skin, anyway).
4. Painstakingly centered and right-justified lines on an IBM Executive typewriter.
5. Typed entire college papers with nice-looking apostrophes by rotating the platen up a half line and using commas.
6. Written a program in Z-80 assembly language to print proportionally-spaced mixed-case text on a printer that normally only printed capitals [edit: and used it to print my Russian homework].
7. Invented a new Romance language as a child (I bet some of you have invented languages, but not intended to fit in as plausible relatives of real languages).
8. Invented two imaginary writing systems as a child (I’m guessing most of you stopped at one).
9. Conducted a long-distance relationship via (what would come to be called) electronic mail and instant messaging — before 1984. (See PLATO People.)
10. Recited pornographic poetry in Esperanto for a sweetie. (She didn’t believe me that it was pornographic, so I had to translate it for her. In front of her co-workers. :-)

OK, this is not really going to be entertaining to anybody but me, but I picked up a box of juice off the shelf at a Store 24 near my house on the way home tonight, and noticed that it had another language on the other side. And I noticed it was in Cyrillic. And I noticed it was not Russian, but Bulgarian. Not a language I’m used to seeing in a random convenience store.

( Tangerine Carrot Lemon & Apple Premium Juice )

This is fabulous. Thanks to greenfizzpops for the link.

Wish I had time for a more substantive update... Life is busy lately, especially the work part of life. But Kala's coming to visit! Yay!