Today is our last day of house-sitting for my in-laws; tomorrow they come home from Disney World. I hope they got us nice presents! (I’m only half-kidding…I don’t expect presents for house-sitting, but I do want something because hello they went to Disney World!)

They have a giant two-quart ice cream maker, so today we made ice cream. I was hoping for something really cool, and we ended up making vanilla with toasted almonds mixed in (left over from a dinner A made on Friday night), and Ghirardelli chocolate chips (I got to do the smashing with a meat mallet), and A was talking about adding cinnamon but I don’t know if it made it in there. It was really good, but I could feel the fat on the roof of my mouth when I was done! We’re leaving the rest for A’s parents. I am going to miss their kitchen…they have every imaginable gadget, and an actual working blender that doesn’t smell like burning when the motor is turned on! I am finishing up the last of some frozen strawberry daiquiris we made.

Marlee Matlin was named to the Gallaudet Board of Trustees!! *dies*

I’ve started buying clothes for the size-16 woman I am, not the size-8 woman I wish I was. This doesn’t mean I’m giving up, but it means I want to wear cute clothes now and not look like a dork while I’m waiting. Here’s some Torrid stuff I bought.

bought on eBay for $11.50

$16.49 + $34 + $28

Holy crap, I got into another accident. As if breaking my light and denting my car last time wasn’t enough! (All that got fixed for under $100, fortunately.) This time, there was basically no damage to my car. It might have scuffed the paint a little, but that mark might have already been there, I’m not sure. I was backing out of a parking space and a pickup truck materialized behind me. I swear. My bumper dented his rear right corner just a bit. It’s the kind of thing that you see cars driving around with all the time, but we exchanged insurance information so I assume he’s going to file a claim. I already called USAA and notified them; the guy couldn’t promise anything but he sounded pretty sure my premium wouldn’t go up, since this is my first accident…with them…that they know about. Will I ever grow out of the days of countless bumps and scrapes? Will I ever end up in an accident so bad I am injured? On the way out of the city, I saw a six-car pileup, and that made me feel a little bit better. I only felt unhappy for a couple of hours; those people had their whole weekend ruined.

I am stoked about my new toy, so I wanted to share it. I got the Ninja Remote from Thinkgeek, because it is absolutely essential at Gallaudet. There are multiple TVs in the Rathskellar Pub and the Marketplace dining area and they are always playing different things, frequently at very high volume. Now I have the power of mute! I’ve already used it on the TV in the Honors Lounge - this morning I wanted to do a little writing for one of my classes, and the TV was on loudly and nobody was watching it, so I just aimed my Ninja Remote and muted it! Gosh it feels good to do that.

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Gallaudet’s new curriculum requires that all incoming freshmen take a general studies class called GSR 103: American Sign Language and Deaf Studies. In this class, they teach about deaf history and culture, but there is also a heavy emphasis on learning formal ASL. They have explained repeatedly that even though we use ASL every day, we don’t know formal ASL, and that’s why the class is required.

A friend of mine, who is in a separate section from me, just said that she got low marks on her first two performance videos because she used English word order. I’ve seen her sign, of course, and she uses perfectly good PSE like many people here do. But no, the class is about formal ASL, and even though she was raised with English, she has to use ASL for the class.

That got me thinking…what about oral deaf people who prefer to stay that way? They may have come to Gallaudet because teachers wouldn’t keep talking while they write on the board, or because they were curious but not VERY curious, or even just because it was a good financial choice. (Deaf students don’t typically pay full tuition; the government awards scholarships and VR pays for some of it.) Should these students be forced to learn formal ASL? Is it enough to learn enough to get by? Doesn’t the ASL class assume you already have some knowledge? (The New Signers Program is something like three weeks in the summer…maybe not enough.) Hearing students here are entitled to voice interpreters if they can’t understand a teacher, so surely oral students are entitled to an oral interpreter to keep up in class.

Why do non-signers HAVE to learn formal ASL when they come here? What if they’re happy with their oral deaf identity? These aren’t real questions, I’m just musing, but it did come to mind.

Edit: I am just trying to play devil’s advocate. This is not necessarily my opinion, it’s just some pondering I did. I do a lot of thinking about deaf culture and the place of hearing people within it, but I don’t know everything.

If you know me, you know I love to travel. You also know that I don’t care where I’m going! I would travel just about anywhere except places where the State Department’s travel warnings are particularly grave. But I would go anywhere in the United States as long as it was free! You can win a Free Raleigh Giveaway from their Convention and Visitors Bureau. This opportunity brings you to a city that has been around since 1788, which has great weather year-round (average 38.9° in Janary and 77.1° in August). During the time that the fall getaway is offered, temperatures will be in the 50s and 60s!

It might seem that Raleigh is not a particularly interesting place to visit, but that’s not so! For children, there’s the new Marbles Kids Museum, which was formed by a merger of PlaySpace and Exploris museums. Anyone interested in history would enjoy the North Carolina Museum of History, there’s an art museum, and for those who love motorcycles, there’s the massive Harley Davidson Museum and dealership! There’s also more than 150 parks and recreation facilities.

If you win the giveaway, you’ll receive one night accommodations for two at the Courtyard by Marriott, a $25 gift certificate to the renowned Bloomsbury Bistro, and a pair of tickets for to the NC Theatre’s production of Man of La Mancha, the Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism exhibit at the art museum, and the upcoming Dinosaurs exhibit at the natural history museum. It’s free to enter, so have fun!

Sorry folks, I just upgraded to WP 2.3 and it’s giving me nasty SQL errors on every post. Hope you can stand to read through that and find the entries. I did get all the UTW tags to convert to the new native tag system though. Woo hoo on that! Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to show the tags when you’re composing a post now…that kinda sucks.

Edit: Fixed! It was the upgraded Running Time plugin, of all things. I don’t need that, it was just a frivolous thing, so it’s gone.

I think my brain is fried. I have studied for about 10 hours probably. Six hours tonight and probably four last night, maybe a little more, I don’t know. This exam is going to be my bitch though. I can tell you anything you want to know about American history from about 1400 to 1790. Well, not anything, but anything on the study guides, which are what she’s doing the test from. But seriously man…I think my brain is going to explode sometime soon. I keep forgetting what I was going to say in this post. It feels like I’ve been interpreting for three hours straight or something…bleurgh wharck wharck foomp! At least I finished before midnight like I wanted to. And now Underclassman is on TV and I am watching it because I don’t have the energy, brain, or whatever is needed to change the channel.

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