When I was in Yountville last weekend, Courtney introduced me to the curiosity that is almond milk. This came up in a conversation regarding my intolerance for lactose, so she gave me a carton to try out. Over the past few nights, I've been having a small glass to assess its qualities. Here is my review:

Almond milk has a very interesting consistency. When drunk [please note that "drunk" is used here as the past participle of "drink," not an adjective], it feels similar to water. There are also small sediments assumed to be almonds. If I were to close my eyes and guess the color, I would say "clear" or "slightly opaque." By far, the most notable aspect of almond milk is its taste. It has a remarkable flavor of, not surprisingly, almonds. For this reason, I would say it is not a suitable substitute for milk, but rather a liquid in its own category. What I mean by this is that if added to cereal, it would add its own distinct flavor, possibly ruining a bowl of Lucky Charms or the likes. Yet if one were eating a nut-oriented cereal, it might enhance the flavor exponentially. In contrast, there are several soy milks that can suffice as suitable substitutes for cow milk.

Now, the one burning question I have:

How on earth do you milk an almond?

In my Italian class, we work with partners everyday. As a result, I've gotten to know my partner quite well. In fact, Lia and I have even studied outside of class. I even know a few random facts about her, such as:

• Her boyfriend is from Mexico.
• He drives a big truck.
• She's fluent in Spanish and uses it as a primary language with him.

I mention this relationship because I noticed a ring on the ring finger of her left hand. I have a few friends who wear rings there just because they want to, but this was a pretty flashy ring. It was a silver band with several inset diamonds on the top. It was the sign of a very serious relationship. After class, I questioned her about it. The conversation went something like this:

Jeff: (holding her ring finger) What's this?
Lia: That's my wedding ring.
J: What?
L: Yeah, you didn't know I was married?
J: You're serious?
L: Yes.
J: When did that happen?
L: In July.
J: But I've never seen you wear your ring before.
L: Yeah, I don't usually wear it because I don't want to get it dirty.
J: And I specifically remember you talking about your boyfriend.
L: Well, I use both terms because I'm so young.

So I've known her for two months now and have had absolutely no idea she was married. Is it normal for people to try and hide their spousal commitments? It left me very confused and I didn't really know what to do. As a result, I'm sure it seemed like I was into her and completely let down. Not the case, folks. Just a little confused.

I just purchased a Gorillapod today. It is completely amazing. It fulfills all of my wildest expectations. You can put it just about anywhere. It is secure on a door frame. It makes me happy.

Contrary to logic, I seem to have lost weight over the Thanksgiving weekend. I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I can't find it. Since there's a scale in the bathroom, I weigh myself every day at the same time and average around 107.5-108. Yet when I hopped on the scale last, it read 106. I have to have the strangest metabolism ever.

A few days ago, I purchased a martini shaker so that I can mix protein powder with soy milk to become even bigger and stronger than I already am. I like to think that a mixing of so many concepts will result in an explosion of awesomeness beyond human comprehension. More likely, it will result in people making fun of me.

I always feel a little embarrassed about this fact, but whenever I go bowling, I wake up sore the next day. And I never get the right to complain about being sore because it's from bowling. Oh, predicaments.

I had two wonderful pictures I was going to post, yet Jayna deleted them. They were self portraits of my wonderful sister with special enlargements of her nose and other aspects of her face. When I pointed them out, she sneakily went behind my back and deleted them. Sad face. I'll post some more incriminating pictures later.

Most families have their own memorable Thanksgiving traditions, usually involving a turkey, gravy, canned cranberries, sparkling cider, etc. Our family has the unusual tradition of doing untraditional things. This started last year, when we couldn't all be together. My parents decided to make good use of the long weekend and go on a trip to Mexico. Yes, for one of our country's most notable holidays, my family went to Mexico. Their Thanksgiving turkey was in the form of lobster.

This year, my family came to see me in Davis. Our meal was a wonderful all-you-can-eat sushi buffet. Long live traditions.

Today in Latin, we were translating a Cicero passage where he was talking about Atticus' sister. The Latin reads:

Terentia magnos articulorum dolores habet.

