Friday Morning Latin Lesson, Vol LV

Felix sit annus novus! Yeah, I was a little drunk hungover lazy last week when it was time to write up the New Year's Day Latin Lesson. Apparently, dead languages and holidays don't mix...which is completely counter-intuitive to the Latin way of thinking when it came to taking days off. However, not writing a Latin lesson on a holiday completely jives with the Roman way of life. Double celebration, man.

You'll probably recognize the greeting above as meaning "Happy New Year". Felix, of course, has popped up around here a lot, as it means "happy/merry/gay" (but it also means "lucky" or, sometimes, "fertile"...so, be cautious when getting felix if you're particularly felix). Sit is a form of "to be" (esse) that means "may we be" and then you should recognized annus to be asshole "year" and novus to be "new". So, it's literally "May we be happy (in the) New Year!"

And, of course, this is the time of year when everyone strives to better themselves by resolving to lose weight, quit smoking, stop downloading jellyfish porn, and to not watch any more Michael Bay films. This being the 8th of January, I'm fairly certain that about 65% of resolutions have already been shredded.

Coupled with the resolution to get rid of some unsightly fat, naturally, comes Girl Scout Cookie time. Excellent timing, you little brown-clad she-demons, excellent timing, indeed. I know this, because my daughter joined girl scouts this past Wednesday--just in time for the selling of the cookies! You can feel my glee pulsating through the monitor right now, can't you?

What to do, what to do? Shall I wreck people's resolutions by tempting them with the sweet delicacies of brown-skirted pixies, or should I try to support those who want to better themselves in an attempt to prolong their lives?

It is my belief that a little bit of a treat now and then isn't so bad for you, even when trying to lose weight. It's when you've resisted the shit for a month or two that causes you to go fucking apeshit when your will power finally breaks. Ben and Jerry's pints? Thank you, I'll eat a dozen. Pie? Why, yes, sir, please bring the whole thing to the table and I'll eat my way through it. Cake? Only if it's served with a shovel.

So, take a little bit of the sweets. Reward yourself for your hard work. Enjoy life a little. Exercise and dieting don't have to be miserable. However, if the desire to gobble Oreos is too much, remember this little bit of Latin, and it should hopefully help you rein in your cravings:

Obesimus, biscuitum demitte!
Pronounced: "Oh-bay-see-moose, bees-kwee-toom day-mee-tay!"

Corpulent translation in the hovertext.

Now...how many boxes of Girl Scout Cookies can I put you down for?

EDIT: Again, failure on my part. Today would be Elvis' 75th birthday, had he not, y'know, succumbed to all those peanut butter and 'nana sammiches. Oh, and the percocet. Anyway, Credo Elvem vivere!

TMI Thursday: Lose Weight, Feel...er...Great? I guess...

If this does not sate your thirst for awesome TMI stories, then check out all the other glorious tales of things we probably shouldn't tell at LiLu's home for the staunchy raunchy, TMI Thursdays!

So, it's the New Year. Time for resolutions and for everyone who has ignored their waistline through the previous eleven months to suddenly want it to shrink again.

While I myself am too perfect, thus rendering the action of resolving to better myself moot, I am here to help you lose weight. It's the Patent-Pending Indefatigable Weight Loss Program, guaranteed to rid you of some of that unwanted weight you've got just lying around in your colon.

The first thing you should do is walk--no, run--to the hospital and get your gall bladder removed. This running isn't so much for the health benefits but to assist you into getting in shape, because you'll be doing a lot of running to the can in a few short weeks.

Once recovered from the cholecystectomy, run again to the the local grocer. There, buy the ingredients for an Irish Boiled Dinner and run home again to prepare. Three hours later, eat your fill of the oh so delicious Irish Boiled Dinner. You'll have plenty of left-overs, so you can repeat this latter part of the diet without needing to cook more.

