theyellowhobbit

It turns out you can actually catch flies with vinegar. We have lots of fresh produce in the house, and thus have fruit flies. adlight made some traps. The way you do this is:

Take a plastic bottle and cut off the top
Fill the bottle about halfway with apple cider vinegar
Use hard paper (like card stock) to make a funnel with a very small hole at the bottom
Tape this funnel into the bottle, such that the funnel is the only entrance in, there's a bit of space between the funnel and the vinegar, and the hole is as small as it can possibly be that would still allow the flies in.

Set it near the fruit, or whatever they seem to be flying around. Then watch them drown. Or forget the trap exists and pretend that there are no fruit flies interrupting your peaceful meal.

Yeah. So the old adage "you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar" may not necessarily be true, but really we need to make a trap with honey to test this empirically. Though that would be a waste of good honey.

...is that I get to drink lots of tea with honey. Though I suppose I can do that without being sick. Still, I don't go through nearly as much tea when I'm healthy as I do when I'm sick.

Which means I am going to go through a ridiculous amount of honey. This is the entry on the subject from last year. So far in the past few days I finished off a 32oz container (though there wasn't that much left and it had crystallized) an 8oz container (again, this was just the end of it, maybe 1.5oz) and am working my way through another 8oz container. I think I might just bring some tea bags and honey and a mug to work tomorrow. (There's tea there, but it's just the cheap Lipton black tea. And as far as I know there's no honey.)

I'll try to keep track of how much I go through. It should at least be amusing.

After having Friday night dinner at MT’s, we headed over to the HRSFA house for more partying. I played another game of Basari which I didn’t win this time, as well as a game of Jungle Speed. And then there was Botticelli, which is really hard when the person running it chooses a name that starts with a vowel. And both rounds were this way. Vowels are evil!

It also probably didn’t help that it was 3am…

At around 3:30ish we headed back, and I went to bed around 4. I was hoping my body could do the thing where it wakes me up early without an alarm, since I wanted to eat lunch and then go to the LARP. And lo and behold, I woke up at 9!

( spoilers )

After the LARP there was more hanging out, and at around 7 I went back to MT's so I could have real food for dinner. After Shabbat ended we went back to the HRSFA house, and there was 1000 Blank White Cards, the game where you make a bunch of cards each with instructions of how to play the card on the back, and relevant artwork and the title of the card on the front,, and then you play them as written, no matter how broken the game might become. We ran out of white cards before Shabbat started, though I did take one so I could write it after Shabbat). We later made some colored cards, but those didn’t really end up being played because by the time we got through the blank white cards, it was really late.

My one blank white card was “No Cartwheels in the Con Suite.” The text on the back said “Do a cartwheel. No seriously, I dare you. If caught by the co con chair lose 20 points.

My colored cards included the D1 (Use A: Roll the D1. If you roll anything but a blank gain 1000 points. Use B: When you need to roll for damage, substitute the D1 for whatever die you should have rolled, and take no damage.) The Futuristic Space Bathroom (…with super powers of lazers. Beyond the obvious, it also makes a great place to hide), the Tapestry (You’ve finished a tapestry. Gain 20 awesome points) and Arrow’d (I forget how much damage this does, but you can roll the D1 instead).

The game was insane. There’s no other way to describe it.

Afterwards, MT and I headed back, I packed, took a shower, and got approximately 2 hours of sleep. Then I woke up and got dressed and finished packing my stuff, and we left the house at 6 so I could make my 6:30 AM train.

Much like the last time I took a train home from Maryland, the train in front of us today was malfunctioning, so we had to stop a while and get all the passengers from that train. Again, the train is completely full. But fortunately this time it’s only pushing us back 40 minutes instead of 2 hours, and also this time I have food with me. And I slept for the first half of the train ride. So right now I am not dying of starvation.

When I get home, I’ll probably spend the rest of the day doing Greek homework and studying for my quiz tomorrow. Though I’m sad I left the HRSFA party early, this was probably the right decision, since I actually want to do well on the quiz.

