Mes Souhaites

I'm working at getting various medical things wrapped up before the end of the year. Today was my trip to the optometrist for new glasses. That whole bit was uneventful up to the dilation at the end. Apparently I'm a really good dilator. Even the doctor commented on how good I was at it. From more than about a foot away you couldn't see that I had irides at all.

My appointment was in Chinatown, so afterward I went off in search of some food looking like something from Demonbaby Goes to Washington.

The waitress seemed friendly enough. Apparently she hadn't seen Demonbaby or she would have certainly been more disconcerted since, as we all know, Demonbaby eats his server after enjoying some tasty lo-mein. Though I couldn't really see anything at that point. I attributed her soft-spoken speech to being Asian, perhaps it was abject terror.

We had a meeting today about the company sponsored IRA. I was excited because, as a one-time owner of The Anarchist Cookbook and a fellow lucky to still have all his fingers, I felt I might have something valuable to bring to the table. I practiced my accent to myself and made a sign that said "reef, th' limey bastards."

Honestly I was disappointed. Apparently, our branch is mostly concerned with the financing of operations. I suppose that makes sense given that we're on the wrong side of the pond. The whole meeting though was about investing and other such boring things. The guy they sent over didn't even have an accent. I'm pretty sure he was as American as I was. Maybe you have to start off at the bottom and after you prove yourself a bit you get to move into the real action.

Anyhow, he said that there were three things we should take from the meeting. I don't really what they've got with liberating our people, but maybe one of y'all can help me out:

• Plan your retirement like you're going to be taking a twenty year vacation. You don't want to have to stop and find more money in the middle.
• "Just Do It." © In thirty years a lot of the choices you make are not going to make a lot of a difference. The most important thing is to start doing something.
• When you get ready to retire, make sure that you've got at least enough money for three years in cash or government bonds. Three to five years is how long it takes for a bad market to begin to rebound. Apparently most funds went down an average of 50% between 2000 and 2002. People who had to withdraw during that period were simply sol.

It is possible that a sufficiently determined individual equipped with the myriad of channels available on modern television can watch That 70's Show all day long.

I need to get my computer fixed. That or one of those new-fangled outside hobbies I've been hearing about.

Say you are playing Bingo and you have boards going from 0-99 with a range of 30 numbers for each letter. (B can be 0-30, I can be 17-47, etc.) What are the chances that a given number will be on a person's board? Seems like one in six since there are five numbers in each column and the range is 30, so there's a five out of thirty chance.

How many turns will it take on average for a game to play out? For the board above, I verified it in class tonight empirically: for fucking ever. After about ten minutes I started calling out ranges of numbers. "B three through nine, if you have any of those cross them out."

In other news, the water is out at my new home. (I've moved five times now in the last four months, for those unawares.) There's two toilets in the place and if you're careful you can get two flushes out of a single tankful of water. I've now used those up. My fancy 1200um ckOne deodorant is now fighting an unpleasant battle against the effects of the Sahara on my scent. I tired rubbing it all over to increase the coverage and make it more effective, but this, if anything, made things worse.

ammedley has posted a picture from our shiny night. We so hot.

In other news I got a call this morning from a guy who said he's got a relative in my English class who told him I rock (not in so many words, it was French, so he said, "rocké") and he wanted to hire me for his institute. I told him I'm out of here in a month, but it was nice to know that some of my students are enjoying themselves.

Oh yeah, further news, I set my COS dote officially to be December 15^th. Now I've just got to figure out how to get home. ☺

And a final anecdote, I was hanging out yesterday with M'Baye helping him get a new server up and running with Fedora. He was saying how much he has been seduced (séduit) by Linux. I asked him why he changed in the first place. He explained to me that nepotism is rampant among the Maures. He often feels that, as a black man, they are looking for any excuse to fire him and put a cousin in his place. When he got there they were using Windows 2000 Server. He got rid of that and started with a Linux box because no one knows how to configure one, so his job would be safe.

Just so that no one else need discover this on their own, eating four quarts worth of Gatorade powder will make your tongue bleed.

I was hanging out with Miriam last night discovering that she literally is incapable of smoking. She can draw into her mouth, but the inhaling she just can't manage. She mentioned that it burned which, given that she has never done anything but puff before, sounds about right.

Anyhow, as we were chatting and discussing relationships I remembered an entertaining anecdote. It comes from a form of French slang called "verlan." It is sort of like pig latin. You take the word and switch the order of the syllables. The word verlan itself comes from the French word for reverse: "l'envers." That's l'en•vers, switch those around and you've got vers•l'en or verslen = verslan.

So, I was talking French with a fellow and we were discussing girls. I called his girlfriend at the time his meuf. ("Meuf" is "femme" or "woman" in verlan.) "Oh no," he said, "she's not my meuf. She's my copine." When I asked him the distinction he said, "Ma copine, elle est pour l'amour. Ma meuf est pour baiser, c'est tout."

(I'll leave that for y'all to translate if you don't speak French. As a hint, I've got an article with a full page spread of Colin Farrell and the quote, "Je bois, je jure et je baise." Boire is to drink and jurer is to swear, baiser is the one you've got to figure out.)

My lying about on my ass has left me a bit bored. I've now listened to Tom Clancy's War of Eagles as Dan Brown's Deception Point and Angels and Demons on tape.

I discovered a stash of Witchblades in French and found that I can now pretty much read conversational French. I'll not know a word here and there, but I get the gist without even having to work at it. Wanting to test my abilities I went out to a new bookstore and bought myself Men's Health in French. It took me about twice my normal reading time to get through an article on one's bad habits (défaults) and whether to reveal them (avouer ou cacher). (At first read, I took it to be asking swallow or spit (avaler oú cracher). I said I can read, not read well. ☺) An interesting verb I am waiting to put to use out of my reading is se cuiter which my dictionary defines as "to get smashed."