Proceed quickly to the nearest restroom. Plunk yourself down on the toilet. Proceed to shit your brains out. Try not to vomit at the roiling pain in your bowels and/or the cloud of stench that permeates you after evacuating your bowels in a manner most liquid. Wipe. Flush. Flush again. Flush again, lest someone link that stank-ass mephitis to you.

Leave the bathroom with your head lowered in shame.

Be sure to drink water to replace the fluids lost through your bowels.

Repeat.

All this and more for the low price of $19.95!!! Call now, and I'll throw in a pack of wet-wipes so you can mop your brow while sitting on the can, emptying yourself of the most vile-smelling filth your body can possibly ever hope to create in a rushing torrent of diarrhea and despair unwanted weight.

...And now you know how my days went from Saturday through Tuesday of this week.

Fortunately, no one who works in the biology half of my company reads this blog, so they can remain clueless as to whom it was that snuck over to the bathrooms and left a vile, foul-smelling haze in the air on Tuesday afternoon...

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

My friend's wife--and her sister!--gave me spotted dick in the can!.

I hear, however, that penisillin will clear it right up.

*chortle*

My friend, B, and I have been joking about the spotted dick for about three or four months. I won't really get into the specifics of the joke, but suffice it to say that I still laugh at adolescent jokes--as if that's a revelation to you. So, I apologize to my friends from the UK. But, you have to admit, it's a funny name.

Anyway, B apparently likes to go home and--get this!--converse with his wife about what happened during the day! He's a regular Ward Cleaver, that one. Anyway, when we first started joking about the spotted dick (*chortle*), he went home and told his lovely wife about it. So, when they were at a grocery store over the holidays, she spotted a can of the spotted dick and said, "Don't you need to buy some of that for your friends?"

Because he's a man of action, B grabbed it and said "No, I just need to get one."

He presented it to me on Monday.

So, for those of us who don't know what spotted dick is, let me fill you in. *chortle* It's a dessert made of a dough-like suet mixture and some sort of dried fruit. Apparently, according to this article, the fruit is typically currants, but my spotted dick has syphilis raisins. Typically, it's served with custard--which is, as you know, a thick, whitish cream--and is a favorite of Ron Weasley's. Who knew? Gingers like the spotted dick! Red, I'm looking at you...but this isn't any different than any other day. So, carry on normally!

You know what's even better? My spotted dick was made in England, so it's authentic. Yessir, it was made in Middlesex! *chortle*

The absolute best part of the can, though, is how polite the wording is when it comes to discussing quality control. I quote:

"If you are not delighted with this product, simply contact us quoting the quality code on the can end and we will refund your money in full. Your statutory rights are not affected."

What a wonderfully polite people, the English.

I would be remiss if I didn't add this little bit at the end. The spotted dick is microwaveable, but you can also warm it in the can by setting it in a pan of boiling water for 30-40 minutes.

So, yes...it's best to have hot spotted dick.

*chortle*

German Gifts

I had kind of a rough day yesterday. And by "rough", I mean by my standards.

First, I didn't really get a lunch. At one point during the afternoon, I slammed down a somewhat overripe banana and some celery and washed it down with some water. Oh, healthy.

When I came in in the morning (oh! Double preposition!), I was filled with optimism that I'd be able to better the world, one sp3-hybridized orbital at a time (unless I'm actually fiddling with the sp2-orbital on the aromatic ring with my bromine on it...how does lithium-halogen exchange work anyway...I know it's a single-electron transfer mechanism, but does it dump into one of the pi-system antibonding orbitals or does it...oh, I'm sorry, what? Did I slip into chemistry speak again? Well, let's fix this ship right the fuck now!).

Anyway, I had high hopes for what I could accomplish during the day. So, I mixed up some solvents, prepared a few samples, slammed down some coffee, and signed up for a decent amount of time on the High Pressure Liquid Chromatography machine (henceforth referred to as the HPLC-inator). I trundled off with my carboy of solvent, my samples in hand, and extra gloves. Science was about to be done.

