04 April 2008

Ridiculous

It feels ridiculous to be writing this post, since the previous one was about how hard-working I am once every few months. Today, however, I have surpassed myself... in procrastination. How is it that it's taken me seven hours to skim ten pages of a book? My notes on those ten pages are an impressive four lines. I'm putting off doing laundry until tomorrow (I have one shirt left, why not?) and I haven't really done anything much. (I did, as you can see, play around with a new blog template!) However, I have three full days to work on the 500-word paper, and I'm confident that I'll get around to it in time!

Stuff has happened though. All of Monday and most of Tuesday, there was a team of electricians in the house making things better. The shower part of my bathroom now has its own light, I have new light fixtures, and a couple new outlets. The rest of the house also got new outlets and updated fixtures and such. I even have a modern looking fuse box, instead of the crazy one I had before. It's nice. But Monday and Tuesday evenings I did repeat Spring cleaning to get rid of the dust.

Wednesday, I regretted not having my camera with me. This is the second time I've seen an ancient nun riding by on an old motorbike. The bottom of her veil waving in the wind, held on by the enormous helmet. WHY didn't I have my camera either time??

Thursday I learned something strange in translation class. The English pronounce "Parisian" like this: puh-riz-ee-an. As an American, I find that odd. My pronunciation follows phonetic rules. Theirs is a bit odd. However, England usually pronounced place names and related words a bit weirdly (kuh-SO-vo?? It's KOH-so-vo!) so I'll just continue being bemused.

And today, noticing that I have about 95% of a bottle of oil, which I'll never need to use all of before I leave, I decided to try frying something. I had a zucchini, so it won the "what should I fry?" contest. Now, about that time, my internet connection was lost, so I couldn't look up recipes. I once saw Paula Dean fry stuff though, so I had a slight idea of how to go about it. I sliced the zucchini into thick slices (to minimize the fried:healthy ratio), let it sweat for a while, dredged it in flour (I love that verb!), dipped it in egg yolk and lime juice (for fun), then dipped that in a mixture of flour and spices. Then I put it into the hot oil, flipped the slices after a minute or so, and cooked the other side. Drained for a minute on paper towels... and it was DELICIOUS! Of course, I'll probably never do it again, since it's fried. I wouldn't be surprised if this was both the first and last time I fry anything. But they were good.

And the final thing I should mention is that France's weather is surprisingly predictable. February was rainy and cold. Literally on the first day of March, it turned rainy and mild. On April first, the sun came out and it's been beautiful ever since. I'm told that May is even nicer, so I'm expecting another abrupt chance on the first of May. We'll see!

Happy April, everyone!

(And if you're looking for something to do, check out my other blog.)

4 comments:

Jakob said...

Yay, a tiny picture of me made it onto your title image. I feel special.

Kel said...

:)

I just took little screen captures of thumbnails of my favorite pictures from my photo library. (That's a lot of prepositional phrases!)

Something made me think of you today, and I thought, "I should e-mail Jakob and tell him ___," but now I can't remember.

Lori said...

I like your new header! I'm a nerd for computer graphics, so when you said on facebook that you'd done it I came to check and I was like... ooh, purty!

Anonymous said...

Whoa. Changes. I don't do well with those. Congrats on the frying. I've always been way too afraid to try, but never say never! Carry your camera everywhere! Duh! [/exclamation points]