Generalismo

These are pictures that I’ve taken from trips to/from work recently. Some are on a day that was bright blue-skied and cloudy, the others on a misty rainy morning.

I ride across this bridge a lot to get to the other side of town.

Same bridge in the fog.

Me, kind of bleary eyed in McDonald’s shortly before rushing off to a client’s house in the AM.

The clouds were awesome on this day.

More beautiful clouds.

You can see that on the sunny day, the clouds near the mountains in the north of town were pretty grey. I might have been raining up that way.

Somewhere across the bridge on the other side of town.

A pit that is downtown.

More of the pit. It’s across the street from the library, and usually when I walk by I wonder what they’re going to do with it.

On the misty day, you can see how the fog is settled between the ridges.

What was in the top pocket of my knapsack on this day for work: Craisins, wallet, hard candy that is licorice/mint flavored* (really odd!), sandwich bag.

And me on the bridge in a hat that Carol my sister gave me

*You have to try it to know what it tastes like. It’s kind of addictive, but when I was first really analyzing the flavor I thought to myself “Wow, it tastes like something very fermented and rotting.” But it’s not really, it just has a dark, smooth flavor with a hint of mint. Without the mint it might be old tasting pretty quick, but the mint helps it be a pleasant flavor. Think rotting food sprayed with perfume (Not really!!) I got it at Cost Plus World Market, which I ride by every week.

Posted by Bonnie under Uncategorized, learning

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I stopped at the house of an elderly man I washed a car for the other day. Two extra cars were in the driveway besides his, so I knew someone was probably home (he was living with his son and his family.) No one came to the door. I left, wishing someone would have come to the door so I could have said hi to Dewitt. I did wash his car a few times, but I also had been over a few times just to talk. I’d sit in his son’s garage while he sat there with his paper on his lap and we’d talk about something. He had cancer that affected the way he spoke, so sometimes he was hard to understand.

The next day I went out with my bucket of car washing equipment and there was a woman in the yard with the family dog. “Is Dewitt around?” Oh, Dewitt? “Yeah, I wash his car.” Dewitt died this morning. And so he had. The woman was his daughter, and offered that in the light of what he went through the night before, she was not unhappy that he had died. He’s gone from this world.

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Last night I realized I had A Christmas Carol in a little book from 1914 of Dicken’s works. I read it and was delighted. If there was a way to say “yum” respectfully to Dicken’s writing, I’d say it. It is good.
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I set out to make a video this afternoon and took 14 minutes of footage for what would probably be a 2 minute video and I discovered that my computer does not like to edit that footage. Tomorrow I’ll have to try again and make it all in one shot without any editing needed. Yikes!
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Busy, busy life coming up. Our reception at my husband’s parents’ house in Kentucky is coming up next weekend, and shortly after that I’ll be headed to Oregon to go apartment hunting. Going to be exciting and probably frustrating and nerve wracking.

Posted by Bonnie under Uncategorized, learning

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I thought I had blogged from on the road, but apparently the wireless internet from the school we were parked by didn’t allow blogging - nor facebook, or any web-based email!

We got to visit with the Darts
and their neighbors again, and they invited people over last night and we had homemade ice cream after supper and some music. We played volleyball this morning/afternoon and could only pull ourselves away when the bus started to honk - it was time to go!

Hopefully I’ll get pictures up before too long

Posted by Bonnie under Uncategorized, learning

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Here’s the video I said I was putting together. Beyond the fact that I have to be careful when I chew (as to not get food in the large holes I have in my gums :P), that I have to rinse with salt water, and I’m just a tad bit sore when opening my mouth all of the way, I feel like I’m just about done with this wisdom tooth thing. My gum on the left side is a little “flappy” where they cut. It’s not totally loose, I can just see where they cut and there’s a flap at the end that wobbles around.

