Monday Morning. I started AGAIN the 15-Minute-German little program, with all the intention of taking it to the end (instead of drifting away hardly three weeks away from completition (three out of twelve)). Now that I know how the system works, and how much does it have, I know also what kind of stuff I have to investigate in alternative sources. I'm back at the "Guten Tag, Ich heiße Martina Li, freut mich"-thingie, but I don't mind it at all. Repetition is the key to success in language learning (though over repeating is the key to language forgeting, which is why I always suffer with my French conjugations - particularly with the verb faire - ). The morning was cold, clouded, stormy, and so I was happy. Perhaps "happy" is too soft a word to express my feelings. I was exhilarated. Stormy mornings are my favorite kind of morning. The chill, the cold, the promise of a diluvian rain sparkled with loud thunders made me dreamy, hopefull and inspired, and so, starting a learning regime, such as this German program (again) was puuuuurfect!
I also fed the masses - or the proletarian people, if you wish to see it that way - with bread and sour cream. Nah, not some metaphoric bread, such as the bread of hope, the bread of education, the bread of information, but actual, freshly baked flour bread, from the local grocery store.I asked around if anyone knew who was supposed to bring bread today, but nobody seemed to know, so since I had to go to the store to fill the tank, I decided to cooperate with the cause and bring them a baguette and some sour cream. Probably the one with the bread task sorted for today would bring one or two bars of bread and I really didn't want to leave too much leftovers. I mean, bread from various days accumulate in Cyn's old office getting old and ugly in several paper and plastic bags, wrinkling up, hardening and becoming sort of gummy, like the limbs of old people.
Well, no bread was left over today, for nobody actually brought any bread, and so my humble, only loaf of bread was the one that abolished hunger in the office. Go figure. Tomorrow the Ants plan a breakfast-sale, for which I offered a bottle of Salsa Lizano. I guess that, in solidarity, we shall not gather to partake in our communal everybody-brings-something breakfasts, but buy from them what we ourselves have offered. Wonder if it will work.
Among the things that fill me this new week is the novel "Emma", by Jane Austen. As I wrote (somewhere), yesterday I saw (again) this movie "The Jane Austen Book Club", where plays one of my currently favorite actresses, Emily Blunt, and I was taken away - again - by the wish to read Jane Austen's books. Well, as far as I know, we don't have Jane Austen's books at home, though I could have asked my mother, since I believe she's the only one who actually might have an idea about what volumes to we keep in our so called library. (We had Kurt Vonnegut, to my surprise, and also the book about Genghis Khan... all of them in Hungarian, of course.) Anyway, I was browsing the Amazon, when I came across this comment of a man who gave a 1 star grade to a compiling book I was cheking out, and so I found out that the novels could be read FOR FREE online. Go figure that. So I sought and found and saved the link. Read the first chapter yesterday, from Emma, the first novel in the list (and the first read in the movie) and found it strange. Yeah, strange. Getting used to the type of English used in the book, such as calling a woman "handsome" (my devious slashy eye made me wonder if Emma Woodhouse wasn't actually some Emmerson Woodhouse), or the reversing of numbers, saying ages such as four and thirty instead of thirty four; but the strange way in which the whole thing is dumped on you, with a basically selfish Emma, who feels herself superior to everybody else, surrounded by repression, passive-agressive blows and who herself deals out a great deal of them, well, that's not at all expected. There's so much crammed into that first chapter and it is so strange to read, you feel like you need a readjusting at some point. Oh well, I've clicked on the next chapter so I'll continue my discovery of Emma, and hope this book will be NOTHING like Dorian Gray.
Workwise, my alotted work has been slashed in two for today. Ro will tackle one batch and I'll tackle the other. And here I expected both to be dumped on me today. Oh well, we shall see, we shall see. This is, after all, just the first day of the rest of the week.
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