Have You Ever Hit Your Grandma? In The Face? With A Canoe?

Ah, finally back from vacation. The first several days can be summed up with golf, beer, and movies. I saw Da Vinci Code. It was pretty good.

After a quick and terrible 27 holes on Friday I headed home for x-treme lazing with the fam. It's about a 4 hour drive and I killed the time with these audio spanish lessons which I obtained totally legally through a legitimate file sharing service. They come in half hour blocks, and taken one at a time they aren't too bad, but it turns out 8 of them in direct succession is about the most stressful thing ever, making the MCATs seem a jolly farce. Basically they give you a spanish conversation at the beginning, then fire off a bunch of definitions, then they say things in english which you are supposed to repeat back in spanish using the vocab you just learned and the initial conversation for context. Seems a reasonable enough approach, and pretty effective, only they give you just exactly enough time to repeat the sentence back before moving onto the next one, so if you delay even a little bit or can't think of (or in my case pronounce) a word, you fall irrevocably behind and your brain implodes. A reasonable person would probably just hit the pause button but by GOD I was going to make it through 8 lessons each way, and nothing on earth was going to stop me, least of all my continued mental well-being. But hey, if any of you spanish speakers want to discuss buying and paying for things, drinking cold beers and eating cold sandwiches, counting to 20, or finding the bathroom (as long as it's either aquí or allí), I'm totally down.

Uh, anyway, I got home pretty late and just headed to bed, having only nabbed about 3 hours the night before. I can't sleep at all lately. Arrrrrrrrrr. My niece is soooooooooooo adorable now. She just recently figured out walking and now she's all over the place, non-stop. There's a steady clumpclumpclumpclumpclump going at all hours of the day. She's not talking yet, but she can happily tell you that a doggie goes woof-woof (woo, woo!), a cow goes moo (ooooo!), a bird goes peep-peep (bee, bee!), and a monkey goes ah, ah, ah, EEEE (she gets that one just right). She also very nearly managed to say cheese:

Mom: Gwen, do you want some cheese?
Gwen: Baa!
Mom: Cheese.
Gwen: Bee.
Mom: Cheeeeeeese.
Gwen: Eech!
Mom: Cheeeeeeeeeeeeese.
Gwen: Bitch!
Me: BONG.

Other than watching her run around, I didn't do a whole lot. Dan and I played tennis and it was an embarrassment of epic proportions. I knew I'd be bad, but I could barely keep the ball in the court. By the end of the second set, I was finally starting to get my strokes back a little--not to say I was hitting well, but at least I was hitting properly--so perhaps there is hope for the summer. I couldn't get ahold of the one person I actually try to see when I'm back home, so the rest of the weekend was devoted to steady rotation of the Sci-Fi channel, the History channel, and napping.

I got back yesterday after another harrowing 4 hours of rapid-fire education to find Ball, God bless him, already in the parking lot with a cold beer in his outstretched hand and a brat spitting happily on the grill. We BBQd it up with the grad students for a while and then headed over to the pool where we sat around trying to fight the urge to toss Jani in fully clothed. Amy also would have made a lovely splash, but Rocky is much bigger than me, and may have eaten my head. Also his name is Rocky. You don't want to mess with that. The end.