The person translating was having a hard time, so our professor was mixing Latin and English. The word the translator did not know was "dolores," so our professor explained that it's just like in Spanish. He loves making comparisons to other languages, even though almost nobody ever knows what he's talking about. A partial list of languages he compares:

• Greek
• Latin
• French
• Italian
• Spanish
  
• German
• Russian
• Hebrew

Alas, I digress. To help her out, he said, "Terentia has great dolores." Now, with the context of "dolores" in a Spanish accent, I know I wasn't the only one who thought it sounded like it could be slang for something else than grief or pain.

My official Jerk Moment of the Day happened in my Italian class. We were giving different forms of prepositions after our professor would give us the context. In one instance, we were supposed to say "dello," which most people did. One girl accidentally said, "dallo," which caused our professor to stop and say, "Did someone just say 'dallo?'" The class went awkwardly silent, so I said, "Yeah, it was her," and pointed to the girl to my left who made the mistake.

Yeah, I'm a jerk.

At the recent Jason Webley concert, he transitioned from a loud song into a soft, quiet one. This spurred some of the audience members to pull out lighters and wave them around, most likely out of mockery of those who earnestly do that. After looking around a bit, I noticed a bunch more lighters showing up. Since not everyone smokes, the mild, handheld illumination was achieved by waving a backlit cell phone in the air. Yet my favorite of all was the one nerdy guy on the right who held up a Nintendo DS. (Click on the image for a larger version)

This morning, I caught a whiff of something that I hadn't smelled in a long time: Dolce and Gabbana's Light Blue. To my nose, this perfume has a very distinct smell that reminds me specifically of Corey King, one of the former fragrance girls at the Santa Barbara Nordstrom.

I later went up to Maria and asked her if she was wearing perfume, to which she replied in the affirmative and pondered at the name. When I filled in the words for her, I think she was impressed. I mean, I was pretty impressed by my own nose.

Since AJ's girlfriend moved to Massachusetts for the quarter, he's started an "I Miss Kate" rubber band ball. Basically, whenever he gets lonely, he adds more to the ball. It's currently about 15lbs and bigger than my head.

As his roommates, whenever we get bored, we take it to the fourth floor and drop it to the ground. It was pretty amazing watching it bounce all the way back to the third floor, but we had bigger things in mind. Messier things too.

Does it strike anyone as odd that our bathroom, shared solely by three college males, has not one,

not two,

but three loofahs?

And that isn't even mentioning the Schick Intuition razor that's sitting in there for no good reason.

A week or so ago, I bought some pork chops to make for dinner. The recipe I used involved onions and applesauce. As I was eating it, the combined smell and taste of the two really made me crave latkas. I thought it was rather amusing that pork so vividly reminded me of a Jewish food.

Yesterday, a lecture was given by the newest member of our Classics Department, Dr. Rex Stem. An expert on Cicero, his lecture was titled, Looking for Sincerity in Cicero's Political Rhetoric: The Case of the Pro Murena. It was a highly scholastic lecture, meaning I was able to make sense out of most of it, yet unable to ask questions showing comprehension. That's what the other faculty was for.

After several questions comparing Cicero's works to his views of Platonic thought and blah blah blah, one of my professors asked the following question:

Are you aware of Stephen Colbert's definition of "Truthiness?" Do you believe Cicero understood and used truthiness in his arguments?

If you were there and following the line of thought, it was a somewhat valid and relevant question. Yet the tone with which it was asked seemed to imply an argument made by the credentialed scholar, Stephen Colbert and his university publications on the Stoic term "truthiness." But no, it was Comedy Central.

Because I'm the most linguistically and grammatically oriented member of my family, I have become the family etymologist. A few weeks ago, Jayna casually pondered to me the following etymology question:

Is the word "proctor," the man who watches everyone during tests, related to the word "proctology?"

To answer this, I quickly went to my Greek and Latin dictionaries. The easiest thing to do was to check out my Latin dictionary, Chambers Murray, to see if there was anything close. The word prōcūrātor is defined as "one who is in charge," "an administrator, manager." Thus, a proctor is the administrator of a test.

