Shaw!

My beloved Bernard got the quote of the day on my google page, so I am going to share it with you, even though it is not at all cynical.
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
- George Bernard Shaw
I am still trying to figure out how to alter my circumstances so that I can marry this man. (Before you go telling me this is too weird, remember that he is the only person EVER to win a Nobel prize AND an Oscar. That pretty much makes him the smartest and most talented person to ever live. Plus, he had an awesome beard, and there's a whole alphabet named after him.)

And now for the weather:
Augsburg, 13:30: -3, clear (google says "mostly cloudy," my window begs to differ), high 0
Cologne, 13:30: 2, mostly cloudy, high 7
Richmond, 7:30: 2, overcast, high 6
Amherst, 7:30: -3, overcast, high 1
Portland, 4:30: -2, partly cloudy, high 6
So I still win the competition for coldest place ever, although our low for today was only supposed to be -2 (Amherst says -10).

No afternoon school today! Yippee! Otherwise, a pretty boring day. . . we're discussing religion and sort of discussing church-state relations in English. . . I'm getting used to thinking of exciting things and never saying them because my English teacher likes to spend 35 minutes trying to find out if the class has memorized every detail of a half-page reading assignment. He keeps promising to have me talk about Religion in the US, which is a Giant topic, and I'm confused as to if I should discuss the church's role in society or the church-state debate, which are entirely unrelated.

I got home before Piff (by something like 3 minutes, but it is still "before"). This is a new and exciting thing. It might, however, be repeated tomorrow, but I'm not sure if my Sozi teacher is "Ln" or if I read the plan thing wrong. It's a possibility, though!

I heard via The Mom that people were wondering if I'd be "home" for Christmas. . . and now that I've actually thought about it, it would be really strange to leave Germany at this moment. I'm fairly certain I don't want to. I would be so upset, even if it were just like a week or two. No offense, Peoples of America, but this is kinda home now.

I read this thing about scent-memory and Andy Warhol in Emily's LJ recently and I found the idea really cool. I bought hand cream today (because cold is terrible for hands and I have decided that constantly biting at my cuticles is probably bad for me) and it smells like peaches. I am tempted to make this the Scent of Winter 05-06 and leave a little in the bottle when I'm done and put it in some sort of Archive of my Life so I can always smell myself back to this time.
I swear it's not as sentimental as it sounds. Andy Warhol did it!

Yesterday's Choco Cornies are pretty much proof that the "throw whatever random extra ingredients you have into a pot" cooking method means DELICIOUS. I'm sitting here eating one, and it's all "mmm. . . chocolate. . . cornflakes. . . oh my goodness! Is that cinnamon? Wow!" These sort of successful cooking experiments make me want to try fancier things like quiche. (I have made at least three successful quiches in my life, for the record.) Piff reports that the giant Cornie isn't actually better, because you end up with a much too high chocolate to cornflake ratio. That was some terrible English, but you understand.

Remember how my computer is weird? How the cd drive is all spazzy? I had Phillip come look at it yesterday, but of course it performed totally normally (I mean, ignoring the weird noise and the fact that it doesn't come out all the way), so I was like "Thanks Phillip! Your aura apparently fixes things!" So of course today, now that Phillip is back in Munich, the cd drive is dead again. Guess I'll be dealing with the cd player until the weekend, since it worked exactly long enough for iTunes to clear off my iPod shuffle and then died before I could get new music on for reloading purposes.

Today you also get a random old picture from my photobucket account. Enjoy!