Italian scorpions doing finances in the dark refrigerator

Italian

 This week at work I had to check sources for an article, which is pretty typical. But these sources were all in Italian. It was interesting working in Italian. I've never learned it, but since I took four years of high school Spanish and advanced college French, I understand the gist of Italian and was able to navigate around the websites. (Chrome's translate feature was helpful too.) It actually taught me a little about French. For example, where we would write USA, Italian only capitalizes the first letter, Usa. And then I learned that French is the same way (Nasa vs. NASA). Also, it helped me understand languages better. For example, I never understood the relationship between Spanish dîa and French jour. But in Italian it's giorno or giorni (I don't understand Italian inflections), and I can see how both the Spanish and the French are related.

Scorpions

One of my classes this semester requires watching long, boring videos of conferences about books and publishing. These might be interesting (just might) in person, but watching them on YouTube or C-Span is awful. I would fall asleep. So instead of falling asleep, I turn the videos on in the background, and I look at pictures of ugly animals. I find it fascinating to look at pictures of creepy animals--spider faces are some of my favorites. After looking at those pictures one night, I had a dream that a bunch of bugs had come home with my family after a vacation. There was a three-inch ant-like bug in my bedroom, and I watched a scorpion or two crawl into my closet. I wondered if looking at all those pictures would give me nightmares, but I wouldn't really consider it a nightmare. Also in that dream we were discussing a terrible person, and I said that we should put handcuffs on him, then put a chain on the handcuffs, then attach the chain to a train, then have the train take off.

Doing finances

Today I had a financial audit. I didn't worry much about it, because I thought I knew what was going on after the last one in the summer. But I should have been more careful, because there was a lot of missing stuff. Oh well. We also had to distribute people's 2013 official tax statements. That was a hassle. I was at church for about ten hours today. But tithing settlement stuff is all over, and since it is unlikely I'll be in my ward next year, I'm done with them forever. Until my next ward calls me as a clerk.

In the dark

I came home Thursday afternoon and discovered that our power was out. At first I was a little excited, because it's been a long time since I've had a good power outage. But I started wondering why it was out. I remembered that when I was walking home, some J-Dawgs employees were out throwing a football, and I didn't see their OPEN sign on, so I wondered if maybe our couple of blocks were out. But then it got dark, and ours was the only dark apartment. Apparently what had happened was that we just got new management, and the new management was supposed to email my roommate Jordan with how to take care of the utilities, but they never sent the email, so our power got cut off. It was too late at night to get it fixed. So we went a night without power. I did my scorpion-looking in the apartment where I lived in 2011 (my roommate from that apartment, who is now my home teacher, invited me to work in there). When I was in my apartment, I got around with a very bright flashlight that doubles as a lantern, which I bought for Geology 210. It made enormous shadows.

Then I wore my warmest pajamas, so I wasn't too cold in the morning. Our power came back on Friday evening about 5:30. I was relieved, because I didn't want to go a weekend without power. Power outages are exciting when they're caused from August thunderstorms or December snowstorms, but not when they're caused from dumb management practices. #firstworldproblems

Refrigerator

Our fridge has been smelling pretty bad, so after our power came back on on Friday, I cleaned out our fridge, something I hadn't done since November. (I can't remember whether it was November 8 or 15.) I like all my roommates, but this is the messiest group I've ever had (and I told them that). I'm not sure what liquid was in the bottom of the fridge, but my best guess is that it used to be milk.

Our fridge smells a lot better now. I listened to my shuffle playlist while I cleaned, and when the song "Somebody Groovy" came on, Jordan said, "Is this Jan Terri?" I said, "No, it's the Mamas and the Papas. How dare you insult them like that!" Jan Terri is a household name in my apartment, especially since her autographed glamor shot is framed and sitting in our living room.