highlyeccentric: Little Mermaid - Ariel - text: "I got nothin" (Got nuthin)
Mousecow is on the early shift and I take that as a sign that I should be enthusiastic about morning, too. I'm not, but I'll try. It's snowing the worst half-arse snow you ever saw.

Today's German teacher, on seeing my attempt at a writing task (very convoluted): "Mache deine Sätz kurz und Stupide"
Me, a language teacher who knows this is good advice: Don't wanna.

Meanwhile, househunting is presenting a. few prospects and b. an internal battle between my desire to stay in my current neighbourhood, and my desire not to have to "call the current tenant" to view flats.

Imperfect
David Kirby

When the first half of Hamlet ends,
the schoolkids rise, pull on their jackets,
and gather their trash as their teacher
says wait, the play’s not over, there’s more.
The kids look at each other in disbelief.
More? There’s already been a murder,
a ghost, incest, and worst of all,
the rejection of a devoted girlfriend.
There’s even been a play-within-a-play,
which means they’ve seen not one
but two plays this evening. In life,
the number of beginnings is equal
to the number of endings, but in art
there are so many more endings
that we can’t even imagine it.
Hamlet was sent to England with
the two men who were to kill him,
but he discovered the plot and killed
them instead. And now he’s back.
He’s mad. Isn’t that an ending?
What did you think he’d do,
take up his robe and staff and start
preaching non-violence? Nabokov
says a man once lost a cufflink
in the wide blue sea, and twenty years
later to the day, he was eating a fish,
but there was no cufflink inside.
highlyeccentric: Dessert first - pudding in a teacup (Dessert first)
... 100 days, welp.

Work: I continue to be stretching out how much I can concentrate in a day (typically doing better at the beginning of a week than the end). Pay-off is I seem to be 'tired but wired' at the end of it, which is annoying. Powering through readings, teaching prep for next semester coming underway, thesis>book rewrite is starting to look like an actual project (albeit one on which very little has been done). Have plans to start sketching out, lol, the NEXT book tomorrow. Meeting with MF last week went well, bit of a mid-year project summit. Tomorrow is my assigned mentoring meeting. I'm also making headway with the website, and the counter-intuitive content hosting platform.

Also sent a long email to someone MF put me in touch with, a former student of hers - we've been having very spaced out email chats about matters academic, and this time she asked for citations. I had nothing SPECIFICALLY what she wanted so she got a LOT of things with annotated notes instead... I have not changed, evidently.

House & Adulting: My basils have spider mites, and the petunias have either those or something else. Something small and greenish-yellow and smaller than a sesame seed all over their leaves. I've cut back the worst affected stalks, and am watering them a lot and spraying them with soap. We shall see.

IKEA delivery came today; I have a PROPER MATTRESS. It still smells kinda funny as it expands. I have not assembled any of the other things yet.

Discovered today that AGAIN I screwed up the new Postfinance bill-payment system, and end result is my credit card never got paid off last month. I did not notice because they just... let me sail over the spending limit. Ugh. I assume there will be fees for that. Anyway, it seems that the bill system is configured for people who pay bills on due date or after, not for little ole me, who wants to pay bills on '27th of the month', that is the month BEFORE the bill is due, not the month WHEN/AFTER the bills are due. Because I get paid on the 25th and the c'card bill comes in on the 26th. Chalk THAT up to Special Amy Moments, and this is what I have a stupidity money buffer built into my budget for.

Health: Okay? I mean. I actually went running three days after LAST going running, that's progress. Bought some disposable masks, too, having worn one at the hairdresser last week and found it much less hateful than the ones I sewed.

Hobbies: brain like a sieve has decided crochet isn't enough stimulation for evening podcasts/audiobooks anymore, and it will only stay trained on audio input if I'm ironing. I don't have enough things to iron to uphold this requirement! I did iron another hem on the tablecloth-in-progress, though I haven't sewn it yet.

Identified an easy looking crochet doily I wish to make, as a break from the endless squares, but have not yet convinced brain to start it.

The back belt loop on my favourite trousers is... fraying? Not tearing at the anchor point, literally wearing away from the belt leather. I am going to have to replace it, as these trousers fit well and aren't in stock anymore. I do not know what kind of fabric I need for that; I have looked online and ???. I have identified a fabric store and will betake myself there, I guess.

