Feeling Ventilated and Powerless!
Mar. 31st, 2004 09:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI left work yesterday feeling uncomfortably ventilated. The zipper on my pants had lost a tooth, high on the fly, and I was more exposed than one might regard as healthy or decorous. It was most embarassing. Dammit, these pants are only a few months new; there's no reason for them to have failed in this manner. And the two sewing books I consulted both agree: repairing a zipper failure like this is nothing for a novice. A tailor would cost more than the pants!
As I drove over to Yamaarashi's home, I finished my Japanese lessons for the day and, since I had them, I put the Russian Lessons 1 & 2 into the CD player. Dammit, that's a hard language! I can't roll my 'r's that way and there's just this disconnect between the words and their storage in my brain. I think it's because I can read kana but not cyrillic; my brain is reassured that there's a written form of Japanese I can store words under, whereas I have no such familiarity with Russian. Maybe I should stick to the Indo-European languages instead.
We got home and I discovered that not only was I ventilated, I was powerless. A line had fallen three blocks away and the transformer had blown under the load. I changed my pants. I had been looking forward to a homey dinner with the kids, but instead we headed out to a restaurant, since there was no power. Since it has now been more than two weeks since her surgery, we took Yamaarashi-chan and Kouryou-chan to Kidopolis, where they had a wonderful evening in the kid equivalent of a hamster maze. Yamaarashi-chan was apparently thrilled to be allowed to run around without someone telling her to "slow down!"
Someone pointed out to me that one of the problems with the home page at Pendowright was that it shows that it was "last updated" some time in 2002. Well, that's true, of the home page. I guess what I need is a prominent display somewhere on the home page of, say, "the last five stories added," along with their dates.
As I drove over to Yamaarashi's home, I finished my Japanese lessons for the day and, since I had them, I put the Russian Lessons 1 & 2 into the CD player. Dammit, that's a hard language! I can't roll my 'r's that way and there's just this disconnect between the words and their storage in my brain. I think it's because I can read kana but not cyrillic; my brain is reassured that there's a written form of Japanese I can store words under, whereas I have no such familiarity with Russian. Maybe I should stick to the Indo-European languages instead.
We got home and I discovered that not only was I ventilated, I was powerless. A line had fallen three blocks away and the transformer had blown under the load. I changed my pants. I had been looking forward to a homey dinner with the kids, but instead we headed out to a restaurant, since there was no power. Since it has now been more than two weeks since her surgery, we took Yamaarashi-chan and Kouryou-chan to Kidopolis, where they had a wonderful evening in the kid equivalent of a hamster maze. Yamaarashi-chan was apparently thrilled to be allowed to run around without someone telling her to "slow down!"
Someone pointed out to me that one of the problems with the home page at Pendowright was that it shows that it was "last updated" some time in 2002. Well, that's true, of the home page. I guess what I need is a prominent display somewhere on the home page of, say, "the last five stories added," along with their dates.
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Wardrobe malfunction!
Date: 2004-04-03 10:01 pm (UTC)A tip on trilling your "r" or "l" sounds: the lead-in/out needs to set up the trill on a liquida. If you listen to a native Russian speaker render English words, they will almost always pronounce an "el/il" sound as a throaty "e-al", and stuff a very rapid "d" (dental stop) before an "r" sound to set up the trill. "Trill" is actually a good example of both "t-drr-ea-al". Get a Russki native speaker with a terribly strong accent to try to say that, and emulate his/her pronunciation. I used to have a Russian co-worker, this made it easy for me to observe an analyze his pronunciations over time, that helps the most.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-04 01:22 pm (UTC)