Carrot Cake and Dictionary Extracts

This morning I woke up when the alarm clock went off at around 7:15. I considered it too early, turned it off, and then went back to sleep. A while later I became conscious again and decided to skip my Greek prelanguage course class; then I slept through all the way until 1:50something.

Since then I've opened up the Wikipedia article for Rumi and written down a few more words of Farsi along with their transliteration and German equivalents, for university, and have otherwise been pleasantly not doing much in particular.

Isn't Arabic a fairly lovely script? I imagine that there are many different iterations, like print versus cursive writing in the Latin alphabet, so the kind which I am reading in the Farsi-to-German dictionary may be a more utilitarian specimen. Here is an example in my rudimentary scribbling:

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J. and Ge. went shopping for Ge.'s birthday and since then I have baked a round tin and a very long rectangular tin of carrot cake for the birthday lad. The recipe may be found here.

It turns out that the ingredients for the frosting were a trifle incomplete; the butter-and-cream-cheese frosting rarely turns out well for me anyway. So I softened a little butter over the stove, mixed it in with a slender tub of cream cheese, and added vanilla sugar and plenty of icing sugar. Then I made a second frosting with icing sugar, a drop or so of lemon extract, the bottle's cap full of brandy, milk and water. Since rosemary has a lemony taste and it was there, I took a dried leaf and crumbled it in. The family came to eat the result and made insulting remarks about ants (well, not really insulting — more funny) at the sight of the nondescript dark bits of rosemary, and then tucked in quite happily.

Besides I've been reading some news and meditating a grand journalistic effort again with a great deal of skepticism
about the likelihood of its fruition. What has gone better is an attempt to read L'Assommoir by Emile Zola in an English translation. Normally I prefer to read French literature in the original because I figure that I'll have to eventually anyway. But the language of the translation is good, I think, and I don't seem to remember Zola being especially fond of the types of linguistic flourishes like idioms which would be lost in translation. It is also without a doubt infinitely quicker to read it this way. I mention it here not only because it is something that is read but also because it is to a degree a semi-journalistic endeavour, intended (or so I gather) to bring close to the audience the experience of working life in Paris and the degradations of alcohol abuse and social inequality. It feels rather current in language and topic even amidst the 19th-century detail; to cite a common French loan to the English, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Yesterday I began doing individual Greek review at the bookshop and it was worthwhile; but I think that I need to begin using the philological library at the FU because it is difficult to get a hold of verb, noun and adjective tables on the internet. The grammar we are using is a minimalist blue paperback volume by a Mr. Triantaphyllidi (ironically enough, the book has more than thirty pages), which as the professor states is the standard textbook in Greece itself.

Lastly, and not very relevantly, while I was preparing the carrot cake I came across a startling realization which may or may not be accurate. Which is that, looking at some of Mitt Romney's most famous quotations, one ultimately has the impression that here is someone so 'mean' in the old sense of the term — so unwilling to see others receive money or goods — that he would begrudge the poorest person their not even $200 monthly welfare payment and their second-tier medication . . . because these are in his imagination obtained for 'free.' Anyway, I hope that I have hereby maligned rather than sketched his actual perspective; besides it is unfair to harp on the subject after the election is fortuitously a bit of history.