Languages: missed a german class on Sunday, but have had two since. A1.2 continues to push my capacities, but as I'm filling in the last few classes in A1.1, I can tell I was ready for the switch.

On the other hand I tried to speak to my neighbour in French today and totally failed, also failed to Normal Human. Ho hum.

Forgot to mention that last week I made a diary twitter for my stuffies, in order to make practising German more cute.
highlyeccentric: The Wiggles character Dorothy the Dinosaur (Dorothy the dinosaur)
Because lists are fun

1. Ich habe letze Nacht nicht genug geschlaften. Folglich habe ich wenig vor an der Arbeit gemacht.
2. Die Arbeit war nicht so schlimm.
3. Ich war am Nachtmittag sehr müde, aber ich habe im mienem Kapitel beendet.
4. Ich ging in das Lokal, wo ich eine Zeitschrift las.
5. Meine Zanhe mir den ganzen Tag wehtun*
6. Ich machte Nudeln zum Abendessen
7. Ich habe Feedback** für meine Schule geschrieben.
8. Danach, ich habe etwas Latein*** ubersetz und diese Liste geschrieben.


*tun mir den ganzen Tag weh?
** I have a strong suspicion that should be plural, in that i wrote multiple separate feedback sets, but how to pluralise a loan word?
*** unsure if i can use the name of the language synecdochically for 'text written in that language'. Probably. It works in French?

(I'm relying on a mix of google translate and the collins dictionary at this point - the past tenses are further ahead than my Duo progress, and the *vocab* for what I do every day is peculiar. Some things I'm translating out of French rather than English, and still others (Zeitschrift, I'm looking at you) I end up scouring a swiss website for because I do not trust either google or the dictionary to have the specialist nuance I'm after)
highlyeccentric: Sign on Little Queen St - One Way both directions (Default)

[personal profile] highlyeccentric posted: Jan. 30th, 2009

I just sent off my enrolment for 'Beginning German 1' through the ANU continuing ed. people. Twenty hours, 6-8pm on a Wednesday from some time in March. Some people take dancing lessons or go to the gym or join dog-walking clubs... I collect languages. And hey, this one isn't dead yet!



Folks, I have not changed much in 10 years. I have a little bit more German, though.
highlyeccentric: Sheer Geekiness, unfortunately - I just think this stuff is really cool (phd comics) (Sheer Geekiness)
We have to talk about three things we like (to a formula of different degrees of enjoyment):

Ich dekliniere gerne die Substantive de Angelsachsen. (Thank you, F. Liebermann, for teaching me to spell 'Anglo-Saxons' in German. Bloody Gesetze, how I loathe and yet miss that book...)
Ich lese sehr gerne die mittelalterlichen französischen Liebesgeschichten. (Someone on this flist is just dying to help me with adjectives, aren't you? My dictionary blathers about 'when an adjective precedes the noun', but hasn't told me HOW TO TELL when it does or does not precede the noun. Examples of not preceding the noun were all constructions with "is" in them, so possibly it's simple like that? Also, am I right that I need die before the objects of these sentences?)
Ich spreche liedenschaftlich gerne der Liebesgechichten von Gawan.

Liebesgeschichten is a bit of a guess. I don't think it's the word I want, I know i've heard the German word for "courtly romances" kicking around somewhere, but obviously my dictionary is no help to me with that one. Anyone happen to know it?
highlyeccentric: Sheer Geekiness, unfortunately - I just think this stuff is really cool (phd comics) (Sheer Geekiness)
This language is going to drive me mad1. I think modern German may have been designed to bamboozle whatever weird people learn Anglo-Saxon first.

Consider the matter of first person pronouns:

1. Anglo Saxon: Ic - pronounced "ick" or "ich", there might even be a rule to which one you use, but I've forgotten it (Sorry, Venerable Alex.)
2. Middle English: Ich - pronounched "ich" or "i-ch", depending on who you're listening to.
3. German: Ich - prounounced some way I can't possibly reproduce, but which is most definitely not "ich" or "i-ch".

And then tonight, because I'm weird, I was reading the grammar at the back of my dictionary, and discovered that the past participle is formed by whacking 'ge-' onto the present tense. I HAVE BEEN TRAINED TO IGNORE RANDOM GE- prefixes, people!
... although, glod, what wouldn't I give to know what this wandering ge- thing did in Proto-Germanic...

~

1. For those new to the world of Me Learning New Languages, this is my battle-cry and expression of glee.

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