¹I thought that the True Love mechanism was like that of a thekinginyellow LARP, where a certain character was specifically designated as my True Love, and I needed to find him, should he exist…

stolen from spacehawk

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Whee! It's kinda true. When I bring my umbrella somewhere, it usually stops raining.

Soylent Green Tea!

Well, I'm transporting it to College Park, in any case. But how awesome is that?

I started Greek class last night. There are 4 books we need (2 workbooks, a New Testament in Greek, and a dictionary, though the latter 2 are optional) and so I decided to order them online since it would be cheaper, except for the workbook which we needed right away. It's A Primer of Biblical Greek by N. Claton Croy, henceforth referred to as "Croy."

So I went to the Coop to buy a copy of Croy, but they were all out. They said they could order it, but if I was going to order it, better to do it from the internet, where I can find it for cheaper. There's also a foreign bookstore on Mt. Auburn Street which I stopped into, thinking that if they didn't have it I would take out the copy in Andover library. Lo and behold the bookstore had one copy, which I bought.

So I got home and had dinner and then started working on the homework. I flipped ahead to see what the next few chapters looked like, and much to my dismay, found that in a certain section, every other 2 pages are missing. This is stuff that we're going to be doing in class tomorrow night! I need those pages by then!

I called dsKC, since he's also in my class. He has the books. I told him what had happened, and he said I could find him tomorrow in the library and make copies of his book(s). But the library still has them (there's another book we also have homework in which I was planning on borrowing until my copy came) and since it was closed by the time I called dsKC, that means if I get there at 9 the books should be there. If not I'll make the copies from dsKC's books, since he'll be there by then.

Unfortunately, I have to wake up early to do all this, and I also have to go tomorrow and return the copy of Croy that I bought today. But on the plus side, I got it for cheaper, (even including shipping) and so I'll be gaining a few dollars back.

I thought that the summer program was going to eat my soul, since it would meet Monday-Thursday 6-9 and Friday 4-7.

Turns out that the classes aren't every night. Greek is monday and wednesday 6-9 and Friday 4-7. This still means I have to come to Friday class ready for Shabbat, and it still means I'll get to swing late. But it also means my Tuesdays are freer (since I work) and my Thursdays are completely free. And then I have time to do homework since there are days in between the classes!

This makes me so much happier. Summer language is only nibbling on my soul.

( today's xkcd )

Alt text: It's easier to be an asshole to words than to people.

I've commented on this before, that people on the internet can often be jerks because they aren't actually seeing the person they're conversing with react, get upset, etc. Usually in real life (once you get out of middle/high school and grow up) most people don't set out to hurt other people's feelings. When someone is hurt, the offending part usually will apologize and feel bad about it. Also, you can see the effect your words have, so you might stop a certain line of conversation if things go sour.

For those of you who don't know, I'm in Philly this weekend, visiting GM. Unfortunately, the internet at her house has been pretty spotty, though it's momentarily working. As such, I'm very much not keeping up with LJ, so if anything important is happening that you want me to know about, you should comment or e-mail me (I'll screen comments). If you really want to get in touch with me, you should call me.

In the kabbalat shabbat service, there is a song called "lecha dodi" which can be sung to many, many tunes, Jewish or not. Since it's kinda long (9 verses) many people will switch tunes in the middle, and usually the second tune is faster and more upbeat. I always make sure to do this, even when I'm in a place that normally only does one tune. We only get to sing it once a week, so I'm of the philosophy that we should maximize the amount of different tunes we use (this applies to many other prayers/songs as well).

Anyways, when I got to that point where you switch tunes, I was deciding between two different tunes. (The descriptions will only make sense to people who know them...) The first being the tune for David Melech that is often used for the second half of lecha dodi. The second being the oseh shalom tune that is in major and is awesome. I think I decided on David Melech. Except when I sang it, I somehow ended up doing my "long lost lecha dodi," a.k.a. hashmi'ini et kolech, the one with the pentatonic scale in the chorus. I.E. neither of the aforementioned tunes. I'm not sure how it happened. And I only realized it when we got to the chorus for the first time. And when I got there I was like "oh well, this tune is also awesome."

I'm trying to think if I've ever done this before. Probably not. Usually I start the tune that I intend to use.