Adriane's Web Page

Intro
What's New
Journal
Pictures
Links
NCSSM
Feedback

Chores

9 November 2001

I'm going to Köln (Cologne) tomorrow. We're not leaving quite so early, but I'm setting both my alarm and my palm. I think my friends will call me, too. I'm not missing it this time. :)

I had to straighten out more crap with the telephone people today. My German's not good enough to have a successful conversation over the phone with phone company people, so I always go to their office and stand in line to talk to a real person to show him or her all the letters I've gotten, where they've charged me twice for stuff or sent warnings that I haven't paid the previous girl's bills. I seem to generate lots of "That's really strange! I've never seen that before!"-type responses from the telephone people who see how they're charging me through two accounts even though there's only one of me and one phone number, and how they sent me the previous girl's bills in a hand-addressed envelope and then sent me a warning because I hadn't paid her bills. Sigh. But when I go there in person, the person there gets to call the main office in Karlsruhe or wherever and do the explaining. I just struggle to put together a sentence or two while pointing at the bills and warnings spread out all over the desk.

Then I went and bought clothes and groceries. Both felt like chores, and I'd rather buy groceries than clothes, but I needed a few more shirts and sweaters. I like really plain clothes but clothes go through such horrible color and design phases every year that it's hard to find stuff that I like. I read a book once where the main character wore jeans and dark blue turtleneck every day, switching to thicker turtlenecks in the winter. I always thought it was a good plan.

My schedule seems to have solidified. I think it's a little too much, but I want to take a few more hours than I have to, so that I'll still enough hours if one of them gets too difficult. For those of you who are interested, I'm taking:

  • Sociolinguistics: Variations in German
  • Introduction to German Grammar (on a linguistics level)
  • Language Acquisition
  • Parsing (sentence parsing)
  • Introduction to Computational Linguistics
  • Mildly Context-Sensitive Languages
  • Polish
All the classes are two hours a week except for Introduction to Computational Linguistics and Polish, which are each four hours a week. With an extra recitation type meeting, the Intro to Comp. Ling. class meets six hours a week.

A dumb ad I just saw online said "Your desktop is boring. Click to download photos..." I like my boring desktop, thankyouverylittle. I like plain backgrounds, legible fonts, and traditional mouse pointers. And I don't want my computer to ching and whistle at me when I minimize or raise windows. Call me old-fashioned...

previous index next

Adriane's Web Page ©1999-2002
This page was last modified 4 September 2010