Fortune Cookie: A slightly widened blog format paves the way for bigger pics and incompatibility with screens at 1024x768px

So, after the going away party came my packing marathon. To break the monotony I put on some sweet shutter shades that Davide gave me, and a mask that Ben brought me from Peru. I also wrote a poem.

Three Pairs for the Elven-kings under the sky,


Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,


Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,


One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne


In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.


One Pair to rule them all, One Pair to find them,


One Pair to bring them all and in the darkness bind them


In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.


I'm thinking that I'll adapt it to a novel. Who knows, maybe it'll be a trilogy if I can come up with enough material!

Fortune Cookie: A custom URL paves the way to fortune and glory

Now that I'm a big time blogger, you can access this page at http://blog.rodarmor.com.

Going Away Party

I would really like to just pick up with the present, with right now. But I don't think that's possible. If we started now, I would be in Sweden. Living in my nice room in Delphi, surrounded by Swedes, slowly and painfully picking up Swedish, and generally having a pretty great time. But, that would mean skipping a lot of stuff: I had an awesome going away party, packed up all my junk, flew to London, and traveled across Europe. I've also had some small adventures, both along the way and in Sweden.

So, let's go in chronological order and start at the start. Which I guess means that we need to begin with my going away party. There isn't much to say, except that it was awesome. Lots of my favorite people came. Meat was grilled, basketball and ping-pong were played, I took some photos, and the weather was beautiful.



Thanks so much to everybody who came! (And even to people like Eugene, who didn't come, and is a jerk.) I've had a great time at Cal these last two years, and the party was the perfect exclamation point.

(I put all the pictures up on flickr.)

PS Just kidding Eugene!

First shopping trip at Willy:s

Willy:s is the nice and cheap grocery store near Delphi, the student housing complex where I live. This video chronicles my first trip there...

Come on, Swedish, are you fucking kidding me?

Lesson 1: Genders in Swedish

In English, every noun that starts with a consonant takes 'a' as the indefinite article, and every noun that starts with a vowel sound takes 'an'. Super easy, and sounds nice too.

a dog
a house
an hour

However, you'll sound like a 'tard if you try the same thing in Swedish:

en hund / a dog
en hus / a house

"Varför," you ask? In Swedish every noun belongs to one of two categories, 'en' or 'ett'. Fortunately, there's a simple rule to remember which group each noun belongs to. Nouns that denote people and animals are 'en', and nouns that don't are 'ett'. So, it's

en kvinna / a woman
en hund / a dog

and

ett hus / a house
ett skepp / a boat

Okay, so no problem, right? Except I was just kidding about that rule, since there's also

ett barn / a child
en båt / a boat
en villa / a house

So you're basically up a creek if you don't know, and it's a 75/25 split between en and ett, so en isn't even that good of a gamble.

Tack så mycket, svenska! / Thanks so much, Swedish!

Full english in London

Man, doesn't that look good? It was my first full english, and I had it a few weeks ago in London. I also present to you, recorded right in the greasy spoon where said breakfast was consumed, this audio clip of my thoughts.

Suck it, normalcy.

Ahh, the dance mirror. That 5' x 9' reflective obelisk that was my constant companion at 1114 Amador Ave. The night before I left for Sweden, in the midst of a 20 hour packing marathon, something special happened. Something special that was recorded on video. I give you this, my final dance in front of the mirror. Before I abandoned it in a park. (Fuck you, City of Berkeley, it's not my problem anymore!)