Response to a Recent Comment

To Frank, thanks for your encouragement about learning Italian. As soon as I get past "Hi, how are you?" (how do you stay?) Maybe I will start looking for some other resources, like some reading material to try and translate, and then maybe I can find myself a conversation group. I recently learned to order a glass of wine at a restaurant. I consider that essential, but my first thought was, wait, I need to order a whole bottle! I now own an Italian-English dictionary.

My husband agreed to learn with me, but I can see he now regrets that. He joked that maybe he would just learn to say, "My wife speaks Italian." He feels that it is impossible to learn a language in a year, and he is right. But, I feel that I can have a pretty good clue by then. We were supposed to watch a lesson twice per week, but that already hasn't happened. Our plan was to do this Sunday and Tuesday, but we both got out of work late yesterday (Tuesday) and we agreed to meet and go food shopping together. By the time we got home it was 8pm, so no one was in the mood to learn Italian at that point.

My husband is a plumber. Sometimes he can get a little bit dirty on the job. Sometimes he gets a lot dirty. I could not believe what he looked like when I met him at the supermarket yesterday. He had just pulled a well pump and was completely splashed with mud. When I spoke to him earlier he said he was going back to the shop to wash up, and he did, but his clothes were still crazy. I like when he comes with me, because we talk and laugh while we shop, so we quickly got into that mode and I forgot about what he looked like, but I wonder what people thought when they saw him. It's just funny to think about.

Back to Italian, what is the deal with those verbs??? You say each verb 20 different ways, depending on who you speak to or who is doing the speaking, and past, present, future, etc. Obviously we have things like this in English, i.e. you go, she goes, she went, but Italian is extreme. Still, I refuse to be daunted!I will soldier on.

So now about Gay, Michigan. I mispoke when I said it was near Copper Harbor. I said that because I didn't feel like looking up the word Keweenaw. Gay is a little town on the eastern side of the Keweenaw penninsula. Copper Harbor is at the tip of the Pennisula, not really that close to Gay. While I was looking to see how to spell Keweenaw, I found that Gay actually has a Wikipedia page, and they have a picture of the Gay Bar sign! I have also learned that they have a 4th of July parade every year, locally known as the Gay parade. Cute.

Thanks to everyone and anyone who has commented lately. It's the only way I know anyone looks at this blog. I was never able to figure out what is wrong with my Google Analytics, so I don't know how many people stop by. One day in the middle of July, 11 people from Brazil looked at it. I have no idea what that is about.

Capisci?

Tu parli e capisci Italiano? (Do you speak and understand Italian?)



Not yet, but I'm working on it.



I am using a program called Mango to learn Italian. I saw a little flyer for it at the library. Weird, because I was thinking about my options in my previous post. You have to pay to use Mango on line, but since my library subscribes to it, I can do it for free! I made Joe promise that we would do this 2 times per week, Tuesdays and Saturdays. We did it together this past Tuesday, and it went real well. I am way ahead, though. I've been doing a lesson every day at work at lunch time, and I am now on lesson 4. It is HARD! Sometimes I just want to put my head down on the desk and groan. I took German in High School, and the similarities to English are notable. Not so much with Italian. And, like so many languages, Italian has formal and casual ways of saying the same thing, plus different ways to say things depending if the subject is male of female. It was the same with German. All of this is good exercise for my brain. My goal is to see how much Italian I can learn in a year. At some point I will want to seek out some people who speak Italian and try talking to them, but I need some time to get past, "Hi, how are you?"

Apart from learning Italian, I am trying to have a nice summer. We went to the Jersey Shore Sunday, Seaside Heights to be exact. We like the crazy boardwalk. The people watching is primo, and I just don't feel right if a summer goes by and I haven't had a sausage and pepper sandwich and Kohr's Ice cream. It's a Jersey thing. There was a good band playing on the beach called Swamp Donkey. One of the people in the band was wearing purple shiney hi-top sneakers, yellow socks, purple shorts and yellow t-shirt. Just based on that, I loved him.

We will also go to Cape May in August, thanks to generous friends who rent a house there for 3 weeks and invite us for one of the weekends. Cape May is a whole different deal than Seaside. I think the people who visit Cape May are a little different, because it is more expensive and a little calmer. If you want to party, you should drive a little ways north to Wildwood. If you want to party you most likely don't really care about Victorian Architecture, anyway, which is half the point of Cape May.

Kate's 26th birthday was yesterday, happy birthday, Kate!