There is absolutely nothing graphic about the video, and there is no footage about the surgery. Just me rambling before and after. There is shot of me on percocet though, and it’s interesting to me to see the contrast between the shot before the percocet and about an hour after I had taken it. Basically it’s Bonnie all drugged up and very happy You can also see the cool map I have on my wall now instead of the quilt

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I’ve been made the unofficial book lady at the secondhand store I volunteer at. That’s GREAT, because in organizing and putting all the donated books on the shelf I get too look at all of the books that come in. Although the books were getting put on the shelf just fine before I started helping, there wasn’t a whole lot of organization outside of a few specified shelves. Novels and how-tos were right next to each other, classics were mixed in with silly novels, etc., etc. So I have it semi-organized now, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep that up or how much more I will be able to organize. It’s fun anyway.

Here are some of my latest finds:

• A few readers from a history class at a college around here. These are so nice! They’re old, but they’re works from Bede and Gregory of Tours, and that sort of thing. There is one on Rome, two on the Dark Ages, and one on The Peloponnesian War. They’re such easy reading, I guess they must have been meant for beginners at history. In any case, I’m enjoying them.
• A Russian Phrasebook. I don’t really want to learn Russian, but I told myself I’d just keep it around “in case.” That’s what I said about the German dictionary, too
• A book of Russian short stories. So far these have been very good. I hate going through a modern short story book and getting half way (or not even that far) through a story and discovering I really am not getting anything out of it, and quitting. Or making it all the way to the end just to say “What a waste of time!”
• Various books on language and linguistics. These mostly haven’t been gone through yet, because I know it’s going to take brain power to appreciate them. The phonetics as described in Invitation to Linguistics (Mario Pei) have been very interesting! It’s amazing to hear the way we make vowels described, and how consonants are classed and what characteristics they have. As I’m reading through this chapter I’m constantly testing out what it says and am surprisingly delighted when what is written proves to be just what my mouth is doing. Do you know where your tongue is when you say “father,” (your tongue is low) as opposed to “deed” (high). There are also different places that the tongue arches, and there are tiny variations in the placement of the tongue that make huge differences in how the sound comes out. But I’m going to stop here because I don’t really know much about it and explaining will only reveal my lack of expertise

Thank God for this wonderful opportunity to find good books. If you know of a Salvation Army or thrift store with a rough looking book section, maybe you would like to volunteer to straighten them out (the books, that is). In the meantime, you’ll end up making a thorough search through them all.

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I’ve downloaded sermons from sermonindex.com and sermonaudio.com in Spanish and in German. I even found Ray Comfort’s Hell’s Best Kept Secret in a variety of languages. (Be forewarned, some of them are not complete). I put them on my mp3 player and I have been trying to listen to them whenever I get a chance. I don’t know exactly what they’re saying, but I think it’ll help to have my ear accustomed to hearing them. Now an interesting question would be is if you don’t understand a language but you are exposed to it enough to ingrain some in your subconscious, will you remember any of it as meaningful after you are fluent in the language? If you memorized Scripture in Spanish, for instance, in the abstract without knowing what a single word meant, and then you studied Spanish for a while without reviewing the verses you had memorized, would they just pop into your head as meaningful? If I listen to sermons that are really not biblical could I be influenced by them by ingraining them into my subconscious without currently knowing what they mean? I’m finding the question hard to explain, but hopefully you will understand anyway.

Posted by Bonnie under books, english, languages, learning, recipe

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For those of you who are studying languages, allow me to introduce Unilang.org. This site has less organized lessons than livemocha.com but I get the feeling that these people are much more die hard fans of languages who are learning for fun. There are a lot of people there with 3 or more languages under their belt, and there is almost always someone in the chat room. There are resources for many languages. One that I found for German, for instance, are stories with the English and German next to each other, line by line. The range of languages here is also much more wide. They have many user submitted exercises and they also have their own wiki.

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This morning’s recipe:

Grind 4 tablespoons coffee. (Or use already ground, like I did :D) Place in filter in coffee machine and fill with two cups water. Press the “On” button. Wait and enjoy the dripping/bubbling noise. Pour in cup with creamer. Drink. Enjoy.

