Liberty and Libraries

Yesterday they let us go in the early afternoon, (much to the delight of the 2-weekers who phased up and ran off to put on their civilian cloths, or go buy some), and the first place that I hit up was the DLI library. I went with a very good co-conspirator and we were very very excited by what we saw. They have scrabble in Arabic, monopoly in a multitude of languages, shelves upon shelves of movies and Audio, and of course, tons of forign-language books, both fiction, poetry, and history. Actual English-language books are the minority there, but I opted to avoid checking out anything Arabic (Language classes tend to be hard to study for in advance, since you never really know how they are going to be structured), and instead I checked out this wicked English-language linguistic book. (I sat in the laundry room and read it for about an hour last night. It's Epic!) The book is Modern Arabic; Structures, functions, and varieties. By Clive Holes. If words like aspect, morphology, and intransitive/transitive make you happy, then you will enjoy this book. There is even a little bit of IPA. It's also an interesting way to get a peek at the linguistic culture without jumping into anything historical or political which I don't really feel ready to do just yet.

After the Library we did a little on-base shopping. I bought boring things like Hangers, shoe polish, and a power strip. While she brought more exciting things (like a new computer.) The newish mouse that Apple is selling now? Yeah. I'd never actually seen one before and so it amused me for.... a long time.

Long story short; I consumed massive amounts of junk food and sugar, we watched the movie RED (I'm a huge Bruce Willis fan.), and in general went 'crazy'. I tried hard not to be jealous of all the alcohol drinking we passed on our way to our rooms. Siiiigh. You don't really need that stuff to have fun, right? *nods*

This morning, I totally slept in, waking up at freaking 0630 (which would mean probably missing breakfast on a weekday). I have a lot of plans for today, most of which will probably fall through, but I totally want to be productive and get things done. *nods* I'll be super happy when my laptop gets here and I can have more reliable access to facebook and stuff, but until then, I'll sign off here.

Cheers
THEO