The Perils of Working from Home

Hmm. Wayfair has a standing desk on sale. And it's not very expensive.

It's dead quiet at work. Most of my colleagues are off, and so are people at our libraries.

Got my grocery order with oatmeal. Why do the delivery guys always forget to close the gate? (I'm looking at "Please close the gate" signs on etsy.) A couple (whom I don't know) was walking past my house and said, "Good morning". People are very friendly here. I like Urbana.

Aww. Zara gave me a little kiss. From her, it means something, because she usually isn’t demonstrative. Napped at lunch.

Mimi has decided that when I leave the upstairs home office and come back, that means that I have to let her on my lap. She's making it hard to do my work, so I'm running reports to get data that I can then manipulate to put up on the Web. She also wants to jump on my lap after she naps. The perils of working from home.

I forgot to mention that I think that I found another daylily on the other wide of the house. (And whoops, I was going to take a picture of it for 1SE, but now it’s dark.) There seems to be no rhyme or reason where things were planted. I was thinking about the gardens that I want to create, and I don't think that I'll have much time to work on them as long as I have to mow the lawn. I need to hire someone to mow it. It might be late to get someone this season though. I saw a possibility on Next Door.

I need to develop a house plan. (My life coach would say, "Break it down." Hmm, I have two sessions with her paid for, so maybe I should get her help in making a plan.) I think that I'll work upstairs because I want to get a ceiling fan for my bedroom this weekend and get a handyman in here to put up the doors and air conditioner upstairs and put up the fan and maybe look at the water going outside. I might need to get someone to look at the central air conditioner because something is weird going on with it.

I cranked up Elton John (I can’t work without music) and am working on the music room. ( I still want to work on the upstairs, but I’ll do it in the morning while it’s cool.) Of course, I found a pair of gym shoes that would have been perfect for tai chi while I was sorting stuff. Oh well. And I’m throwing a lot of stuff out.

I was singing “Nothing Compares 2 U” upstairs earlier, while Mimi was taking a nap. She lifted her head and looked at me, and went back to sleep. Everyone’s a critic :) Actually, they both like it when I sing. I don’t know how they’re interpreting it, but it fascinates them. They’re neutral about the piano and hate the guitar.

I’d like to start voice lessons again, but don’t know where the music books are. And I’d like the piano cleared too. Voice lessons kind of suck without a piano, but my teacher was good at providing accompanying piano tracks.

I stopped to eat dinner and it got late. I’ll tackle the music room again tomorrow. I still need to study Italian. And I want to get to bed at a decent hour so that I can work on the upstairs before it gets hot.

I got a manga of Marie Kondo’s book in Italian, which is perfect for me to read. Small amounts of text and lots of pictures! And I’m familiar with the subject matter. (I need to work her method on my clothes. I have too many.) I need to look for more mangas in Italian.

I also got a new gym bag (which is very nice—gray with brown handles). I packed it with gym clothes and shoes and a lock and my weight-lifting journal. I don’t think that I’ll go this weekend because most gym managers are probably taking the weekend off. I have a membership through my health insurance, and some people don’t know how to use it.

I just bought the book The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, My Soul A Memoir of Fulfilled Desire. I have got to read that book. From the description: "One New Year’s Day, Noelle Oxenhandler took stock of her life and found that she was alone after a long marriage, seemingly doomed to perpetual house rental and separated from the spiritual community that once had sustained her. With little left to lose, she launched a year’s experiment in desire, forcing herself to take the plunge and try the path of Putting It Out There. It wasn’t easy. A skeptic at heart, and a practicing Buddhist as well, Oxenhandler had grown up with a strong aversion to mixing spiritual and earthly matters. Still, she suspended her doubts and went for it all: a new love, a healed soul, and the 2RBD/1.5 BA of her dreams. Thus began her initiation into the art of wishing brazenly."

