and of course, fish multiplies, fish dies, and so on

My classes are so amazingly enjoyable. We're starting to build trees in modern grammar, which is kind of strange, both because of my residual impulse from comp sci to run an AVL balancer when one end gets too low and because we label phrases by the dominant word's function, not the overall phrase's function, yielding funny things like "every day" being a noun phrase in "he walks his dog every day," which makes me a bit uncomfortable. On the awesome side, after my comment that I think there's an implied temporal preposition such as "upon" or "during" in such phrases, our TA now looks at me whenever an interesting question comes up in class in case I want to comment. Yeah...yeah. I rock that much.

Erin Hutchinson rocks equally for giving me these fantastic classical CDs as a mission farewell present. Last night, listening to classical from my gorgeous CD player, eating rising crust frozen pizza, studying differential equations...sigh, does it get any better?

Speaking of which, my differential equations teacher is the most awesomely Polish man ever. I mean, my Italian professor was kind of Polish, but he didn't have the whole "If you laugh, even at my jokes, you risk getting Solidarnosced in your sleep. Just to warn you." thing going on. Nor did he say things like "If you only just perturb this a tiny amount" in a thick accent to describe unstable equilibrii. Psh, that pendulum won't just be perturbed, bud. It'll be more shocked and appalled than a letter to the Daily Universe.

In seriousness, he's letting me turn in the homework on Monday, since I wasn't able to find the assignment online until shortly before class, which I terribly appreciate. Also, apparently we only have, like, an hundred homework problems to do for the entire semester, which blows my mind. I mean, a math class without tediousness? Let's take a nice little walk back to the comp sci department where you belong, pal.

Oh, in passing, here's a marvelous talk by Elder Holland, courtesy today's 100 Hour Board.