Sappy Cat Napping, er, Blogging (2)

Waiting for the precalculus final: 11 days and counting...

Women like this should not join the military

My nephew recently started his compulsory nine month stint in the German military, the Bundeswehr. Let's hope that he will fare better than this sorry excuse for a wanna-be soldier tired woman slowing down her team on the obstacle course.

The soundtrack is a hoot, and the video is adorned with pithy remarks such as "May I help you?" For comparison, the average "good" time to run the course is 2 minutes 20 seconds. When the guys drag out the unable-to-crawl-any-further recruit from under the barbed wire obstacle, we read "Let us celebrate -- 3 minutes, 5 seconds!"

The small print at the end reads that she says her hobby is sports!!! Yeah, right -- watching them, I bet. :D

Buying Brötchen

This post isn't going to interest anyone except Lil'Sis and me, but I wanted to post this video here for easy access for the next time I feel like looking at images from back home. :)

I recently discovered videos from the Old Country on YouTube. What a lovely surprise! Lil'Sis had suggested I search for names of towns near the former homestead to see what I'd come up with.

Well, here's something sure not to excite anyone except those of us who have driven down these roads: a video of someone on her way to buy "Brötchen" (breakfast rolls). A momentous event, to be sure. (*YAWN...*) Especially if she had actually filmed the Brötchen, which she didn't!!!

So the video is just basically boring driving. However: while the area at the beginning of the tape was unfamiliar to me, starting at 1:10 I recognized where the driver was. The intersection pictured at 2:20 was the site where one of the boys I went to grade school with was killed in an automobile accident. The treelined highway after the turn at the intersection is the one that took me to school back in the day (I rode my bicycle on the sidewalk). The gray sky and the wet roads are typical, but my, the trees have gotten very tall!

Sappy Cat Napping, er, Blogging

What I wish I could do -- and will, after July 22nd!

Stars & Stripes Forever!

Cameron Carpenter is all over the keys (and pedals) performing John Phillip Sousa's "Stars & Stripes Forever" at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City in 2007. Check out the fancy footwork! And don't you just love the spandex? Um... me neither. But the music is awesome. Happy Birthday, America!

Friday Furball

This video made me smile. The accompanying classic by Queen is an added bonus. I wish I had a best friend like that! :)



Notice that this is a dangerous (by some people's blanket opinion) dog breed. For the record: I don't believe in breed profiling -- dogs should not be put down for their genetics, only for aggressive and injurious behavior. And their owners should be held accountable if there was negligence.

Update from the Trig Trenches

This here cat has finally found something to like about trigonometry: triangles! I actually remember some of this stuff from high school, and that was thirty some years ago, y'all. What's not to like besides highly annoying, brain-contorting and synapse-malfunction-inducing word problems? We have straightforward formulas! Numbers that make sense! And we can use a calculator and finally set aside "exact values"! Fun stuff. (Did I say that?? Shhh!!!!)

Today's homework was such a relief after the odious brain torture caused by overexposure to trigonometric angles, establishing identities, graph transformations involving complex inverted functions, and other sinusoidal hideousness that Miz Minka thinks there's hope for her non-math brain after all.

Not that I'm breathing a huge sigh of relief: I still have about 20 or so word problems* to get through before the next quiz, meh... I have my first mid-term behind me, with a passing grade, which is all I can hope for at this point! (PLEASE, don't make me take this class again...) And another one of my classes has a HUGE term paper due in ten days, so I have to get busy. IOW: still no blogging, although I miss it something awful. Pictures are piling up on my camera, and ideas for posts are loitering around the lonely writing hallways of my brain. Alas, a body needs sleep too.

* I like narratives. Just not the math-related kind. :P

It's Hot...

Current temp in my neck of the woods:

108.7 F -- but it's a dry heat! :P

Updated at 5:48PM: 111.9 degrees!!!

5:50PM: 112.3 degrees!!! (I really should stop checking current conditions.)

5:55PM: 113.2 degrees...

5:58PM: 113.7 degrees...

6:10PM: 114.6 degrees...

6:13PM: 115.0 degrees? Mr. Greenthumb and I think the weather station's thermometer is broken (or in the sun). A nearby wilderness area registered 103.3 just now. Hmm....

6:16PM 115.2 degrees...

6:43PM: Yeah, no way, their thermometer must be way off. We have 100 degrees in the shade on our porch. I guess you can't believe everthing you read on the Internet! ;)

Update 6/29/09: According to the local paper, yesterday's high was 108. That's still plenty hot enough, TYVM.