The second half of "proctology" comes from the Greek λόγος (logos), so I looked up the prokt- words in Greek. It turns out Liddell and Scott define πρωκτός (prōktos) as "anus." The search ends there.

In other words, no they are not related. That is, unless you have a rather strict proctor, one whom you would consider a pain in the πρωκτός region.

As part of our lesson in Greek today, we met at the library for our instructor to show us where to find our necessary sections. I found the conduct inside the library rather interesting. Everywhere we went, our professor would pick up books to show us, then set them down on a table two feet away, then continue on. He would even pass around books and tell us to find a table to put them on when we were done. When questioned about this, he informed us that it's proper library etiquette to refrain from reshelving books, as you're most likely going to do it wrong. I guess it makes sense, but it was still a little weird.

An hour later, we went back to the library with my Latin class (same professor). It was essentially the same tour, so someone conveniently picked out all the books we needed to see and laid them on tables near their respective shelves.

Knowing I would be going away for the weekend, I spent some time cleaning the kitchen on my day off. I always like leaving my place clean. That way, when I get back it's like someone broke into the house, tidied everything up, and left everything.

This is pathetic. Running on four hours of sleep isn't fun, mostly because I usually get about nine. I think this overrules my college student status.

I received one of the more interesting comments yesterday. In response to Ants, a kind gentleman wrote this:

Hi there, I found your blog while doing a google search rather dashing party, That's my tribe.net identity. I also have a blog Oh the humanity!

I love your blog's template, it's absolutely fantastic, did you design it yourself? Your description of the ant lady is really good too, she comes alive as a person through your words.

I'd like to exchange blog links with you. I think we come from very different life perspectives but your blog is interesting, well written and well designed.

By the way, I think your sister looks nice in that picture.

NB I'm not trying to spam you, I know google takes no account of comment links, and I've nothing to sell - I'm just introducing myself and saying "hi."

If you'd like to exchange blog links then please use the email link on my profile or let me know via my blog, thanks.

Happy blogging.

This made me happy. Not just because he had plenty of nice things to say, but also because he complimented my sister. She appreciated that too.

My favorite part was that he explicitly stated "I'm not trying to spam you." I think every email, whether it is actually spam or not, should say "This is not spam" somewhere. This email is not spam because it openly proclaims not to be spam. For some reason, that reminded me of this. Ah, good times.

We have a severe ant problem at our apartment. Funny thing is, nobody else in the complex has any ants. They generally stick to the kitchen, but occasionally move over to the dining room.

Two weeks ago, we had a pest control lady come by and spray our balcony. That helped for about a day. Then the ants came back stronger than ever.

It got to the point where we would start leaving cups of syrup and honey on the balcony to attract ants, then light them on fire. They still kept coming.

Today, the ant lady came back. She pretty much covered our entire kitchen with ant poison, so there's an oddly sweet smell in there. She was very friendly, but I couldn't help noticing what a character she was.

If I had to draw a woman who kills insects for a living, she would automatically appear on the page. She was a little on the short side, wearing dirty clothes. She wore black jeans, never a very good sign. All of her teeth were distinct, as if individually outlined by a lifetime of poor oral hygiene. Her fingernails were pained a few weeks ago, leaving only the inner part of the nail colored, the rest chipped away. She reeked of tobacco.

In the few minutes of conversation I had with her, she openly spoke about her trailer. I would think that if you live in a trailer, you wouldn't volunteer the information first. If you had to speak about your dwelling place, you'd start with "home" or "place." I'd even venture a guess that "pad" or "digs" would come before "trailer." This lady really left an impression on me.

For the first time in ever, our apartment complex is washing the outside of our windows. A week or two ago, they sent around a flyer informing us that there might be someone outside our third floor window. It's a nice gesture and all, but were they not aware that the weather gets pretty bad this time of year? Did they fail to notice that meteorologists predict rain today?

In response to yesterday's article about elementary school fingerprinting for access to school lunches, my friend Tom had the following to say:

That's terrible! I can't believe they would do that. Now, instead of bullies beating up kids and stealing their lunch money, they will steal their arms!

Is it bad that I base my votes on the grammar and syntax of the arguments?