Oh yeah, and get a free Iced Coffee at Dunkin Donuts on the 15th at participating stores! I’ll have to put that up in a post all by itself so people see it even if they don’t read my entire posts.

Posted by Bonnie under deals, food, languages, learning, recipe, spanish, world

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I am getting fed up with getting ims, emails, and now, seeing even ads with the spelling of “ur” for You’re/Your and “U’ for you. To some people it isn’t a big deal, either to use it or to see it, but it’s soo widespread now. Oops. Did I transgress the laws of spelling when I said “soooo” with more than the called for amount of ‘O’s? Ok, so I guess we’re all guilty of breaking the rules sometimes. I guess the reason I’m not yet accustomed to spelling words that way is because I’m not a mobile messenger. I didn’t even have any messengers installed on my new laptop until a few weeks ago I downloaded Skype.

By the way, for any of you who have Skype or are going to get it, are you aware that in their user agreement they have the rights to record all audio, text, or video communication that is received or sent by Skype? I think they can use it as they see fit, or however they word it.

I have to yet again mention LiveMocha.com even though it feels like I blog about this once a week. I usually go there at least once a day and do some Spanish (and lately German.) It’s a great way to learn a language. If you’ve been thinking about taking up a language , why not go and check it out? I was thinking I wanted to learn French, but I discovered learning how to pronounce certain sounds that don’t occur in our language was too painstaking. So I decided German was a better choice. And then, when I read up in the book I have on it I discovered that the definite article changes based on the context! (In these three sentences: The man is here. The man’s hat is here. I gave the man a hat. I see the man. The definite article (the) would be different in all three cases!). For now though, learning German articles beats learning French sounds.

For anyone here that does visit live mocha, look me up: Authorized77 One note of interest - the site doesn’t function well with the browser Opera. I use Firefox when visiting livemocha and it works fine.

Be careful who you talk with, though, and be aware that cultural and language differences might result in some quite strange conversation. Someone from Brazil asked me if Americans shower every day, and do they smell OK? I later found out from a different, more globally aware Brazilian, that there is a myth in some parts of South America and in Africa that people in cold climates don’t shower.

One more word on language learning. Don’t worry if all you learn is a smattering. I know that I want to be able to converse in Spanish and my goal is to become at least halfway fluent. But I don’t really have an immediate use for German, I may just learn a bit and then move on to something else. Learning languages is almost like learning music. Once you learn how language works, it’s much easier to learn how to speak more than one. It’s not quite as simple as it sounds, but it is a whole lot easier if you know about the structure of languages - even your own language. Hey, if I had studied more English in high school I would have already know about all sorts of things that I am just starting to learn in Spanish! So whatever you find yourself studying, just apply yourself and chances are, whether you remember it or not, it’ll help out down the road. When you go over drills of verbs, or multiplication tables, or memory verses, or anything else, you may not be consciously memorizing it, but it often happens that later on it just pops into your mind when needed. And I’m convinced the more you do, the better your brain becomes at memorizing.

So if you’re bored, and want something relaxing to do? Go over your verb conjugations and don’t make it a point to memorize them. Just read them, study them, make observations if you can, and let the material seep into your brain while you’re having a fun time. If you forget them, it doesn’t matter. You can’t erase what you continually put into you.

