Carrot Cake!

Tired today. I was up late watching the news and reading the news and reading my book. I already took a nap, but might lie down for another hour (done).

I've aborted my trip out, mostly because I'm wearing a pair of jeans that slide down on me. I don't want to wrangle them in a store. And I have my carrot cake mix to make for dessert.

Got the carrot cake in the oven after spattering the oven with batter as I mixed it. Sigh. Need to go clean up in a minute.

Freshly baked carrot cake is delish.

Talked to Mom. My aunt has been in the hospital because she collapsed, but the doctors think it was anxiety. Anyway, she's having a tough time finding someone to help her when she goes home, and she's taking her frustrations out on my mom.

German was typically hard. I'm at the point when I kind of dread the lessons, but it will get better. I don't dread Italian anymore.

Language Meme

From belleweather on DW

1st foreign language learned
French

1st language you self studied
Esperanto

Language you wished was your native language
Italian. I love it so much.

Language you wish you studied more
Chinese. I took two semesters of it in one summer, and then never did anything with it again, and forgot all of it. Sigh.

Language you wish wasn't so hard
Chinese. It's tough.

Language you have officially quit
I don't think that I offically quit anything. Just go around in circles.

Language you wish you could speak everyday
Italian.

Language that everyone speaks but you never want to try
Spanish doesn't call me, although it's supposed to be easy for Italian speakers. Japanese also doesn't interest me much.

Language everyone speaks and you want to try
Oh man. Chinese and Portuguese. And I just started German.

Language that makes you nervous
Chinese because it's so easy to say something that you didn't intend.

Language that feels soothing
French

Language that feels like a businessman in a suit
German

Language that feels like grandma's home cooking
Italian, although if it really was my grandmother, it should be Lithuanian or Polish.

Language that feels like a mad scientist’s experiment
German

Language you think is overrated
Spanish

Language you think is underrated
Italian

Language with the hardest pronunciation
Chinese, Chinese, Chinese. Tonal languages are a bear.

Language with the easiest pronunciation
Italian

Language with the easiest grammar
Chinese

Language with the hardest grammar
Polish? Russian? German?

Language with the best writing system
Chinese. Chinese characters are cool!

Language with the worst writing system
Polish? At least for an English speaker. None of the letters are pronounced the way that you would think.

Your language learning guilty pleasure?
Can't think of one. I need to watch more movies in Italian.

High Alert

PSA: For those of you who want to add me on Dreamwidth, I'm also days_unfolding over there.

Putin has put his nuclear weapons on high alert. Lovely. He IS trying to start World War III. I realize that I'm lucky to be on a different continent from him. However, my ancestors are from Lithuania and Poland, which Putin would like to take over. But nuclear weapons go everywhere.

Wow. Look at all the people in Berlin protesting the invasion in the Ukraine. I read an article that said that Putin has got the members of NATO on the same page, which didn't seem possible.

Italian went okay, except for a power failure at my teacher's house. We spent our conversation time talking about the war in the Ukraine. He's concerned because most of the gas in Italy comes from Russia. I'm learning conditional tense. Soon I'll know as much grammar as I used to know in French, but a lot less vocabulary, so I need to work on it.

Lay down for a nap but couldn't shut my brain off. Just as well because I have lots of stuff to do.

I studied some Italian and German on Fluent Forever, which is an app on my phone. It's not good for grammar, but great for pronunciation and vocabulary.

Ran out and got soda and munchies. I bought a frozen Shepherd's Pie to make for dinner. And I cleaned Walgreens out of diet root beer.

I'm sitting for a moment, but Zara's telling me it's feeding time. My work is never done. My mom was saying yesterday that food takes too much time. First you have to shop for it, then you have to prepare it, then you eat it, and then you do the dishes. She thinks that it's too much trouble.

Now I'm feeling exhausted, so I want to go to bed early. It's still a little too early, so I'll go write. Nope, too tired, so I'll declutter the kitchen and put stuff away. Oh hell. I need to get the garbage out (done).

Wrote an email to my dad about languages, the fact that we might go remote permanently at work, and the war in the Ukraine. (He's in Nevada, and we mostly communicate via email.)

I'm beat. I'm going to do my nighttime tasks and crash, and get up early, I hope, and get more stuff done before work.