one step closer

okay, this is fucking awesome---dad got great grandfather's naturalization certificate in the mail yesterday! we're getting there. slowly, but still. :) now, i just have to pretend that i live with carissa in redlands, so that i can apply in los angeles instead of san fransisco (everyone says that the san fransisco people are horrible about processing things; the estimated delay is somewhere over two and a half years from submitting the application). and actually, this could work out really well, since siblings can submit parallel applications with only one set of certificates---so if i have her do it, i might be able to save myself a very expensive plane ticket to los angeles... that would rock. man, when i finally get that passport in my hot little hands, i am so throwing the hugest party ever to celebrate. hell yeah.

somewhat less awesome is that i'm still fighting this damn computer. at the suggestion of some webpages, i tried upgrading the bios firmware, and it really seemed like it had worked. of course, after it had been running for about two hours (previously, it would crap out after about five minutes), i decided that it was fixed, and wrote a victory message to a friend---not more than five minutes later, it nose-dived again. [rolls eyes] this is fucking ridiculous. i suppose it might actually be the processor that's having issues; it really does seems like it must be a temperature problem, but the thermometer claims that the processor temperature is less than half the cutoff point, so i don't know what the deal is. i tried running the memtest utility just now, and it did find some bad sectors, but it wasn't able to finish before the computer froze up. so, actually, i'm not even sure if the stuff it found was actually because of bad memory, or because the processor started to hiccup... i'll let it cool off for a while and then try it again.

we had 'movienight' at markus's apartment last night, like usual, but with everyone on vacation, it was just him, me, walter, and peter (and yannick showed up, but quite a bit later). anyway, somehow i convinced them to continue speaking german to each other, rather than switching for me. i'm impressed and glad that they actual did it, but boy, was that ever a wake up call. i mean, i know i'm just starting out, but the specific stuff on the tapes, i feel like i've learned pretty well. and i guess this would probably make me a very well-prepared tourist, when one is around friends, asking about directions or buying things and counting money or time suddenly doesn't seem so useful or helpful anymore. i understood very little of what was going on, with the exception of some proper nouns and conjunctions. and the occasional filler phrase or boilerplate response ("i don't know," or "i think so," etc.). of course, we didn't see a film, even though i had proposed and brought "crash," and we had planned on seeing it, but since there were so few of us, we played the original settlers game instead. it was fun, but i think fabius's neuremburg version is better. that, and i just felt like an idiot because there were even a few times where i should have been able to come up with the right words to make the better part of a coherent sentence in german, but whenever i opened my mouth, only nothing or nonsense ever came out. and of course, they were giving me a hard time about it... i know they only mean it in jest, and like i always say, "why do we tease? because we love." but if i didn't know better, i'd say i actually get made fun of all the much more for the extra effort that i put into things. what i'm trying to say is that i know they don't mean it seriously, but all the same, it starts to weigh down on you after a while. i'm trying as hard as i can, and i'm just getting flak for it. eh, i'll live. i'm just whining, is all.

but on the other hand, katja volunteered out of the blue to try to help me with my german, so i'm going to meet with her tomorrow afternoon for a couple hours. we'll see how that goes. i had a really strange thought this morning; probably it's totally disjoint from reality, but i wondered for the briefest moment, since it really is quite odd and random for her to just volunteer like that, if it might not be the case that she was perhaps slightly interested in me. which is in no way to say that this would be an unwelcome development, but it would probably be, i dunno, 'peculiar?' anyway, it's unlikely at best, but if it turns out that that actually is what's really going on, i suppose it might be good for me, even though the thought makes me massively uncomfortable at the moment. whoever said that "the longer you wait, the harder things become" definitely knew what they were talking about...

this afternoon, markus, peter, and i went out driving; in search of the sleeper strips they put on the road, so we could make take some measurements. i can't remember if i've mentioned this before, but we're playing around with a crazy idea i had a while back, that if we modulated the surface pattern, we could potentially make music, or even speech (okay, that's probably a stretch) instead of just a constant tone like they use now. yeah, i know, it's as useless as it is insane, but we're having fun. :) unfortunately, as a result, i didn't really get much work done today. and i'm not sure if this makes it better or worse, but alcherio is on vacation at the moment, so i don't even feel particularly bad or guilty for it. ha. hopefully i'll be able to kick my ass into high gear next week; if i don't have some stuff to show him by the time he gets back, i'm pretty sure that "happy camper" won't be the most apt of descriptions for his demeaner.

tomorrow night, some of us are going to geneva to have dinner with carol. she just moved there last weekend, after getting fed up with her psychotic flatmate in lausanne. it's almost certainly better for her, since she works in geneva, but we'll miss having her around here. anyway, she invited us over for dinner, and then afterwards we'll go see the fireworks for the 'fete de geneve,' which are supposed to be some of the biggest and most impressive anywhere. i figure it's worth a shot. :)