Ladies, Lattes, Latin, etc.
Today I hosted all the SLU historian girls (Sammy, Katie, Sara, Rebekah, Nichole, Carolyn, Elizabeth, and Meg - there's actually a lot of them now, wow!) for a potluck brunch. I made an egg bake and biscuits and they brought fruits and juices and breads and such. I also set out my whole random assortment of teas and k-cup flavors for the Keurig coffee machine, and promised to make Spanish espresso on the stovetop for lattes. It was a smashing success! Charlie even behaved! (Though it helped that most of them have and love dogs.)
The raison d'être of the event was actually that I had gotten Hobbitus Ille - The Hobbit translated into Latin - for x-mas and thought it would be fun for practicing our language skills if we read it together in a judgement-free environment - aka, a group of cooperative, helpful girls all of whom self-admittedly have "rusty Latin" (whether or not that's really true), rather than the ego-ridden mix of male students who do not engage in sports or war, and thus use academia as as a way to compete and establish hierarchy (blech!). ANYWAY it worked out really well. We sat in a circle, and anyone who felt up to tackling something would read a sentence aloud, and then as a group we'd define the words we knew, look up the ones we didn't, and pieced the sentence back together labeling the grammar workings - "is this word acting as a gerund or a gerundive?" - "crap, what is this 'ut' introducing?" - "'hobbito' is in the dative... why?" until it made sense. Then we'd check it against the English version, and started the process over for the next sentence. We did pretty well! We made a bit of headway into the first chapter, and I think we managed to keep it rather low-key and unintimidating. We're all at totally different levels in the program, with totally different levels of Latin, but we all need practice, and who doesn't love the Hobbit? I was glad to see my Latin skills are still intact and that nothing was too frustrating or confusing.
But we didn't really GET to the Hobbit for a good long while! There was brunch, and chatting, and lattes, and chatting, and seconds, and chatting, and tea, and chatting. I made them espresso three cups at a time on the stovetop, and we used Katie's milk frother-thingy to make good foam. I was so pleased that everyone was quite entertained by the process of making espresso in a cafetera, and Rebekah thought the frother was just too fun. I got a lot of compliments on the lattes, which was wonderful.
It's just so nice to have this many girls around these days. Even though I'm way ahead of most of them in the program (and good god, some of them are like, 22 years old...) it's nice to do things like this to ensure that I'll stay involved with this new set of girls. Its nice to have a group of historians who don't need to just talk about the department or history 24/7 to sustain friendships. We hardly mentioned school at all actually during brunch, which made it all the more relaxing.
We've decided to keep up Saturday girls study day. Maybe not the whole production of a pot-luck brunch at someone's place though... so next Saturday we're going to meet at a really cool nearby coffee shop (It used to be a bank - you can even take tea in the antique vault!) to continue the unexpected party chapter, and then work on whatever we each need to do (I'll probably be grading) while being social and supporting each other. I love this plan.
The raison d'être of the event was actually that I had gotten Hobbitus Ille - The Hobbit translated into Latin - for x-mas and thought it would be fun for practicing our language skills if we read it together in a judgement-free environment - aka, a group of cooperative, helpful girls all of whom self-admittedly have "rusty Latin" (whether or not that's really true), rather than the ego-ridden mix of male students who do not engage in sports or war, and thus use academia as as a way to compete and establish hierarchy (blech!). ANYWAY it worked out really well. We sat in a circle, and anyone who felt up to tackling something would read a sentence aloud, and then as a group we'd define the words we knew, look up the ones we didn't, and pieced the sentence back together labeling the grammar workings - "is this word acting as a gerund or a gerundive?" - "crap, what is this 'ut' introducing?" - "'hobbito' is in the dative... why?" until it made sense. Then we'd check it against the English version, and started the process over for the next sentence. We did pretty well! We made a bit of headway into the first chapter, and I think we managed to keep it rather low-key and unintimidating. We're all at totally different levels in the program, with totally different levels of Latin, but we all need practice, and who doesn't love the Hobbit? I was glad to see my Latin skills are still intact and that nothing was too frustrating or confusing.
But we didn't really GET to the Hobbit for a good long while! There was brunch, and chatting, and lattes, and chatting, and seconds, and chatting, and tea, and chatting. I made them espresso three cups at a time on the stovetop, and we used Katie's milk frother-thingy to make good foam. I was so pleased that everyone was quite entertained by the process of making espresso in a cafetera, and Rebekah thought the frother was just too fun. I got a lot of compliments on the lattes, which was wonderful.
It's just so nice to have this many girls around these days. Even though I'm way ahead of most of them in the program (and good god, some of them are like, 22 years old...) it's nice to do things like this to ensure that I'll stay involved with this new set of girls. Its nice to have a group of historians who don't need to just talk about the department or history 24/7 to sustain friendships. We hardly mentioned school at all actually during brunch, which made it all the more relaxing.
We've decided to keep up Saturday girls study day. Maybe not the whole production of a pot-luck brunch at someone's place though... so next Saturday we're going to meet at a really cool nearby coffee shop (It used to be a bank - you can even take tea in the antique vault!) to continue the unexpected party chapter, and then work on whatever we each need to do (I'll probably be grading) while being social and supporting each other. I love this plan.