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magistra17
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Interests: Grammar--I get a huge kick out of analyzing parts of speech, identifying interesting uses, structuring sentences carefully (not that you'll be able to tell here...). I am also obsessed with etymology; maybe it's part of being a classicist, but there was a definite point at which I started hearing words and thinking less about the sentence they belonged to and more about their roots and root meanings.
Interests also include music, reading (when I have the time, which is hardly ever), hanging out... which brings me to my biggest interest of all: relationships and the people with whom I am involved in them.
Expertise: Eating neatly. I am more than a little anal about maintaining straight parallel/perpendicular lines when I eat, and I am just as anal about leaving little crumbs or pieces behind on the plate or table. I may look like a chipmunk when feeding, but it can never be said that I don't clean my plate.
I am also excellent at demonstrating the use of the indirect statement in such example sentences as "Your mom thinks that the donkey will fight Caesar." (My class came up with the sentence... my COLLEGE class...) I know next to nothing about Roman history, but I know quite a lot about the mythology and grammar.
Also very good at using 50 words to say what could have been said in 10.
Occupation: Latin, Greek, music and chemis
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
2/26/2005
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| Summer break is finally here. You can tell because I'm posting something for the first time in ages. This is because I feel like I've done something out of the ordinary routine for the first time in ages. I love it. :)
Tuesday through Thursday of last week, I was up at the cottage with my mom, my sister, my niece, and my nephew. We had a great time, and the weather was beautiful (albeit slightly chilly). My mom and my sister were working on proofreading the Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, which my sister spent all of her sabbatical last year compiling and for which she is the assistant editor, I was reading Arabian Nights and laughing out loud at Sir Richard Burton's footnotes, and David and Audrey were down in the water as soon as the temperature rose above 60 degrees and we let them out of the cottage.
Friday, Steve and I left for Minnesota. Emily graduated from high school this year, so we went out for her open house. While we were there, we also got to watch Erik and his varsity trap team place first in the state meet, Steve got to go shooting with his brother and his dad a couple of times, we went bowling, I lost to a ten-year-old in pool (as usual, we went one and one), and we mingled at the open house. This also reminded me of where my husband's eating habits come from; his family eats at most one organized meal a day, and the rest of the day the kids forage for themselves. Consequently, I had Cheetos for breakfast on Saturday, half a bag of cheddar cheese Combos for breakfast on Sunday, and Sour Patch Kids and M&Ms for breakfast on Monday. I--even I who normally hate all things vegetable--was craving fruits and vegetables like crazy by Sunday. Consequently, I made a fantastic beef stir-fry for dinner tonight with carrots, asparagus, green beans, sugar peas, onions, and broccoli with a side of strawberry/banana/blueberry salad.
Yesterday was our fourth anniversary. Since we were going to be driving home from Minnesota, we decided to drive through the UP and take two days as an anniversary celebration. Tuesday we drove up through Duluth, where we stopped for lunch at one of Steve's favorite restaurants and watched the lift bridge go up as a boat came under, and then drove across to Munising, where we stayed overnight. We were delighted to see our old friend Das Gift Haus had a store in Munising since we were so enthralled by the whole name and ambience of the one in Sault St. Marie on our honeymoon. Yesterday morning we drove to Miners Falls, which was lovely and would have been a delightful hike full of beautiful trees, quaint wild flowers, and a picturesque waterfall had it not been for a cloud of mosquitos so thick we couldn't stop without our vision being darkened by their crowded little blood-sucking bodies. So we stopped long enough to take a couple of pictures and virtually ran back to the car, whence we drove down to Miners Castle. That actually was an enjoyable spot, because it was comparatively bugless and it was a beautiful day. Still, we opted not to try any of the other woodland hikes in the Pictured Rocks area and set off for home. We did, however, have to stop near the hideous red, white, and blue patriotic moose in front of the Quality Inn of St. Ignace for old time's sake. There's an almost equally ugly gold-painted moose statue headbutting the door now too. Sadly, Steve refused to pose for a picture with his hand on its butt to match the one from our honeymoon:
I am also now regretting that we didn't stop for fudge in Mackinaw City, but my pants are probably thanking me for not putting any additional strain on them.
