Life-related news
Peter and I went bowling Thanksgiving weekend and tried to remember French words. While we weren't surprised at how much we'd forgotten, we were surprised at how much we remembered. Complicating matters was our historical reaction to Madame Caldwell having taught the subjunctive tense early in the year in AP French, and strongly encouraging its proper use by smiling, nodding, and jotting something (I assume a bonus point) in her notebook. Peter and I mastered not only the subjunctive, but also how to restructure or rephrase most any sentence in the form of a ploy for bonus points.
So far so good, but after a while we started going overboard: using the subjunctive all the time, and then just systematically mangling verbs with extra infixes and suffixes and anything else we felt like doing. The goal wasn't to make French words as long as German ones, but it often worked out that way. Madame Caldwell knew we knew the material, so she'd laugh at us, but when other students misused the subjunctive she'd frown at them. I felt only slightly guilty for being on the winning end of a double standard.
The aforementioned complication is that ever since, when Peter and I speak in French, it's always our creatively mangled brand. We try to outdo each other. So that's why we were surprised at how much French we remembered correctly.
Of course, we had no trouble singing Madame Kerpel's inane pronoun round perfectly.
Job-related news
I had an interview for a neat-sounding job at CWRU. I don't feel confident that I bowled them over with my Windows skills (I haven't used Windows all that much, really). Tomorrow morning I'm going to help someone burn CDs with her new Mac, which may lead to additional consulting work. We'll see.