Last year was disappointing in many ways. This year I started out with great optimism, but everything went wrong. Everything. In fact, the first six months were just plain weird.
Now I'm mostly recovered. But maybe I should keep some sort of record of all the good things that happen. It's possible that my memory is too selective and I remember only the bad things.
J came to visit, which was the high point of the year. We went to a zoo and I got lots of pictures. One of these days I'll get some posted. He didn't get a chance to make his pomelo preserves, so I did it myself after he left, and it wasn't nearly as good as his.
Regarding cooking, and just about everything else I do, my first attempt can be a great success, but it never happens again. The first time I made crepes they were perfect. The batter was smooth and perfect, and they cooked up perfectly--perfectly round and perfectly lightly browned. Every time since then the batter has come out lumpy, and the crepes are irregular in shape. But they taste about the same, so it's no matter.
In the vacant lot next door is usually all dust and weeds. But recently there were two piles of jagged, squarish boulders. After a few days they were gone, except for some heaps of boulder crumbs. But the next day there were three piles of two different colors of dirt. And now those are gone and there is a pile of something else. So somewhere not too far from here some building is going on.
It's nice to actually see something happening. It beats spending your life at the computer, which seems to be all there is left for me to do.
A little tutoring has added a bit of interest to life. But that encourages me to spend even more time on the computer looking for pictures and checking on words. It is hard to explain a word without using words. And that means more words that need explaining. I have found that Bing Dictionary has some pretty simple definitions, but sometimes I have to make them even simpler. The best I can do is not as much as I would like because I know nothing about the Korean language. But I find out things as I go, like what sounds my two students have difficulty with. R's and L's can be hard. And they do not immediately hear the difference between "chief" and "cheap," "fist" and "feast," and "duck" and "dog." (We had a Spanish-speaking friend who pronounced "ship" and "sheep" just alike, and she refused to say the word "sheet.") And even if you get the sounds and the words, how the words relate to each other in the sentence is a huge mystery. I look online for tips on teaching English as a second language, and the first thing I notice is that the teachers all have Personality. ........Oh, well.
chicken chickens cock hen chick
goat goats buck doe kid
horse horses stallion mare foal
{cow} cattle bull cow calf
Notice a problem? There is no singular for "cattle" unless you use "cow," which it may not be. We would never say "mare" for a horse of undesignated gender.
Or you could say "one head of cattle" ??? ["One head of chicken" would sound like some magic brew.]
New subject. I have often seen crossed swords as a symbol, but it never occurred to me that they can face up, and or they can face down. Faced up means ready to fight, faced down means the fight is over.
Speaking of symbols, why is it that lions are honored beasts, while bears are seen as mean and destructive? I think lions make more sense, actually. They get hungry, they kill and eat. Whereas bears are so unpredictable.
Now we're getting into animal preferences. Which are better, dogs or cats? Some will say that a dog truly wants to please you, whereas a cat is all for himself. I could debate that. And all the bad things you can say about cats you can say about people, but you like them anyway, and learn a lot about them and yourself when trying to live with them. So I like them equally well.
Some people like sheep better than goats. I like them equally well. And sheep are not dumb, by the way. They do what sheep are supposed to do, and if it is inconvenient to a human, people call them stupid.
So next post I'll talk about sheep, and war, and whatever else comes to mind.
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