Do I sound nuts? If so, you’re drawing a completely logical conclusion

I’ve been struck with a desire to write more music. I know I’m not that great of a flat picker in the big realm of flat pickers, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be really good. Good, maybe someday, but not really good. So I got to thinking, if I’m not going to be up there playin’ with the big boys, I may as well try to do something behind the scenes. If song writing is an art that can be learned, I want to learn what it takes. Someone told me once to write every day. If I had done that since he told me, I’d have just about 100 songs written I reckon. Out of those 100, I’m pretty sure that ONE would have been decent enough to play. But no, I’ve let a lot of times pass, a lot of emotion just waste away without one word to describe it. Like painting, every piece doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. If it sharpens your skills in some way then it wasn’t a failure. So if you feel the urge to write a song, don’t push it away because it might not be any good. Of course, it might not be any good (I’ve written loads of the bad ones!) but just write it down, get the chords down, etc, maybe record it in *“rough draft style” and put it away. Ah, yes, it’s exciting! But don’t play it for anyone. Just keep it in a safe place and continue to write when the urge arises, or if you can make yourself write. Then go back to it in a few weeks, or months, and see how it feels. Are there any things that pop out that make you cringe? Should you change a few words at the end of the line before the chorus? Then, if you’re satisfied with it, share it with people if you have the hankering to. It‘s really painful to play a song for someone and realize that you can hear a bunch of “mistakes,“ and you know the person you‘re playing it for can hear all those things too. Correct and revise before you let people hear it. I’m not saying you can’t get some help or advice from someone you trust, but it’s a shame that you lose the urge to write because you think you’ve failed and all you can remember are those embarrassing moments of putting yourself out on the proverbial limb. It’s hard to tell if you’re comfortable with a song immediately after you write it, which is why I suggest waiting a little bit before appraising it.

Posted by Bonnie under english, learning, spanish, world

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Sooo..we went to butcher a cow yesterday. I’ve never assisted butchering anything larger than a racoon, and believe me, it’s a lot more backbreaking to do a cow than a racoon! The hide alone weighs over 50 lbs, and the guts weighed so much it was incredible.

We cut open several stomachs. One to get out the tripe, the other to see the amazing folds that the farmer told us we’d find. One had little fingers like grass in it, it was quite neat. The tripe one was FULL of grass. Well maybe not full, but there must have been 5 gallons of grass in there, looking almost like it had just been mowed and mixed with a little water. Quite incredible for a city girl like me! Actually I’m not quite a city girl, and I guess butchering a cow moves me closer to the country girl status ;)

Above is a picture of the omasum.  See all those folds! It’s incredible. I also found here that they sell salted omasum, so it must be edible. Visit this site for more anatomy pictures of cow stomachs and other animal organs.

A cow has four stomachs; the rumen, reticulum, omasum and the abomasum. I knew cows had four stomachs but I didn’t really pay attention till I had seen the stomachs come out of a cow. Here’s a site about the digestive process of a cow.

The hide is really neat. I think someone’s going to get a rug We also got the eyes for dissection purposes, and intestines for sausage. Anyone got a recipe? I know they need to be scraped down and the meat needs to be seasoned, but I’m not sure with what, exactly.

Definitely visit this blog for more info about our butchering exerience.

Posted by Bonnie under agriculture, food, learning, outdoors

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(The title of today’s post means “I’m hungry,” in Spanish. Literally “I have hunger.”

Today someone took us to a pancake breakfast at the place we’re staying at. Quite nice, and since I skipped the desserts after our concert last night I was HUNGRY! It helped me to pray better for people who are hungry. It’s such a shame that we so easily forget people who are suffering. Our selfish minds have very short memories. How often have we been touched by an image or a story of someone suffering, yet at this moment reading this blog you (and I) probably had nothing more on our minds that surfing the internet, and maybe a petty problem that doesn’t cause true suffering but just an annoyance of self. Now maybe I’m just not as feeling as y’all, but I surely feel ashamed that I can go hours and hours and hours without thinking about and earnestly praying for the many Christians who are being persecuted around the world, and the millions of people who are suffering from hunger or other life threatening ailments. Yet I can find time to dwell on the fact that I ate too MUCH for breakfast, or that I was annoyed by someone.

