Archive for November, 2006

Fun way to start the day

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

Getting to hear Sylvia Poggioli utter the words:
… he will be traveling in an armored car rather than his usual glass-covered popemobile.
“Armored car” is unremarkable, but “glass-covered Popemobile” in Ms. Poggioli’s impeccable tone and timbre… I want this woman to do our answering machine messages forever.

Whew. (a bit of luck.)

Monday, November 27th, 2006

GRE: complete. Felt decent about the writing section, though I won’t know the results for a couple of weeks. Despite getting great scores on the verbal section of the practice tests, I struggled a bit on the for-real thing and wound up with a “pretty good” score, there. Consistent with my experience [...]

Best Beans

Sunday, November 26th, 2006

Tomorrow I take the GRE. While I’m definitely nervous, I’m reassuring myself that I’ve been studying to decent effect, so far — if I can do as well on the real thing as I have been on my practice tests, I’ll be pleased. (Of course, the one thing that’s been hardest to practice [...]

Seventy-two degrees

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006

Tomorrow morning, some home heating consultants will perform an evaluation on both houses up here. It will involve hooking up a massive fan to a blower-door, attaching that to a door in our house, and pushing positive pressure inside. This in turn will push warm, interior air out through any leaks or poorly [...]

Ridiculous culinary weekend

Sunday, November 19th, 2006

Kate and I just got back from a weekend trip to Chicago. The house is quiet, the cats seemingly didn’t notice we were gone for 48 hours. We went partly to stop in on Medill, Northwestern’s very well-reputed journalism school, and mostly to celebrate Glen’s birthday by testing the limits of our culinary [...]