slowly going crazy

there are more marias in finland than there are swedish-speakers.

there have been several exciting kitchen misadventures recently.  yesterday i accidentally made fried rice porridge instead of fried rice, because i had cooked the rice with too much water.  today i set the timer and forgot to turn it on and had to carefully slice the crispy carbon top millimeter off of a carrot cake.  then i tried to ice it while it was too hot and had to pour the melted icing back into the bowl filled with tiny crumbs.  so the crumbs are nicely evenly distributed through the icing now--which is not in any further danger of melting again, however.  it tastes all right, i guess--blander than my mom's carrot cake that i liked, and the icing too sweet. 

i'm also going COMPLETELY INSANE.  seriously, both of the last two days in a row i've spent eight to nine hours reading this sociology book in swedish.  each day in that time i got through almost exactly 40 pages (and it actually takes more like twelve hours because the other four are the times when i'm completely useless and robotic in between and immediately after a bout of reading.  yesterday i kept coming to my senses in another room, making food, at the itunes music store--and realising i had no memory of stopping reading).  at this rate i won't finish the book until the day before the exam and i'll still have actual STUDYING to do.  the slow pace of slogging through the book isn't the whole problem;  i also actually hate the book itself and am building up a hatred for the writer.  i'd like to hunt him down and beat him over the head with his own book, actually.

but on the plus side we have the official site of svenska akademiens ordbok, the swedish equivalent of the oxford english dictionary, with full entries and etymologies online (although only through TILL at present).  and each definition bit has credited examples of the word as used historically--some of the examples i saw yesterday dating from the 1500s, and with spelling that looked more danish than anything and was almost impossible for me to read. 

oh, and also, restriction linked to this: which wins the internet.  sadly she doesn't know who made it.

crazier

seriously, this is the kind of book where it takes the first three pages of the chapter for him to make the point "habitual behaviour is a deposit of earlier learning", and then that sentence is immediately followed by "at some point in the past, the habit has been learned".  and then a whole paragraph of pointless examples about habits.  and i'm not good enough at swedish to skim.  i'm going to come out of this a ranting raving drooling hysterical-with-rage lunatic.