One of the best ways that I have found to learn about historical figures is through childrens’ books. Yes, that’s right. The ones that kids take out to read for school projects in elementary school. If you’re writing a big report on people you may have to go through more indepth research, but often times when I visit people who’s kids are working on reports, I find it enjoyable to read through the books they have there. They’re short (usually), in bigger print, and sum up most of the important details in a book. Don’t feel as if to learn about something you have to do all the research the author did. I’d rather know a little about each of the major historical figures than know a lot about only one and never have heard about the rest. Of course, you can pick and choose who you want to study more about.

On the school front, I’ve also discovered how math can become very disagreeable. If you don’t spend enough time on the basics, you will absolutely hate advanced math. I won’t give all of the details, but I had forgotten how to do a very simple mathematical procedure and it made finishing a lesson from my brother’s math book miserable. Then I went back, reviewed the process, and now I find it very enjoyable to write certain types of math problems down on a sheet of paper and work them out when I have spare time. If you really hate math, try going back to the beginning and drill yourself on multiplication facts and addition facts until you have them down and can figure them out instantaneously. Don’t worry about how slow you go through the memorization process, take as long as you need for each problem. If you find one that takes a long time to remember, say it over and over again in your head. I’m amazed at how studying Spanish has changed my views on studying and learning in general. If you put something into your brain hundreds of time and do it over and over again, you will memorize it. Sometimes it doesn’t come to mind immediately, but soon after it pops in and can almost be surprising how automatic it becomes!

One more thing, I’m trying a new comment filter system. I get dozens and dozens of spam comments, so I have had to moderate everything before it goes “live.” However, I’m trying something new. You need to have a previously approved comment for your comment to appear without moderating, new commenters and comments with links will go to moderation. I hope that helps the comment process move along, because I’m not always around and I want everyone to be able to SEE their comments right away, instead of leaving and wondering if it’ll ever appear.

Posted by Bonnie under books, learning, math, reading, spanish

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Shortly after I put up the last post on languages, someone emailed me from LiveMocha asking me to check out their website. I’m glad to report there is another language learning resource available online. LiveMocha offered much more than I expected. Of course, the hitch is that they plan to eventually start charging for services. In the meantime you can access their free Rosetta Stone-like courses, invite other members to chat in the language you are learning, and tutor members learning your native language. Part of the exercises are spoken exercises. After you record yourself speaking, you can invite someone who natively speaks that language to correct and rate your exercise. There are a few bumps they need to iron out (for one, the site doesn’t function well in Opera, the browser I use) but I highly recommend LiveMocha.com.

LiveMocha currently offers courses in German, English, Spanish, French, Hindi, and Mandarin Chinese.

Posted by Bonnie under languages, learning, spanish, world

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The resources available to aid in our learning of foreign languages has changed since the good ol’ days. I remember starting out with the Berlitz Language Course records - not that I’m old enough to have purchased it new, I got it used for nothing because someone else didn’t want it anymore. Now, instead of records we have CDs containing not only text and audio, but also pictures and videos.

Rosetta Stone is one computer program that is popular, and Pimsleur is a popular audio course. There are also programs from Berlitz, their company being over 125 years old.

There are also many free resources available. For example, Youtube has a variety of different vloggers that make videos primarily in Spanish, and some made with the express intent to serve the student of Spanish language. Ben and Marina Diez, who are a couple in Spain, make videos and pod casts in Spanish directed at the student. But forget the typical lesson material, Ben y Marina have pod casts on things like MySpace, the ethics of tazing, and summers in Madrid. .

There are also a wide variety of internet radio stations available. No longer do you need a shortwave radio to be able to hear what is broadcasting in Mexico, or even Spain. They include talk shows and music of all types. All you need is a high speed connection, some speakers, and a search engine. Check out this list of Spanish radio stations to help you learn every day, spoken Spanish.

Still, with all the courses available, languages can be very difficult to learn without someone to interact with. Find someone to call on the phone, or the meet with in person on a regular basis to practice what you’ve learned. For Spanish, you can visit the forum at Notes In Spanish and practice what you’ve learned and get feedback from others.

Posted by Bonnie under books, english, languages, learning, spanish

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