School officially voted on Monday night to keep NHCA a K-12 school, which is wonderful, but now they have another tough fundraising year ahead of them. They're still trying to make up missed paychecks from April and May. Keeping the whole school open also means I have another busy year coming up: 5 music classes, at least two Latin classes, at least one Greek class, a math class of a level yet to be determined, and aesthetics (by myself this time, which means I also need to teach the art history/appreciation side of things). The school also wants to use our grammar school music productions as publicity events, so I have to pick some good ones. Apparently the Christmas program and the spring 1st/2nd grade opera + 3rd-6th grade whatever-I-pick concert will be going "on the road" in a manner of speaking. I have absolutely no idea what to do with the 3rd-6th graders this year; I'm open to any suggestions for very inexpensive ways to apply the music theory I try to teach them (my two previous ideas have been recorders and handbells). I need to plan. Massively. (Yuck.)
But in more exciting news, I made my first ever loaf of homemade sandwich bread today. I think it turned out okay, though I'll have to wait until it's cooler to find out for sure. I had already decided this would be the summer in which I learned to make bread, so it was nice to get started. Next up: oatmeal bread. Though it has to wait until this bread has been used up, and there's a recipe for chiffon cake with almond cream filling and fresh berries that I've been salivating over for a couple of weeks now...
Also, I ate peas. Voluntarily. This is big.
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| I am completely picture-dysfunctional. I understand that pictures are more easily translated than words in our current global economy, and I understand that there are plenty of visual people who are much better able to follow instructions in pictures than verbal instructions. However, I am no longer able to "read" instructions.
Example A:
We bought a stool from IKEA for me as a new violin/viola chair. I love it. It consists of a seat, two A-shaped legs, and two crossbars. It took me over an hour to put it together, and I gave up when I couldn't get the last screw in. Steve came home, laughed at me, and took the entire thing apart. He put it together in about five minutes and told me that my problem was that I had managed to configure every possible part backwards that could have gone backwards.
Example B:
My Volkswagen has a little sliding switch for the dome light. The switch has pictures of a lightbulb and of a car with a door open. The switch slides to cover one picture or the other. I cannot figure out/remember/understand whether I should slide the switch to cover the picture I want (which is my natural inclination) or whether I should slide the switch so that I can see the picture of what I want (which seems backwards to me, but is actually the way I think it works). I can only determine which is correct by trying it out and opening and closing the door a few times.
Example C:
Steve got me a Garmin GPS unit for my car a couple months ago. It's very nice and helpful for finding places I've never been. However, the map rotates so that it always shows me driving forward. I understand why; I am, of course, driving forward the vast majority of the time I'm in the car. Still, when I see the map move, I have to rearrange it in my head to put north at the top because I think in static pictures. Mostly because I don't picture the earth moving around me, but me moving around the earth. I know the setting can be changed to keep north at the top, and I'm seriously considering it. But I wonder how other people can not be bothered by this. It took me a long time to get used to reading maps in terms of "turn left/right" in the first place; this just makes it harder.
Clearly, my brain works in words. I just miss the days when other people's brains did too. I felt like less of an idiot.
