One small layer of my brain says I should be cleaning - I'm doing some laundry - I should be baking more madeleines because I'll eat them, but there are no eggs (except under chickens) as they were all boiled and fed to dogs. Instead I'm practicing my French to Spanish, because I keep reaching 'through' the French to get the Spanish from the English... and that is just how my brain is set up. I will be doing my Russian lessons later, as well, but for now, this seemed to be the rubber-band effect I needed in my brain.
Spanishdict.com : using that for 'blind' retrieval of Spanish words from English - and that is hard - spelling them and not grabbing the French word. When I consistently keep reaching for the French, I've been writing it down on a list of things to practice, to connect the three angles of the triangle (French--English--Spanish) a bit better.
Mark made me the extra colors of the pushpin magnets I was asking for - the red for French a week or so ago, and now the blue for Spanish - and I've been putting them to use this morning putting up the words I have a hard time grabbing the Spanish word (blue) for from the French (red). And as I was reaching through this brain network I sat down and drew a little map of some of what it feels like where languages are stored. Of course, the more I work with a language recently, the more it takes up more space and connects in with other things. That 'pool' of blue for Spanish isn't completely a good thing - because it is pooled there half isolated and hard to retrieve. But there is always the base of French, ASL And English that were there in my infancy.. wrapped and flowing through everything - and everything else gets connected and shoved in and around it like a big squishy purse or drawer where the files are not well organized.
(separate thought : perhaps Latvian shouldn't be such a tiny dot, I recognize and can insert words on Clozemaster far better than I do many of the others - although I get 10/10 on French there, and 9/10 on Spanish, getting 7/10 on Latvian, which I've barely studied, is nothing to sneeze at, and I do a pretty good job on BaltoSlav languages on Latvian words and Ba ba dum has Lithuanian that is closest, flag striped yellow/green/red : I have played a bit more on Bern Istaba as well, the children's site for Latvian similar to the English site Starfall Esme used to play on)
But I have swept and put the rugs in the laundry - I'm afraid perhaps the valve is leaking again, but we have to pull everything out to look at it, take the screws out of the wall and shut off the water - I've cleaned the floors in several places, looked in the fridge for anything to chuck out and so forth... with the truck not easy to get to town in, I don't want to get into a plumbing job or other major project. If the valve is leaking, it is a tiny trickle that I have only barely noticed from a low spot in the garage floor that holds the water there if it gets there... So many more things need to be dusted and cleaned, it is neverending. And this is my first day off that didn't automatically come with 'ten other things' planned for me to do, so I've been sort of drifting from one thing to another and not held fast onto any one big thing I have to do today. I haven't done a shred of art in a long time, well maybe a sketch or two, and the language map above probably counts in some way.
I did go look at the garden - everything has been very wet and is wanting warmth and sunshine, maybe even some fertilizer. I pulled some weeds, fed the chickens, gave them fresh water - and Mark and Esme are doing things with the greenhouse plants.
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