I started studying my Italian flashcards, really I did, but my mind kept wandering. I finally printed off the months of the year in Italian because I was having problems with them, and I'll make physical flashcards and study them. Okay, my flashcards are made.

I need to get to bed so that I don't sleep really late so that I can work on the upstairs and work on mowing the lawn tomorrow during the day.

My Relationship with Foreign Languages

One might ask, why were you studying Italian when you hadn't been to Italy yet? I was thinking of an answer to that, which led me to my relationship with foreign languages in general.

I grew up around foreign languages. My dad immigrated from Lithuania when he was a kid, and the older generation all spoke Lithuanian, which I did not know. My mom's family was from Poland, second generation, and a lot of the older relatives spoke Polish, which I don't speak either. Sometimes it was awkward, when I would hear "blah blah blah Adrienne blah blah blah," and I would sit there with a stupid smile on my face :) But hearing foreign languages is kind of soothing to me? I know that people complain about people speaking foreign languages around them, but I don't feel that way at all. Do I kick myself for not learning Lithuanian and Polish when I was a kid? You bet.

My school started foreign languages in middle school, around 12ish years old for folks not in the US. The choices were French or Spanish, and I took French. Thus began a long love affair with French. I took it from middle school into high school, and placed in Advanced Honors French at university. There I kept it up until I was taking classes with the people who were majoring in French, which I wasn't, so I dropped out. Why didn't you minor in French, Adrienne?

I still think in French occasionally. (I remember being mortified in high school when I found myself trying to translate French into French, not realizing what a good sign that was.) And it's there somewhere. One of the most annoying things about learning Italian is that when I think of how to say something in Italian, my mind pops up with the French first, and I think that the French is right. But the problem with living in the US is that you don't get a chance to use it. One of many reasons that I love the Internet is that it allows me to take language lessons over it. And when I go back and review my French, I suspect that I'll relearn it quite quickly. Last fall, I had a teacher for Italian and French who taught in Italian and French with very little English (just when I needed a word defined), and the French was much easier.

I also took a two-semester class in Chinese over a summer at the end of my university days because I needed some extra credit hours and it sounded cool. Well. Chinese is HARD. Hardest "B" I ever got. Plus I was sick of Chinese by the end of the summer. I remember none of it except "ni hao" (hello).

So, Italian. My mom loved Italy, and she was taking an informal Italian class at a nearby school. I did something similar, thinking that we could practice bad Italian together. I didn't like the class, but it got me interested in Italian. I bought Rosetta Stone in Italian, and worked with that a little, only to find that I didn't like it as a language-learning method. Then I saw an Internet ad for online tutoring, and I thought that I'd try Italian. I did that for a few months, but then my teacher needed to take some time off. In the meantime, I saw an post about a group Italian class that someone was having, so I joined it. I did the class for a few months and liked the teacher, but we were having problems finding a time that was good for everyone, so we switched to private lessons. That was working well, but then my teacher decided to go back to school for a Master's Degree, so he stopped teaching.

Somewhere in there, I fell in love with the language.

So, I was looking for an Italian teacher again. I chose someone who also taught French, thinking that it would be good to have someone who did both. This was the teacher who taught in Italian and French, which was good, but her idea of teaching was to march through the grammar book. I can teach myself grammar mostly on my own, but I really need conversation practice. Plus we had problems scheduling the Italian lessons, so I took more French lessons from her than Italian. Then I dropped out when I was moving and taking my programming classes. I intended to start back up with her, but decided that I didn't like the way that she was teaching.

So I'm in search for teacher #4. I hope that the teacher that Mimmo found will work out well. I intend to tell her to make me speak the language a lot. And also that I want to learn "practical Italian", so I can get myself in trouble wandering around Italy. And if we're reviewing grammar, let me do most of the work as homework.

I might need to learn Lithuanian someday because I'm eligible for a Lithuanian passport, which would give me an EU passport, which would make spending an extended length of time in Europe easier.