It’s worth a nickel

Today I got a letter from the Census Bureau. It’s really important… the envelope had messages about “official business,” and “penalties” for improper use.

It told me that I’d be getting my census form next week, and asked me to please fill it out and send it back.

Seriously? Why not just send me the form and ask me to fill it out? Why double your printing and mailing costs by reminding me to fill something out that I haven’t even received?

(Click the picture to read the whole mess of crazy, if you’re so inclined.)

Luis and I started up our German classes again last night. Apparently there was some miscommunication with the Poughkeepsie City Schools’ Continuing Education team, though. We’re enrolled for Intermediate German (as opposed to Beginner German, which we took in the fall), but it seems that there is a Beginner 2 class that we missed.

Long story short, we’ve skipped about 10 lessons, covering unimportant concepts like the past tense, irregular verbs, and the accusative and dative cases. Um, yeah. Totally lost for most of the 90 minutes of class last night.

But our teacher is giving us a new word to learn every day, via email. I’m going to try to blog mine, so that I have a history of them. Today’s word is a separable verb, anklopfen, which means “to knock (at)”.

Examples:
Der Brieftraeger klopft an. The letter carrier knocks (at the door).
Jemand klopft an die Tür. Someone is knocking at the door.

Did you ever have one of those days where you just woke up, and for whatever reason, just felt cranky?

I slept okay.

Nothing happened.

I’m just … annoyed. Irritated? Angry?

(I’m sure other people have these mornings too.)

And I spent the 45 minutes of my drive to Somers telling myself to either figure out what was making me angry, find a reason to be happy and pleasant despite feeling annoyed, or (ideally) both.

No such luck.