Time to brush up on the ol' Spanish.

Uh oh:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4081592.html

Good thing we planned a vacation to Oaxaca in October.

FrivolousKieran, meet ProfessionalKieran.

If you're coming here to read about linguistics, or internationaly things, you might be interested in the work blog I just started:

http://blogs.msdn.com/kierans

Yes, yes, finally.

More about cheese.

I don't think I've had enough posts celebrating Dutch cheeses. My life would be sadder without edam, gouda, and leyden. There's just no way around it.

Now I have a post celebrating Dutch cheeses.

It was a dark and stormy night.

I am tireder than I have any right to be. It's not just because of lack of sleep, since Saturday night after Puzzle Safari I slept for 10 hours at least, more than making up for the deficits of the week past. It's also not because I've been running like a lunatic, because yesterday I hardly moved from my sofa. Work? house? work? Some combination of all of the above.

Puzzle Safari was good though, even though we only finished 13th and we were hoping for top ten and even though we had a few wrong solutions in the mix that hurt us in the end. It did whet our appetites for Puzzlehunt, and rumors abound as to when the next one might be.

So right now, it's a little after 10 on Monday, Chris is not home yet, and I'm sitting here with Jake and Ella beside me looking precariously like they're about to launch into full-on kitty wrestling mode but now and then giving up as though it's not worth the energy. Maybe I'm contageous.

Two poles.

This day started out strong and then took a sharp decline downhill. Now I'm sitting in my office practicing active work avoidance and listening to Magnetic Fields and blogging. If the best way to snap yourself out of a funk is to surround yourself by happy people and happy thoughts, I am not really doing that. Magnetic Fields, I tell you! Wtf is wrong with me?

I am reflecting on guilt as motivator. This is the kind of blog post that I already know that only I will read beyond this point, but I'm okay with that. I will read it tomorrow and think, Damn, that's exactly what I meant to say! And then again in a few months and think, What a twerp! The other day I peppered some meeting notes with smartass comments far down the notes and then sent the notes out like that. People replied to the whole thread in order to clarify contentful points in my email but no one commented on the smartass part. It is stuff like that that leaves me thinking I should go back to impoverished essay-writing fulltime. At least I knew that no one was going to read the essays.

But so guilt as motivator. I am guilty of having guilt as a motivator. I can be manipulated into doing most anything if you make me feel guilty enough that I am not doing it. It's sort of tragic, really. People call this vestigial Catholicism. It's more like vestigial self-awareness.

Wtf is wrong with Stephin Merritt? No, really. In high school in moods like this I listened to The Cure. Kind of hackneyed -- and by the way, three separate times today, people used the word hackneyed in conversations that I participated in or observed, which is sort of statistically anomalous and probably accounts for my current choice of vocabulary -- but it worked. When I was 17. I was saying to Vince the other night that I don't feel that different from the way I felt when I was 17, and in fact right now, both in specific and as a sort of general state, I feel a lot closer in my mind to my 17-year-old self than I do to my eventual 40-year-old self even though in reality my life now has a lot more in common with what it will look like when I'm 40 than it has with what my life was like when I was 17. But obviously I'm different because The Cure is not just hackneyed, but because The Cure feels hackneyed. Although if I'm being honest it kind of felt that way then too.

Seriously, I'm telling you, there are like three readers who are going to get this far. They probably all listened to The Cure in high school. Think about it. This is true. If you're still reading, you know that this is true, because you know that it is true of you.

I am italicizing like I'm still in high school. Hackneyed.

Anniversarium.

Yesterday was our one year wedding anniversary. It's been a pretty good year, so we celebrated by going to Le Pichet for dinner on Saturday night -- good, but not great -- and hiking at Thunder Creek/4th of July pass in the Northern Cascades yesterday. 10.2 miles later we were a bit dehydrated, and coming down off the mountain is kind of brutal in terms of the steepness and the associated effects on the ol' knees, but it was a great day.

In the last year:

We got married.
We went to French Polynesia for a while.
We bought a house.
We got cats.

Plus the smaller day in and day out kinds of things that really make up a year.