Contrary to popular belief, I'll be thrilled tomorrow when I have to go back to work. Three consecutive days off is just too long. Call me a workaholic, but even though I've been keeping (somewhat) busy, I'm just...bored.

Finally, all of the planning for the trip to the UK is finished - well, I guess that's a little premature. All that's left is to get the currency exchanged. I finally registered the student/youth ID cards that I got in the mail months ago, which can be used for discounts and all that crap. If you're headed anywhere and are 26 or under, try STA Travel. They saved us a metric ton of cash on our multiple plane tickets and hotel reservations. Tim and I'll be in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin from February 11-22, if I remember correctly.

As I've spent a decent part of today stumbling around the internet (I beat it. The last boss is really hard.), of course I was going to come across something as crazy as this. The SnuzNLuz alarm clock takes the old axiom "You snooze, you lose," to heart (if I had said the possibly-more-appropriate "to bed," I run the risk of confusing all three of you who read this blog, so we'll just leave it at that). Your alarm clock is linked to your bank account through wifi, and makes a donation (of your choosing, preset) to an organization, charity, or non-profit you don't exactly get along with (also preset). The idea, supposedly, is to teach you to wake up already. So, according to the guys over at ThinkGeek, Republicans could donate to the ACLU, butchers to PETA, hippies to the American Coal Foundation, et cetera.

I'm reading Bill Bryson's Made in America for about the ten thousandth time. It's quite fascinating and highly recommended for anyone who's interested in how various words and phrases came to the American vocabulary. I'm finding it a little more difficult, but thanks to a few conversations we've had at work, I'm attempting to figure out if anyone has an explanation for regional accents. The best I can find are these explanations, which I'll refrain from copying and pasting so those of you who really don't care can bypass it:
How Did Regional Accents Originate? - from Penn State
Why are accents from a particular place the way they are? from Ask a Linguist
"Regional Vocabularies of American English," from Wikipedia
"American English regional differences", from Wikipedia
The main "American English" article from Wikipedia

Anyways, it's all really fascinating to me, so you can go ahead and click on those links if you're interested, as well.

One last language-related link. Did you know "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence?

Hi, I'm a nerd. Enough outta me.