In the course of procrastinating...

... I learned some interesting things!
What you must understand is that writing a 7-8 page dossier (that's 7-8 pages single-spaced, by the by) in French on a scientific topic (linguistics) is rather draining intellectually. I spent much of Saturday brainstorming, and Sunday and Monday writing. Today is editing as well as starting to study for the comparative linguistics exam on Thursday.
In order to retain my sanity, I've been alternating writing a section of the paper with fun things, which gives me time to reboot and to think a bit more about what comes next. As a result, I've now watched the whole first season of Lois and Clark, beaten 100,000 in Tetris, and learned a lot on Wikipedia.
One of those things is about a writer named Antoine Rivarol, whom I hadn't heard of. I figured I should learn a little about him, since I quote him in my paper (I got the quote from one of those "Dictionary of Quotations" type books, where you find useful quotes topically).
He was a pretty interesting guy: he pretended his name was Count Antoine de Rivarol, and that he was of the Italian nobility. Maybe this helped him sell his Dante translations? He wrote a variety of essays (incidentally, I had to retype the word "variety" because my fingers first automatically typed "variété") and things I'd never heard of, my favorite of which was titled Petit dictionnaire des grands hommes de la révolution, par un citoyen actif, ci-devant rien, which basically means "Little dictionary of the great Revolutionary men, written by an active citizen WHO HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT." As in, "They revolted, not me. I'll tell you about them, but don't hurt me." Plus, he had an awesome hairdo!

...I also did something really stupid.
I had some leftover ground beef, which was going to turn into hamburgers for lunch Monday, just like I had on Sunday. Brilliant. So I pulled out my ingredients, turned on the stove, found the pan (which I had not washed yet), heated it, and made my two dinner-roll-sized burgers. Squirted ketchup on the said dinner-rolls, ate a burger. Then I remembered that I had a still-hot pan on the stove that would be hard to clean if I didn't do anything about it. So I filled it with a quarter inch of water, then squirted in a generous amount of dishwashing liquid. At which point I remembered that... wait a second, I'd done the same thing yesterday! Which means that, since the pan hadn't been washed, it still had plenty of soap in it when I cooked lunch.
Seeing as the other burger no longer seemed very appetizing, I had a yoghurt.

My next post will probably be after my first exam, when I crash into a pile of discarded brain matter and nonexistent thoughts and sleep for two days before I am again capable of using two-syllable words, and I have to start studying for my anthropology exam.