I prepped the machine appropriately, and I was all fired up. I had this thing. I didn't need to go find my friend, Joe (which would have involved a trip to some sub-tropical, pirate-infested waters, anyway, so it was better that I had everything under control). I could handle this. I started the machine, and this loud buzzing, like a million angry bees were coming for me, started up along with the machine.

Things didn't seem quite right (at least in my adolescent-level mind) but I figured I'd let the first run go, see how things shaped up. Except, I did something stupid: I leaned forward, resting my forearms on the bench, thus pushing the keyboard back into the UV-Vis detector, and shutting it off. Keen. I'll just turn it back on.

Except. It didn't come back on. Not fully. It wouldn't calibrate. I tried shutting it off for longer and letting it come back up. Still no calibration. Crapfuck. I had to go get help.

Fortunately, I went and found someone who wasn't on a cruise in pirate-infested waters, and they tried the same things I did. Nothing. So, they went to consult someone else. Finally, we called it a bust and I hopped on another machine. Not literally, as that might have crushed it. However, hopping on it probably would have netted the same result.

Apparently, over the break, the computer that runs the HPLC-inator had a fight with the pump on the HPLC-inator, and they weren't speaking. I dunno, they started bitching about little things and then the computer called the pump a whore and...well, things got ugly. After a little bit of fiddling, that problem was rectified...except the computer, in an uppity fit of bitchitude, decided it wasn't going to read my information for me, so it wouldn't run the program.

The obvious fix was what anyone does when dealing with an uppity computer: turn it off, turn it back on. Things finally seemed to work, so I reloaded all of my data into the sequence programs and got things running. This was an hour and forty-five minutes after I wanted to start, and I had a meeting looming over me at 2:00.

Yeah. Six hours into the new year and we're having a meeting. Right, sir, I'll send a memo.

So, after the meeting, it was 3:00, and I went down to check on my HPLC-inator runs, and I found that it had shut off. This was not unexpected. The initial run was to get a feel for the method I was running and to see if it would, in fact, purify my compounds for me. Finally, around 3:30, after having to reload all the data for the sequences into the computer and restarting the run, I was able to go sit down for a bit and cram some food into my piehole.

I worked on my notebook to make myself look busy for a little while and then wandered back out to my bench to see what was happening there (the answer better have been nothing, since I hadn't been able to set anything up, thanks to the bitchy nature of the computer and the spat it had with the pump).

Instead of nothing, I found a big-ass, flat, cardboard box. "What the bloody hell is this?"

"It's a box," said my labmate, Jennifer.

Because it's always a good idea just to go tearing into mysterious, unlabeled packages in a chemistry company, I dove right in. What I pulled out was...a calendar.

Apparently, I bought a chemical from this vendor in Germany, and they wanted to thank me for my purchase with a calendar. It's a nice calendar, pictures of flowers, all that good stuff. The days are even in the right order, and all the months are there. Top of the line stuff.

I found a letter enclosed with the calendar. It was in German.

"Can you read German?" I asked my labmate, Jennifer.

"Nyet," she responded. I cocked an eyebrow at her.

"You're very funny; you know that, right?"

She grinned.

Fortunately, if you flip the letter over, there's English on the other side. That's how I knew this was a "thank you" calendar. Also, I found a packing slip. It was, perhaps, my favorite thing in the box. It read: "Contents: 1 calendar".

Also, there was a letter verifying that the calendar did not contain any infectious agents. Nice. So, it's not an anthrax calendar or anything. Which is good, because "death by calendar" is probably a very ignoble way to go.

So, thanks, German vendor of chemicals. I'll hang that calendar up in my office...whenever I find a way to do it. All I need is a hook or a nail or someone with rock-hard nipples one of those magnet things.

