Sunday Morning

Today I discovered that the Nutella-filled tortillas are rather nice -- though they're a bit sloppy to make, what with the melted butter on the outside and melting Nutella on the inside, they do dry enough so that's not really a problem. You've got to have your act together, though -- can't be going to look for something while the tortilla's cooking. Also, I found that cooking the tortilla with a pan lid atop it helped a bit -- they were tending to puff up when cooking (though they did deflate later), but with the lid, not so much. I think we'd make them again. To be honest, I'd love to see what that'd be like with crepes. I make lousy crepes. I'd like to get better at that. I think that crepes work better when someone is cooking them while you're still eating -- when we do it, it seems like they cool pretty quickly, even when put into something to warm them. Yet another reason to have staff. I also want to try making croissants again. In theory they're easy to make; in practice, not. Not for me, anyway.

Since I joined that French Etc site (the one where I'm getting half-hour language lessons directly from the woman who runs it; she says they have a staff, but it looks like she does pretty much all of it; she must work very, very hard), I've been getting mailings from them about their podcasts. I'm not a big podcast listener, because I haven't figured out an easy (for which read: hands-off) method of getting the podcasts to a portable format. I'd like to be able to just plug my MP3 player into the laptop and have the transfer automagically happen (can smart phones do that, I wonder?) but I don't know how. If I want to listen to a podcast on the player, I have to physically find it in the RSS reader and move it. (Oh, the agony; oh, the travail.) But yesterday I took the time to actually listen to the podcast, and you know what? Its actually pretty good. She has a nice sense of timing, so while you get breaks to repeat what she says, you don't get a lot of dead air time; plus, she repeats stuff after she's gone through it once, which I like. I am glad that I went to those French Immersion courses, but if I had known about this web site, I'd have done this, instead. It worked out to be $12.50 a half hour for the Immersion, and I 'spoke' for about 6 minutes, at most; this is $20 a half hour, and I speak about 20 minutes -- including specific corrections, role plays, and general conversation. I'm still a little tense about doing it (am I going to sound like an idiot this time?), but I like it. And at half an hour a shot, it lasts long enough to get me going, not so long that I get bored.

Saw a girl at church today -- couldn't tell if she was in her late teens or mid-twenties - who looked as if she was going for a retro look, from a miniskirt to soft leather boots to a patterned headband. She looked really nice. I wanted to tell her that, but she left early. Just as well. I'm given to understand that for a guy my age to say that to someone her age can very easily come across as creepy.