My finals are tomorrow, and then this semester will be over! I’m going to take a visit home to my parents’ house soon and, boy, am I excited because they have had new ducklings and kittens born while I was away:

Despite what it looks like, I don’t think my dad was poking the kittens with some metal pipe when he took that photo. The kittens are in the trunk of a 1940-something Oldsmobile that hangs out in our garage, if you were wondering at their surroundings. The duck-mama took her brood to stay underneath a different car, one that stays outside the garage. That’s a miniature duck, so the adult duck in that photo is about the size of a pigeon, meaning the ducklings are D’AWWW-inducingly tiny. Jon may or may not be able to come with me, though it looks like at this point he won’t be able to since a friend of his is flying in from the west coast the weekend I plan on visiting. Pity, too: my dad promised Jon he could have a kitten if he came, possibly one with ketchup…

I’ve been plunging through the final chapters in Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love in preparation for my kernel final tomorrow. I hope I do at least as well on the final as I did on my midterm; I got a 70-something percent and that was above the class average…

Jon and I had a horrible experience the other day getting Indian food. We love this one restaurant and usually eat there if we want Indian, but recently we’ve been branching out to see if we’ve been missing out on other awesome Indian cuisine in Lexington. It turns out that I don’t think we have. I tried dinner at one hole-in-the-wall location and it was okay, nothing great, and the ‘mild’ was much spicier than I expected. I got chicken madras based on Poonam’s suggestion, and we both thought it was all heat and no flavor. Nuts to that place. Then Jon and I went to a very expensive Indian place downtown that we had enjoyed once before (or I had, with my chicken tikka masala; Jon didn’t care for the chicken curry the first time). We each tried something different there on this occasion than we had before, me going with the mango chicken and him with the chef’s special. Jon ordered medium, I got mild, and both came out incredibly mild. Mine was tangy and okay, but really the sauce was just kind of boring. Jon was disturbed because he had asked our waitress if that meal came with white meat chicken, and she assured him it did, but it was very much dark meat. Again, his meal’s flavor was just dull. I got plain naan and he got garlic naan, and my naan was okay, but not nearly as puffy as I like. Jon said his garlic naan had very little flavor and was, again, not puffy enough. We concluded when we left that we could’ve made something better than that ourselves at home, and we only cook Indian food on occasion, so we’re by no means practiced. That seems like the worst insult you could give a chef at an Indian restaurant: a white boy cooks better Indian food than you.

I think we’ve been spoiled by our usual Indian restaurant, which has food so good that every bite is just awesome and makes you want to keep eating. At both of the other Indian restaurants I’ve tried recently, I got bored eating before I was full, and a Subway sandwich started to sound good. I don’t know if we just dislike south Indian foods, since Poonam has described those as being sweeter and milder, and that definitely describes mine and Jon’s food at the recent expensive Indian place. Maybe that’s just the style, to have boring, tasteless food, but I somehow doubt it.