Nasturtiums, morning glories, hosta and lilies blooming, peppers and tomatoes coming onto their vines, green beans, harvested potatoes and all sort of greens.
purple potatoes from our garden
LANGUAGES: (with some synesthesia thrown in)
A little graphics art project I did very quickly one night to remember the transformations in Finnish. I did a good update in Finnish this month, after doing an update on Romanian last month and sort of letting that sit a bit. I'm also touching on Japanese, and Spanish and French and throwing in a bit of this and that and so forth. Japanese makes me feel 'my brain is actually rearranging this stuff as I hear it- and then rearranging it to produce the sentence again and I can FEEL it trying to figure it out) Finnish is more in the 'oh, that word transforms a little in this situation, and combines this way in that - got to remember that and get the vowel marks right'... I do know there is much more in Finnish it has yet to actually present to me, but I'm almost halfway through all that DuoLingo has to offer at the same time. It's a bit daunting how 'easy' it is and yet how 'hard' I've been told it will be. With Japanese, both of those are up front, I feel it's hard, I know it's hard, and yet I keep understanding more in ways I did not expect to understand (it feels like a different liquid in the channels of my brain) so I keep coming back.
I threw in a few lessons of Chinese to see how the number systems compared, since they use some of the same symbols. Then we watched Kill Bill series and I understood more of what they were saying in Japanese, but still, not enough. I also found a decent program for teaching Latvian (Apsveicu!) and was trying that out but my spelling is absolutely awful and that program does require you to get it right to advance so... Ko jus teicat? Just try to spell 'iepazities' on the fly... still, it is hard to find resources for it at all, so I was excited to get the chance to work on it more than the children's site I had found and reading the news site when I'm in the right mind for it and remember to go check.
We renewed our library cards, and Esme got a book on electricity. I found a book that captured my interest with the prose, hard topics but I'm pushing through it - 'Find Me', by Andre Aciman. Not something I would have picked up having known what it was all about, but the author did weave a beautiful scene and a fast tale full of rich details, so I'm pushing through and seeing what it has to show me. The thing that grabbed me was that on the cover it said 'by the author of Call Me By Your Name', which is an anime Esme and I saw about a boy and girl who 'meet' on a train (this story also starts, oddly, on a train), alternate 'swapping bodies in dreams' having to relate to being a different gender and different expectations from their families they don't really know - and when they figure out what is going on they 'write letters' (while they are each other, they leave each other diary entries) to one another, but then towards the end we find out that they are actually in different times, about three? years apart, and the boy ends up saving the girl's life by writing to her not to be somewhere at a certain time that he finds out is a disaster her and her family apparently died in, and she listens to him and ends up surviving, to meet him in the real future. I'm not sure, now, if this is the same author of that anime story - I'll have to look that up after I finish the book but not before.
Esme got her glasses renewed and we pick up the new pair today. We've been playing more board games, card games, such. I want to get her more engaged this summer and also taking care of herself better.
Our cat, Lyffan, whose name means frog (not seen is her brother Loki, he was inside sprawled on a countertop near the food) sniffing the Nasturtium flowers I had picked. Our Minion cat is thirteen years old, the black tortoiseshell, she is doing well but has dry skin issues (like her daughter Doxie had much earlier in her life) yet is still so stubborn about wanting to be outside nearly all the time I have to call her in and sometimes go pick her up bodily and bring her in to eat dinner at night.
My brother's birthday is today. I sent him messages. My birthday is next week. I ordered myself a tamagoyaki (Japanese omelet) pan I had been thinking about for a few months, and a new colander for my vegetable washing. Mark said we might go out somewhere for a lunch or something closer to the day - although honestly I always feel like Father's Day and my birthday collide some - ever since that year when I was a kid that I was told 'you can't have a party, Father's Day is the same day as your birthday, no one will come, anyway it's summer and there isn't anybody to ask who isn't already doing something'...and I decided oh, so, nobody will come... I did have a few little parties here and there, not saying I didn't - but I was told that because of where my birthday fell in the month it was really just going to be overlooked by most because they were busy. And that became okay - my birthdays are for me then, to decide where I am in the Universe, and reflect, and that has been mostly what they have been all my life since with a few nice recognitions, an indulgence, like a new pan or a special sandwich here and there, but primarily 'pearls on a string' thinking back where I was last year, where I am now...
Esme has asked a few months ago to try more salads, so we've made two that she enjoys so far.
Green lettuce, black olives, tomato, no dressing (she tried two, doesn't like it at all)
Green lettuce, black olives, mandarin oranges, sometimes with cooked chicken patty cut up and placed on top.
