thoughts of the week

In all honesty, this week hasn't brought too many thoughts besides the following: "UNNNNNNNGGGGHGHH AARRRRRRGGGGHHHH PANIC" and "I'm tired. enh. Why am I so tired. . . ? The fact that I am tired worries me."

But. . .

But this weekend. . . yesterday and today I wore a skirt or shorts; it was 70 degrees Fahrenheit and pretty damn gorgeous. Life seems better, even though nothing has changed. (I also took an 8.8 mile walk yesterday, which was the turning point between "I feel miserable" to "gee, I feel pretty good.") I have already walked four or five miles today, and I am planning on going out again.

Now I smell like sweat. This should be horrible. I should be embarrassed. But I realized that I smell different in warm weather than in cold weather, and I have not smelled like warm-weather sweat for seven months. It is novel, in fact. [EDIT: I forgot this is what I smell like when I burn, even slightly. Ain't life bizarre?]

[Edit #2: Walked a total of 24 miles this weekend. Boo-yah me. The longest portion walked consecutively of that -- 9.3 miles -- is pictured above. . . man I love Boston.]

Thanks to my blog binge on swissmiss this weekend, I found a number of things to think about, which perhaps will follow in a different blog post.

But from the week, sort of:

A story by Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian author, which we had to read in Spanish. I didn't get it. I read it in Spanish, looking up at all the words as I went, and didn't get it; I read it again in English, and I didn't get it. The thing to do, obviously, was buy a book of his short stories, which is now on my desk.

100 most used verbs in Spanish. Ugh why don't I have any kind of vocabulary? (Test last week. :P)

INFLATEABLE CONCRETE STRUCTURES. Holy crap this is cool.

There are all kinds of land augmentation, and all kinds of reasons for "new land" to come into existence -- this article discusses artificial islands in great detail, for instance, but anyone (well, anyone who is a civil engineer, architect, or student thereof) who lives in Boston knows that there are other kinds of artificial land -- see the picture at right, from this site for all the land that has been added to Boston since 1630.

Another architecture blog. Some thought to balance all the candy.

These ideas for Japanese keyboards are apparently an April Fool's Joke, but I find them fascinating. I've never seen anyone typing super quickly in Japanese. It will be interesting to see what changes are wrought in the language by technology. . .

A fabric museum thingy?

This article, about why women in healthier countries prefer feminine-looking men to masculine-looking men, FREAKS ME THE HELL OUT. I hate discovering MORE things that make my personal choices seem outside my personal control. . .

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As for me, here is the final poster for Gondoliers, with some tweaking (and text) from last time. I'm fairly happy with it, although I wish the text didn't vanish into this background so readily.

I will hopefully discuss swissmiss, nematodes, and CPW in another blog post soon. . .