Haps and mishaps

Haps: Tomorrow brings a field trip to the local office of the Samskrita Bharati organization, a group that promotes spoken Sanskrit and Sanskrit education -- often, I hear, with a serious Hindu nationalist agenda. It should be an interesting trip. Thankfully I don't know enough Sanskrit to throw political insults at our gracious hosts, and our teachers assured us that they really would be gracious, too.

Mishaps: Project de-Perfectionize is well under way! In this morning's reading class, I innocently paraphrased a sentence about a princess planning to returning to the house of her father, the king. My teacher, fed up of the word I always use for "house", asked me to throw out a few synonyms. I said the following: "grham, sadanam, sadman, saranam, nivasah, vesya."

"House, house, house, house, house, prostitute."

Laughter and blushing ensued.

In other news, on Sunday I have back-to-back appointments with two Vedic astrologers. Suggestions for questions I should ask them?