Miscellany

My acceptance to UW is all official, more or less. Wednesday night I e-mailed my adviser-to-be to inform him that I'm definitely accepting. Thursday evening I received via e-mail attachment a letter from the Department of History indicating my acceptance and the offer of funding. Friday morning I printed it out, signed it and returned it. Now this afternoon I received an official letter from the dean of the graduate school (yes, I got mail on a Sunday, because our landlord dropped off the mail that had erroneously been delivered to the downstairs apartment) saying that they've approved the History Department's recommendation to admit me, etc. So that's resolving itself....

Tonight I cooked a veritable feast. I made some delicious artichoke dip, courtesy Laura's fabulous recipe, then cooked spaghetti with red sauce and Italian sausage. I also made garlic bread myself. It all turned out very well, though it also reminded me how overwhelming it feels to be cooking multiple dishes at once. The garlic bread may well have been burned to a crisp had I had the oven very hot (instead it turned out just fine). But, I still find the whole process harrowing, despite the fact that I prepared most everything in advance so that I wouldn't have to be frantically chopping onion or opening cans or preparing a spread in a rush. It truly amazes me how a lot of people seem to handle cooking several things without appearing too fazed by it all....

Daylight savings time really sucks. More accurately, losing an hour bites. I can't tell you how much better my day would be if I had the extra hour we lost in the middle of the night. I would've gotten up at a much more respectable hour and accomplished quite a lot, and I would still have another hour before I should get to bed, which would give me enough time to wind down the day and be good and ready for sleep. Instead, I'm either going to have to cut it short abruptly or be tired in the morning or both. We really just need to do away with it. There's no compelling reason for us to have it now (and I'm not sure there ever was one in the first place), so it'd be best to just to stop making people screw up their routines, even if it is only twice a year....

I seem to be the literal embodiment of Sartre's self-taught man. For those of you who never read Nausea, he's a minor character who goes around reading all the books in the library in a systematic fashion, except that his system is to read them in alphabetical order, as opposed to by any sort of general subject, or in a purely random way. I'd like to think I at least have a compelling reason for this. Joe has chosen to organize his books alphabetically by author, and I'm making an effort (perhaps a vain one, but I'll try nonetheless) to read all of the books in our apartment (which includes a few that are my own, a lot that are Joe's and a lot we inherited from Dick Schwarzlose) before I move out at the end of the summer. So, I've been going along shelf-by-shelf, left-to-right, reading books at the rate of three or so a week. I think I shouldn't have much trouble getting through my books (I have only a couple of my own here left to read), and getting through Joe's books (at least the ones in the bookcase I haven't already read and have much interest in reading), which is roughly about 40 more to go. But tackling the large number of books piled on the floor in our map room/library/Che room is a major challenge. There are probably at least another 50 books, and about the only way I could possibly finish them all would be to read about one book a day. That's possible with some books, but certainly not all of them, so I'll just have to try to get through all I can. Not to mention, I forgot to count the few Central European books Colleen lent me, which are hiding behind my computer. Still, it'll be fun to try.