Peril!

Blast from the Past!  This is an entry I guess I started but never posted about a million years ago.  I found it when I was paging through my Edit Posts menu, thinking about adding tags to my earlier posts.  I thought it was kind of funny, and I continue to hate the wind.  It makes me immediately grumpy to walk out into it.  Enjoy!

This morning, underinformed about the high winds outside, I made the tragic decision to wear a wrap dress, which resulted in my stepping outside and avoiding flashing the neighborhood only through lightening-fast skirt-clutching reflexes, honed by years of living in Boulder CO, where winds can reach hurricane force. Because I didn't have time to change, I am now damned to a whole day of blown-skirt peril, including biking to school one-handed while other hand holds skirt in place, miraculously holding onto bike and skirt and manipulating bike lock simultaneously, and traversing the 5th-story bridge that connects the building with my office to the one with the lab where I work. Freaking wind.

We're Shooting for 35% Next Year

Seeing as how the exchange rate has been working more and more in my favor, my living situation has become approximately 25% cheaper (utilities and entertaining flatmates included in the rent!), and I have a marvelous brother-in-law who was pleased to harass the airline on my behalf, I am officially staying an extra month overseas, for a total of 10 months.  This is great news for my dissertation, which will presumably be 11% more awesome as a result, but I realized on the phone with my mom (who requested a chart) that it means the following for me and my husband's first year of marriage:

Here's hoping the volcanoes pipe down, because if I'm delayed we may fall below the 20% mark.

So, yeah.  How's married life?  We wouldn't know.  The main difference for me is that sometimes I check the "Mrs." box when I'm asked for my salutation on forms.  The main difference for my husband is that he has to handle all my US obligations, including filing our first married tax returns with vague assistance from me ("That information may be in the pile near my desk.") and fun with motor vehicles.

Thank God for Skype and webcams, or I might not recognize the guy when he turns up to collect me at the airport in July.

Christianity: You're Doing it Wrong

"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians.  It's no different.  It is the same thing.  It is happening all over again.  It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians.  Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today.  More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."

I'm sorry, what was that you said?  I couldn't hear you; I was busy smashing up Christian-owned businesses and burning churches.

Pat Robertson: Feel free to read up on Nazi Germany, slavery, pogroms, colonialism, reservations, segregation, crusades, tenant-farm clearances, and hate crimes.  And STFU.

While you work on that, I'll be over here, thinking about Pat Benatar in an effort to avoid flying into a knee-jerk berzerker rage upon hearing the word "Pat."