We were at the house of my maternal grandparents for Christmas this year. ( This gets very long, and may be somewhat disorganized, due to being written over the course of almost a week. )

Happy new year, everyone.

In the spirit of which (and because I'm so happy that I now have ALL of my music), I present one of those iTunes memes, this one from eumeliannyikha

( Yay, music! behind cut. )

ETA: Oh, that wasn't all of the music. No wonder that felt sparse and I kept getting the same stuff. Maybe I'll do another tomorrow with everything.

"Dude, Crazy Old Guy is crazy!"
See, there's this elderly man (he's maybe like an elementary school teacher taking an enrichment class?) in my 19th Century History (of Spain) class. He has this tendency to go into long rambling questions (note: this is a straight lecture class. We might be glad for a change of pace, but A) his questions are just him lecturing instead of the prof, and B) most of the time he's unintelligible - to us Americans, anyway. Our conclusion: he's not accustomed to being on this side of the desk), and got dubbed "Crazy Old Guy" the first day when he interrupted the lecture to, as far as we could make out, argue that Franco had many unappreciated wonderful qualities (Yes, perhaps Spain was a more stable country or whatever, but he was a repressive dictator who stopped on individual freedoms and had people who didn't agree with him murdered. I don't think that a police state is worth it, thanks all the same. "He who sacrifices freedom for security," and all that (although I should mention that I can see points one could get to with that quote that I wouldn't agree with)). So yeah, we named him "Crazy Old Guy," and he hasn't done anything to disprove such an appellation.

Okay, I got distracted by children's music just now. Do any of you know Two of a Kind? Probably not; they used to be a pretty local Philadelphia group. But their stuff is really good. I'll bring some when I come back to Smith.

It would appear to be winter now. My face has decided to go all dry, and my annual hand-rash has returned. Clearly it doesn't care that we're in Spain.

There were going to be other things in this entry, but music from my childhood may have caused me to forget them.

Oh, right, how were your Thanksgivings? Mine was . . . odd. It sure didn't feel like Thanksgiving, but when it was actually happening it was distracting enough that I didn't notice.

I have two and a half weeks of class left. In thirty-three days I will be home. This is a very odd feeling. I will be glad to be back, though.

Oh: I find my church to be hilarious sometimes. There's been a discussion of the watershed on the listserve, and one of the little old ladies just pointed out that historically there was a spring near the church, which appears to go under the church, since there's always water flowing through the basement, even when it's dry. She continued to suggest that we could do baptisms down there; it would be much more convenient than tromping down to the river to break the ice.*

I think that that was about all.




*On Christmas Day in 1723 the first congregation of the Church of the Brethren in America baptized several new members in the Wissahickon Creek.

Because I have nothing better to do, and my iTunes is on, in the hope that music hath charms to tame the wild jackhammers.
( one of those music memes )

I was going to say that this seems to be an excellent example of the portions of my iTunes library that comes from one particular person - and then I realized that that's silly, because I have almost no music that's actually my own (and most of that is instrumental), so any one of these things is going to heavily feature music I got from somebody. The one thing I will say in my defense is that I do actually have more variety in my music than I seem to based on this list.

I just realized that it's raining. And I think the jackhammers have stopped. So I'm going to go cook.

And yes, I do have things to post to the Spain journal - I'm just lazy and haven't gotten around to it.

ETA If you've heard the song enough to be able to product lyrics other than the ones I've provided, I think that it's acceptable to Google those.