January 2007

13

Started the autodidact log. Polished up the web design for autodidact.absurdism.org; finished applying the layout to all the pages. Scoured through books and websites for quotes to add to the main page random-quote generator.

Colored a page in The Anatomy Coloring Book.

Researched sundial ideas. Mosaics would be good. Got some library books on mosaics yesterday, and I read a few.

Helped Dad bake the chicken; put on seasoned salt and rosemary, kept an eye on the timer, put them in the oven. They turned out well and tasted great. My mouth is watering from the memory, actually.

I was a bit sick yesterday and went home from school early, so I slept quite late and consequently stayed low-key.

15

No school today because of Martin Luther King Day. Thumbs up for freedom! Woo woo!

Last night I made some art; I'm working on digital art mostly, trying to familiarize myself with the mysterious workings of Photoshop Elements. So I took some tips from Greg Martin's tutorials, which are great. Clear, well-designed. I have to go off the beaten path a bit because I don't have the real Photoshop.

I woke up early-ish, 8:00, and then fell back asleep until maybe 10:00. After that I stayed in bed for a substantially long time and read my books and daydreamed.

Tonight I might watch Night Watch (foreign movies, for the win!) and do some more Egyptian practice. Also want to finish up those International Phonetic Alphabet flashcards. Silly, yeah, but they seem to work.

Research binoculars ... I want a telescope, but binoculars are good to start with.

I also e-mailed a woman about doing volunteer work for an LGBT youth hotline, but she didn't reply yet. That reminds me, I need to find out some LGBT events in our area to add to the GSA calendar.

Practiced for a Spanish presentation at school. A presentation on—behold, a fascinating subject, written out in nice school-child Spanish—the Three Bears. I read some Pablo Neruda afterwards, and translated what I could line-by-line, then looking at the printed English translation to tell if I was right.

23

Yesterday read two chapters of Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis, with the English book to temper it for words I didn't catch. Most of the grammar is very simple, and it's intuitive. There are official teachery names for the ways in which the noun cases function. Ablative of place from which, for example. But Latin syntax is decent for an English speaker if you can wrap your head around its heavy inflection. Prepositional phrases in particular come easy.

They were, I think, the sixth and seventh chapters. This would be Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in English. I'm liking it and I'm liking the cheeky inventiveness of the translation. The -is at the end of Mrs. Norris's name is declined as in Latin, since some feminine nouns end with an -is. Domina Norris, Dominae Norri. See, it is a lot like English, since you can stick a title before a name and not have to apply any modifiers.

I did two exercises of ancient Egyptian, specifically exercises 1.5 and .6 in the book I have, which is How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs. I would mind that kind of exercise in Spanish or Latin, maybe, but with another writing system altogether it's more difficult to dive in at the deep end. I could probably begin to try sorting out more complicated texts, but I don't have a cryptographer's mind. Instead: the exercise.

I could puzzle out phrases, though! hd_s ik.r means "excellent man," and sh(r ik.r is "excellent conduct." It's odd how these phrases show up with underscores and periods and so on. The transliteration requires a lot of special characters.

Colored in a larger part of another Anatomy Coloring Book page. It was review of what I know, mostly: the structure of a cell, with frill-edged mitochondria and a lump of nucleus at the middle. The dotted ribbons of endoplasmic reticulum, with little ribosomes stuck on it like pushpins. I read and learned about basic animal cell structure.

Also saw an advertisement for an editing position at a local writing magazine for teenagers, so I emailed the grown-up editor, and gave him a call. He told me to stop by tomorrow. I figured out where it is on the map (I have bad map sense) and generally puzzled around for a bit, finding the geography. Roads and landmarks are sorted into tiny lines. I couldn't get the hang of it just now but I'm working on it.

In school today someone told me that "a good student" is someone who "listens to all that BS." He grinned. I felt like a secret agent, infiltrating the masses. Not that I am (I'm not, really!) but it's a good note to end on, a funny one. A little hopeless too.