Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selooutside St Petersburg, Russia
November 2004
Just to have SOME visual today
I am OK.
This morning there was a very brief interruption in power at my house and I lost my internet connection. I was not able to get it going again prior to heading out before noon.
The replacement memory stick for my MacBook had arrived and now that we were past the Triduum and Easter Day I was eager to get everything backin place and working. So I ran several errands and headed to the Apple Store. My laptop, on which I do everything, is now in hospital while they install the new memory, then re-image everything (I include this for the few techies out there). Seems that the old ram stick damaged things when partitioning the drive before so one more round of clean slate activities, though with all my date intact. I do not know if I am going to have to reinstall all my applications. Again. For the fourth time.
I stayed in that neighborhood, studying Russian all afternoon, in the hopes that it might be released and good as new in the same day, but no such luck. Just got home from Russian class. Tonight we finally got to the present indicative active of regular verbs! Hooray. We can start making sentences now, though still on a very limited basis. When you only have two hours a week (shortened by a break in he middle) it is hard to make serious headway on a new language.
Anyway, I am home. I am fine. All is well. And, fortunately, I can (on at least a limited basis) make use of my very old desktop to post here. And read mail, though that is a clunky process on this machine.
I am not going to try to catch up on blogging today.
Play nice. Catch you later.
--the BB
5 comments:
Whew.
Goodness,you have had a lot of issues with that, may they be over now for good.
And I finally backed up my mac book, which took me longer to get around to than normal.
I was a little concerned about your whereabouts BTW!
When you speak of your Russian classes, I am often transported to Central Ave, the sight of the UNM on the left and the Frontier on the right as I headed east to go have lunch at a restaurant further down.
The name currently escapes my addled brain and it may no longer be there. It was on the corner of Central and ????
I need to get my brain restored along with the mac!
Be well - good thoughts - many prayers!
Fran, I don't remember the street name either but the Frontier is still there and still good for a green chile cheeseburger. I ate there the night before my first Russian class. Having learned where the classes were held I now park on the west side of UNM rather than the Frontier's south side.
It is nice to have a brain challenge to keep the neurons firing, and Russian certainly is that!
Paul, it's good to have you back, even without your fully functioning computer. The languages with different alphabets must be challenging - well, they would be for me.
Ah, Mimi, I think my ability with other alphabets is profoundly shaped by receptive age. I learned the Greek and Hebrew alphabets when I was twelve (just because I'm curious and am ensorceled by the phenomenon of human languag5e), and semi-learned the Russian and Arabic alphabets also. Greek and Hebrew got used, of course, and the others did not until my first trip to Russia in 2001. Since Russian is similar to Greek, it was easy to resurrect. I have not reinforced Arabic and thus remember none of it.
Because of Cambodian-American members of our congregation in Oakland I tried to learn some Khmer and can speak about five phrases. When I tried to learn more I was utterly undone by the alphabet, which is very complex. I threw up my hands in despair and although I have serveral books on Cambodian on the shelf they only gather dust. What a difference three decades made in my ability to learn new symbol systems!
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