The California Aggie ran an Associated Press article today about my elementary school district. I was pretty excited. It's not often that a small elementary school will get such coverage that my college paper will run an article on it. Unfortunately, nobody else was too enthralled.

As a resident of Davis for the past few years, I've become accustomed to the politics and mindset of the local citizens. When I first heard of Measure K, it did not surprise me at all. In fact, I was already aware of the concerns of the residents in regard to building a Target in our town. In my mind, it was a very important issue to our citizens, something everyone would like to have a say in. It wasn't until someone pointed this out to me that it seemed funny.

We're voting whether or not to put build a store? Do we also get to vote if a store can close down or not? (Answer: No)

Due to plenty of local concerns, everyone knew a plain ol' Target wouldn't be let in Davis. I can just imagine the conversation now:

Davis: We'd like the convenience of a Target in our town, but there will be a few issues with the whole thing.
Target: So what do you propose?
D: We're going to need you to register the project with LEED. It's going to have to be a green building, since Davis is a hippie town.
T: We'll work on that. Anything else?
D: We are the bike capitol of the US, so we're going to need lots of bike parking. You might as well make it covered bike parking while you're at it.
T: And...?
D: Electric car parking.
T: And...?
D: Well, you could go ahead and build a park while you're at it.

That last part is my favorite. Part of the plans for the proposed Target is three acres of trees as a greenbelt to reduce noise. I will so totally go play at the Target park.

The Yes on K team seems to give straightforward and understandable arguments. Their opposition, No on K, is incredibly annoying. In their 300 or so word argument on the front page of their website, they used the phrase "big-box" nine times. It's even in their URL. It hurts my head to read their argument.

Ah, Davis. You're so cute, yet so strange.

I realized it has been a while since I've baked some bread, so I started making some this morning. It occurred to me that I had not used my bread flour since before Joe and AJ had their party. As I reached into the bag, I noticed a very hard lump of flour. So hard, in fact, it would have hurt me if I tried to break it up. Once I took it out, I learned it was a bottle cap.

After I was kneading the bread for a while, I found a small little lump of dough that just wasn't working itself in. So I picked it off and squeezed it. It felt almost normal, but there was something a little weird. I stretched it out, but it didn't break. I then gave it a little sniff, which was about when I realized it smelled minty. Someone put some gum in my bread flour.

I don't really like parties.

I just need to let everyone know that I love my sister very much. The preceding sentence may or may not have anything to do with the following picture:

In an effort to procrastinate from my paper, I made it a little easier to see what exactly this law student was working on:

Or:

In honor of my 100th post, I will celebrate by writing about everyone's favorite celebratory topic: death.

In each of the past two days there has been an article about a body found the day prior. Since death is a very serious issue, I think you should feel terrible if you find this at all funny.

Wednesday, November 1, 2006.

Unidentified body found in McDonald's parking lot

As the title so blatantly suggests, there was an unidentified body found in a local McDonald's parking lot. Pretty much the only interesting thing gained through the content of the article was the fact that his body did not show any visible signs of trauma or distress. It seems pretty clear to me that this man died as a result of an internal problem. When I hear something like this, my first assumption would be a heart attack, since it's a pretty common form of internal distress. Now, does it seem at all strange, funny, or coincidental that they found a man dead, let's assume from a heart attack, in the parking lot of a McDonald's? Do we really need to investigate this further?

Thursday, November 2, 2006

Body found in Sproul Hall late Wednesday

This one was a little creepy since I had class at 8:00 this morning four floors above where this happened. Basically, two janitors found the body of a young Asian man hanging from a yellow rope in a custodial closet. I've never personally been to the third floor of Sproul, but one of my friends guessed it was the Chinese department. Let's assume this Asian man was Chinese. So, we have a Chinese man hanged by a yellow rope. Really now, I'm not sure this actually happened. I'm thinking it's just an elaborate, grotesque metaphor.

As my roommate Brandon is looking into law school, he pointed out something funny on the UC Davis Law School website. On the Admissions page, they have a picture of a law student working at his computer:

But is he really working? If you look closely at the screen, you can notice the distinct shape of four playing cards. Not only that, but you can make out the placement of people around a table. This law student is playing online poker. And the law school approves!