ah, so much to mention. in no particular order...

i got my trial saddle today! taking it to my lesson tomorrow, and don't even have to protect it from stirrup leather marks or anything! go dover!

have i told you about our new washer and dryer? if i have, it is exciting enough to bear mentioning again. no, see you don't understand how happy i am about laundry. and i'm no laundry fetishist, either, believe you me*. after all the fiascos with our building's laundry room (1. the fact that though it is in our building, we can't get to it from our side of the building (there are two separate halves) because our side is lacking stairs to the basement (there were stairs, and there is still a doorway, but there is no actual stairCASE), so we have to go outside the building, around the corner, into the other side, through two locked doors, and down THEIR basement stairs. 2. basement floor is perpetually covered in mud, and often (especially this summer) water. 3. it smells. 4. the washer semi-regularly don't drain, so you find your clothes sitting in half a washer full of dirty water, then you have to wring them out, call the repair guys, wait a couple days, and pay another buck-twenty-five to get them clean finally. 5. the last time we washed down there, just before tenerife, we came down to find not only problem 4 (above), but an entirely flooded room, from the utility sink backing up.) after all the fiascos (i repeat, so you aren't lost), karl and i decided we'd had enough, and we had to buy our own. we looked dutifully at appropriately grown-up retailers for washers, and may have bought one, but then.... then i found a washer/dryer on upenn-dot-forsale for $150! how nuts is that? some graduating senior, who had bought the machines from another graduating senior the year before. ahhhhhhh....... so now we have the washer in the kitchen next to the sink (it is a sink hookup type), and the dryer (which is that nasty dark brown color) is in the office (which is basically a Really Big Closet (aka Room Where We Keep Our Crap), since we don't use it as a second bedroom). anyway, the point is (there was a point, borogoves? how well disguised!) that I Love Laundry now. it's better than anywhere else i've ever lived because it's free, and it's only 20 stair-free, door-free feet from my bedroom.

*that is one of my favorite constructions in english. it is V(erb) S(ubject) O(bject), which is an unusual order in english, and in fact basically doesn't exist except in now idiomatic constructions such as "believe you me." the usual order, by the way, is SVO ("you believe me"). this VSO ordering is a holdover from the days when english had free(er) word order, like latin (of ye olden dayes) or russian, finnish, turkish, etc (of today).

john, my ex, is engaged. in july he moved to maryland, outside baltimore, to start his new post-doc at the army r*search l*bs. he moved in with his 2 year girlfriend heather. as far as i know, she's the only one besides me he's slept with. anyway, in a response to a recent email, he let me know. no wedding plans yet, apparently. i feel weird and not weird about it. on the one hand, i really am over him, have been for a while now, and am glad he's happy. on the other hand, i wish i knew her. even met her once. if you've been following along (i'm too lazy to look up the links), she was Not Happy about my existence, when they were first going out. she basically banned him from seeing me (and worse than that, he didn't stand up to her on that. for crying out loud, she wouldn't even let him keep miss fergusson while i was away because ... actually i don't know why. the 20 mins we would have to see each other to accomplish a guinea exchange? the very presence of the piggy too much of a reminder of her boy's "past"? [ed: insert eye-roll here].) anyway, i would've liked it if we could have all been, if not friends then at least acquaintances. sigh. i guess not.

charming brit saying of the day: "i'd rather have me bollocks nailed to the mast of a sinking ship." -geordie ed, a hamburger truck cook being trained as a head chef on the show "faking it," on how he feels about having to tell other people what to do.

it's official: linguists have better parties than psychologists. i knew you were wondering. friday night, karl and i hosted a psych dept grad student party. there's one linguist who is getting an MA in psychology, so she was invited. about halfway through the night, she says to me, at a linguistics party, everyone would be half naked by now. it's really no surprise that linguists are more fun than psychologists, but it hurts to be smacked in the face with it.