Suck It, November

A couple of weeks ago, I was going through my new blog followers, checking out their blogs and updating the bloglist(s) in the side panels when I came across, almost by accident, a site called "NoMoSlackMo". I was intrigued, at first, but when I saw the tagline of "Suck it, November", I was in love. Er, as much love as one can be in with a website, I guess. No, no, I take that back; I was quite smitten.

As you may remember, I'm none too keen on the whole NaNoWriMo thing. I personally get nothing from it. Oh, sure, it's fun to hammer out words for thirty days straight, but after a while I felt as if, as a writer, I should be doing this more than just thirty days at the end of the year. I mean, if I want to be a serious, professional writer, I need to commit to it, right?

And, I had. I was about 19,000 words up on my current work in progress (WIP) when I sort of...slacked. Purposefully. You'll notice that the writing updates withered during late November and on into December. The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is stressful enough, to be honest, without worrying over how much of my masterpiece novel I've gotten finished. So, I kind of quit and tried to focus on doing other things, like playing Lego Star Wars cleaning the house and preparing for a visit from Jolly Old St. Nicholas.

The holidays are, once again, sadly, behind us. New year resolutions are, once again, sadly, upon us. And so, too, is NoMoSlackMo. For the uninitiated, NoMoSlackMo stands for "No More Slacking Month", and is sort of the bastard child of NaNoWriMo, but without all the stigma that goes along with that. And, the rules are pretty simple. As per the authors:

• Writing takes place from January 1, 2010 to January 31, 2010
• Goal is to reach 50,000 words by midnight on January 31, 2010
• You don't have to start from scratch. The point is to finish what you slacked off on in November.
• You can start from scratch if ya want.

Obviously, I didn't start from scratch. However, I was 19032 words into my current work. I thought, "I could cheat and just start out 20,000 strong, so that I only have to write 30,000 words and be 'a winner'!" But then I thought "Hmmm...I want my book to be somewhere around 100,000 words, so if I were to follow through and write 50,000 words plus what I already have, I'd be almost done with my book."

And, so, that's what I've done. Which is kind of a bitch to keep track of, since my starting word count wasn't nice and round or anything like that. Alas, I have to do...math...and shit...now that I'm doing this. Fortunately, Windows comes with a built-in calculator! How convenient?

Anyway, I finally got to the point where I introduced the king. And, he's supposed to be a slimy bastard lusting for the main character's mother. I thought, "Who embodies this better than anyone else?" And then after I stopped looking in the mirror, I thought, "Who in pop culture embodies this better than anyone else?" The answer: Lando Calrissian. That's right. The king (er, one of them) in my neat little myth story is roughly modeled off Lando. Except, he's Greek, not black, he's a king, and not an administrator of a mining facility, and he tricks everyone into giving him horses, not tibanna gas. Although, I do think they both rock the cape look pretty well.

I have, officially, finished five chapters in the book and I've started number six, but I need to re-read some Greek funerary rites before continuing too much further. Plus, I need to figure out how "youthful" I want my "youth" in the story to be. I'm thinking sixteen should be about right--he'd be hotheaded and impetuous, which is what the character calls for. However, I've vowed to myself that my hotheaded and impetuous character isn't going to be a whiny bitch like Harry Potter; he's actually going to listen when someone imparts some wisdom or knowledge or guidance upon him, rather than just get mad and strip naked on a stage with a horse. Wait...I think I'm mixing Daniel Radcliffe vehicles there...

Anyway, here's the progress to date. I've got 66 pages, and if that's 1/5 of the way done (estimated), then I should end up with about 330 manuscript pages. Not bad, I think. Short enough to get some interest, I'd hope, but long enough to qualify as "novel" status.

The top word bar is my NoMoSlackMo status. The second is the overall word count (sorry, ladies, but the word counter and the button you provided on your blog are a little too...pink...and that would clash with the layout colors of my blog. Yeah...yeah...that's a good explanation...we'll go with that. *shifty-eyed*)

2433 / 50000 words. 5% done!

21465 / 100000 words. 21% done!