And, as always, life continues miscellaneous

[kiya]

Egypt miscellany, part 1: Michael Atherton's Ankh: The Sound of Ancient Egypt arrived today. This is an attempt to reconstruct Egyptian music and instruments; it's about 10% Egyptian archaeology, 10% comparison with things that are better known in other archaeological records, and 80% complete guesswork. It's also pretty cool.

Egypt miscellany, part 2: Someone over in kemet posted some links to various hieroglyphic fonts, which I have cheerfully installed on my machine. Wheeee! I can type M and get an owl! (Those of us who are easily amused have more fun.)

Parcel miscellany: autumnesquirrel, your box arrived, and will get opened when I can find something to get through the tape other than explosives. ;)

College miscellany: Have written a note to Boston University admissions. Now, I don't do phone calls in part because I freeze up massively in a stage-fright sort of way when trying to; it's not often I get the same problem with email. It did, however, lead to some amusing conversation with the gang:

I say "Argh. How do I start this thing?"
Tesla (oneironaut) says "You pull the cord?"
Whitney (me) breaks into a million tiny pieces.
Eastman (annwyd) says "Whoops."
Eastman sweeps them up into a hopefully Whitney-sized pile.
Tesla says "It's always the completely offhand comments that you seem to find funniest."
I say "Think of that as very carefully and delicately smacking the overtaut mass of stress with a hammer. SPANG!"
Eastman, as opposed to being an overtaut mass of stress, is an out-of-tune harp constructed of styrofoam and rubber bands, with every rubber band vibrating frantically.
Whitney tries to come up with a way of plucking Eastman that isn't obscene.
Lavoisier (erispope) says "With tweezers?"

Also, thanks to oneironaut and tiassa for helping me tweak the letter for maximum usefulness.

I don't think I'm going to get work done today, but I'll keep trying. And going, "Agh! Talking to strange humans! Agh! Agh!" even though I've sent that email.

Addendum:

Whitney gets an autoresponse from BU.
Tiassa says "Thank you for writing BU. Your email is very important to us. Please hold."
I say "Basically, yeah."

Comments

[tiassa]

Every now and then I do something vaguely useful, even though I do try to be simply a fount of useless smartass remarks.

[kiya]

I won't tell anyone.

(Be vewwy vewwy quiet.)

[kiya]

Speaking of smartarsery:

Two hours, four minutes, and about thirty seconds.

Re:

[tiassa]

I told you. Works every time.

Re:

[kiya]

Two hours, sixteen minutes.

(I said 21 on Overland, but then I checked how long he'd been on before I noticed.)

Re:

[tiassa]

What, you told him you were timing? What did he think?

Re:

[kiya]

He logs in, I report the time. I don't think he's figured it out yet. ;)

Re:

[tiassa]

That's amusing enough that I'd like to see it. Of course, if it were happening, it would be because I'm not there, so.

Maybe I'll stay up two hours later tonight. See what happens. Of course, it's Friday and he has a social life, so.

[morningwind.livejournal.com]

I've seen lots of Kemetic-themed music floating around on Amazon.com, including Michael Atherton's...is it good? *tilts head in curiosity*

Good luck on the BU front!

[kiya]

It's neat. It takes a bit of a mental shift to listen to, because it's very unlike most modern music.

I am awfully pleased with it. There's this wonderful bit of percussion and rhythm in the middle of the second track that I've fallen for in a big way.

[thastygliax.livejournal.com]

Re: Atherton: I've heard of that album, and it's somewhere on my wish list (I think). I'd be interested in hearing some of that sometime, to see just how much I want it.

Re: admissions autoreponse: If you had seen the amount of stuff coming into the admissions office I'm working at right now, you'd be either much less worried or much more worried about the time delay. ;-) And Emerson is MUCH smaller than BU...I don't even want to *think* about what it must be like there...

[kiya]

You coming to games night? I can see if I can get my MP3 machine working and bring it.

Their autoresponse was something along the lines of, "We get thousands of emails per week; if you said something substantive we should be back to you in two or three business days." I'm presuming the included website links are for those people who asked about things that are prominently displayed on the website.