Annoying pregnancy insomnia strikes again. Basically, half the time if I wake up at 5 am for some reason, I can't go back to sleep till about 7. Today it was mostly because the baby was squirming no matter what position I was in. Honestly, she is not even outside yet, and she's already keeping me awake.

In other news, started learning Swedish for no ( Read more... )

Spent some time writing in my awful Spanish and French on Lang-8. It's a pretty cool site, I registered there a long time ago with grand visions of writing philosophical essays in Japanese. Or one-paragraph stories about what I ate for breakfast, don't remember which now.  You post your atrocious pieces of writing and get corrections from native ( Read more... )

So, for those of you who are wondering whether I´ll end up reading 20 books in February, the answer is no. The reason is because a couple of weeks ago I had decided: I have what, about 4.5 months before the bundle of joy arrives? Why not spend this time learning Spanish! For real. And so I started doing this, and it's going quite well. In the ( Read more... )

I have acquired a bike! Well, rather, a bike has been acquired for me as a birthday present. It's an awesome Trek 7100, and his name is Virgil. Yeah, yeah, all the 'going to Hell' jokes have been said. Funny enough, that's not why he is called Virgil. He is called Virgil because his frame color is listed as 'root beer' in the inventory (for those ( Read more... )

Had my first Yiddish class last night. Of course, I am the only one there whose grandparents didn't speak fluent Yiddish or whose parents spoke Yiddish and used it to talk 'so that kids wouldn't understand'. The crowd obviously differs in ability level, so some people think we are going too slow, some people think we are going too fast (but how ( Read more... )

Looks like my fall and winter Mondays will be busy again. I am going to register for a Yiddish course from October to January (I don't have enough languages occupying my head).

Irish is done. I think we've reached the point at which Irish becomes stupid hard. Occasionally it all clicks into place, and you have hope that you will ever speak this language. The next day you look at the book and it all looks like you have never seen it before (much like it happened during the last class, way to instill confidence). I have ( Read more... )

I figured I might as well refresh my Japanese while there are still remnants of it floating in my brain. The only problem is I left my favourite textbook in Toronto (I think; it might be hiding somewhere in the Wall of Books in this apartment). Got a new edition yesterday on Amazon. Now the question is: how soon do you think I'll find my own copy ( Read more... )

I knew that German language, which I learned in high school and then successfully forgot, would come back one day and bite me in the behind. Today is that momentous day. I had to remember all the German I ever knew and then some, when I was going through the list of Max Planck's works, trying to match them with their English titles. In case you are ( Read more... )

I have lost the ability to speak and write in the English language. I can only spew out strange tech-speak like "the patron's record is retrieved by scanning a barcode on the library card" (you also have to pronounce it "paTRON", so it creates an image of generic individuums all marching with their library cards to the circulation desk to "retrieve ( Read more... )