Monday, March 23, 2009

The first weekend home

Mmm, I've had some good beer and food since I got back. I got to the house around 5ish, and headed with my folks to the Friendly Tavern in "downtown" Zionsville. I got a good prime rib with sauteed cabbage and some friend mushrooms. The cabbage wasn't so great, I was expecting saurkraut, but oh well. I also had a great Blue Moon wheat ale and a Sierra Nevada pale ale. The pale ale wasn't so great, it was a little too bitter for my taste. I had another bottle later that night when I met some high school friends and it was really different. Go figure.

Having home cooking was great, Mom's mexican soup was great, and last night Dad cooked up a turkey breast. I'm working my way through my list of must-eat foods. Tonight I'm going to have a Qdoba burrito with friends Sam and Jessi while we watch the Battlestar Galactica finale.

Speaking of which, I'm gonna be late if I don't go now. More on the weekend later.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Travel time sucks

I'm packing things right now and wondering what exactly is wrong with me. I've hardly got anything in my suitcase. The largest thing is a giant backpack I'll presumably use as a second piece of luggage if I end up buying large amounts of clothing and booze to bring back.

I know I'm missing something, but what? Planning on buying new clothes in Indy, so I've hardly packed anything. I've got some old ratty things at home to tide me over.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Upholding the curtains

I'm taking a break from one of my quizzes (hooray for untimed, open-book quizzes!) and browsing through the class forums. We've been discussing morphology, and how some words don't really relate to their meanings once you remove their affixes. One person brought up some words like 'downhearted'. Our text says there's no other relation to 'hearted' (even Firefox spellchecker agrees), but this student came up with 'kindhearted'. I was thinking about 'hearten', as in gaining courage or morale from something.

Another one was 'upholster'. The etymology is quite fun, according to Dictionary.com, it came from a 19th century Americanism 'upholsterer', the profession name. And that came from a 17th century term where a person was employed to install furnishings, or to literally 'up-hold' the curtains.

Sunday, March 08, 2009

Transporting goods

I made a list earlier of all the things I want to get for myself when I'm home:

couscous
lentils
creme eggs
reese's pb cups
shirts
shoes (oh, Born, how I love your shoes!)
jacket (actually, never got my secret santa present, which a little birdie informs me is of this ilk)
Settlers of Catan
SD flash card

The couscous and lentils are dependent on price. I'm pretty sure lentils are dirt cheap in the US. I might buy a bunch and ship them freight or something to save weight on the airline. Of course I'm going to add a few bottles of wine. Anything I'm missing?

Even better is the list of things people want me to bring back for them. We have Twix, Combos, Frito Lay guacamole dip, and several dozen cadbury eggs. I might just reserve one suitcase for those.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Coming home

Well, I've been bad about blogging here. Too much with life and new classes and work.

But, the big news: I'm heading home from March 20th to April 5th. So anybody with free time that wants to hang out, let me know.