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| It's Christmas Pops weekend--I played the first concert tonight, and I have one at 3 pm tomorrow and another at 8 pm tomorrow. We're joined by some Broadway guy from the area who's not bad (even though he dresses like a thug off the street and I would have been afraid to meet him in a dark alley before rehearsal), the bi-annual guest conductor, and the North Muskegon High School choir. Their director is one of those frighteningly thin people who looks like she's going to break any second, and tilts slightly to one side as though the cracking has already begun. However, given when I know of her husband (who's wonderful) and given that she's made the choir program at the school grow from 6 girls to 150 students, I suspect she's nice and isn't really trying to starve to death. Some people just have that misfortune. She remarkably looks like an emaciated version of my old roommate Christena, actually. And the choir's not bad; definitely a high school choir, and the tenors are always a little flat, but not bad. As for the repertoire, the highlights include playing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God/Angels We Have Heard On High/Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" medley in an Irish fiddling style (arranged from an Amy Grant album by our guest conductor) that doesn't actually include "Angels We Have Heard On High" and consequently has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas, playing the Mannheim Steamroller version of "Stille Nacht" in which the orchestra sings the first verse (without words), and NOT playing "Little Bolero Boy", which was the worst Christmas piece in the universe because it combined two of my least favorite pieces of music in the entire world. Also a highlight: "The Twelve Days of Christmas" arrangement that has silly music jokes like the theme from Swan Lake in the background of the "seven swans a swimming", an excerpt from the Nutcracker for the "nine ladies dancing," and the French national anthem following the "three French hens".
One of my favorite moments from this week at school came out of a third grade discussion of whether or not we should still listen to Wagner's music despite the absolute cretin of a human being he was (I promise, this actually was related to the discussion):
Student: "If I were Attila the Hun, I would write two pieces of music. I would call one 'Victory and Loss,' and the other 'Death to the Enemy!'"
I also had a student (9th grader) ask if he could copyright a sigh.
I also had a fifteen year old student admit that she jumped out of a two-story window to see if it would hurt... last summer. (Apparently her friend was standing below and promised to catch her. Unsurprisingly, she failed to do so.) She also confessed to playing ding-dong-ditch at 2 am last summer with neighbors who answered the door with a bow and arrow and threatened to shoot her if they could find her. She had several other examples from the past year like these and couldn't believe that none of the rest of the class had had any similar recent adventures.
My fifth and sixth grade Latin students composed a brief story as part of their test review this week in which I was the main character. I was walking to Switzerland, a spear in one hand and a shield in the other, until another student held me back and I threw my spear at him and killed him. I spent the rest of my days defending my evil deed. (They tell me it's not a reflection of how they really feel about me...)
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| Here is my voting experience today:
At 6:50, Steve says to me, "Maybe we should just go now and get it over with. I mean, the polling place is pretty much across the street." I agree, and we make the 30-second walk over there. The polls open at 7:00. At 7:40, I am not even close to voting. I give up and leave, arriving late for school. Steve stays, and finishes voting around 8:40.
At 3:20, I leave school early so that I can vote before I have to go to Alumni Orchestra rehearsal. I arrive at the polling place at 3:45. I walk straight through, vote in a nearly empty room, and am walking back out the doors with my "I voted!" sticker proudly displayed by 3:55.
I am fascinated by the lulls and swells in these sorts of things. Clearly, if you're allowed to take time off from work to vote, you should do it in the mid-afternoon. Too many crazy people are up and in line by 6:30 in the morning.
In other news, The Choral Scholars last night were delighted to find that the pronunciation of one line in one of our Christmas songs (in a language from Ghana) comes out sounding like a Swedish man saying, "Nutty caca, eh?" (We're so unbelievably juvenile sometimes...)
And woah. Kind of freaky.
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| This is my new favorite etymology:
addle:
by 1712, from addle (n.) "urine, liquid filth," from Old English adela
"mud, mire, liquid manure" (cognate with Old Swedish adel "urine," Middle Low German adel, Dutch aal "puddle"). Used in noun phrase
addle egg (c.1250) "egg that does not hatch, rotten egg," literally
"urine egg," a loan translation of Latin ovum urinum, which is itself
an erroneous loan translation of Greek ourion oon "putrid egg,"
literally "wind egg," from ourios "of the wind" (confused by Roman
writers with ourios "of urine," from ouron "urine"). Because of this
usage, the noun in English was taken as an adjective from c. 1600,
meaning "putrid," and thence given a figurative extension to "empty,
vain, idle," also "confused, muddled, unsound" (1706). The verb
followed.
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