Friday Filler

It's official. I'm ready for fall. The summer heat just keeps dragging on and it makes me really unmotivated to do anything. I'm looking forward to school starting at the university where Brian and I volunteer because it will help give my week a bit of a standard schedule. I'm much more productive when I have a schedule.

So here's my filler for the week...

Vaccinated!
Brian and I went for our second round of vaccines earlier this week. We thought we'd have to go for two more booster shots in a couple of weeks, but we got them all taken care of this week. We are now vaccinated and ready to go. Apparently, based on where you're traveling the doctor has to discuss certain vaccines. I already had a list of the vaccines we wanted and we added one more the doctor recommended. However, there were a couple of vaccines which we decided not to take. One was the rabies vaccine which consisted of 4 shots on three different visits. When she told us that the vaccine worked as well after being bitten (within a certain time frame), it was easy to pass up. She also asked us if we wanted the cholera vaccine. She said it would help prevent diarrhea, but was really only necessary if we commonly had this problem. But the thing was that she hesitated and smiled a bit every time she said the word "diarrhea". I think maybe she wasn't sure how to pronounce the word in English and not that she had the sense of humor of a 10 year old boy. But who knows. Maybe she finds the word "diarrhea" really funny. I prefer the German word "Durchfall". It comes from the German words "durch" which means "through" and "fallen" which means "to fall or drop".

In Other Words
Sometimes I love how well a German word fits its meaning -- like with Durchfall. It just sounds so much nicer than the English word. The German word for slug is another great example. "Slug" just sounds disgusting. But the German word "Nacktschnecke" is a combination of the German words "naked" and "snail". Naked snail makes you feel kind of sorry for the thing instead of making you want to pour salt on it. {Just for the record, I would never pour salt on a slug.} But it doesn't always work out that way with the German words. We have a bottle of Listernine sitting in the bathroom that says it provides "Zahn- und Zahnfleisch Schutz", which means tooth and gum protection. But "Zahnfleisch" -- it's a combination of the words "tooth" and "flesh". And every time I see the label I can't help but think "tooth flesh" instead of "gums". Tooth flesh. The word makes my skin crawl.