Interesting Day

Interesting day, today. Several different reasons.

For one, I actually got to talk with a woman with whom I'd exchanged notes on the Forvo site. She's a volunteer editor near France, trying to learn English, and I'm a volunteer editor here, trying to learn French, so we've exchanged notes several times about the way to say things -- usually, how the French or the Americans would say something (we say it this way, usually....) but sometimes correcting spelling or grammar (she'd remind me, for example, that a sentence which starts with Je aime really should be spelled J'aime). On more than one occasion, she'd said she wished she had someone with whom she could speak in English, and I'd offered to talk with her on Skype. Today, she took me up on it, and we spoke for about half an hour. Turns out that her French accent is not nearly as thick as she told me it was, and she was usually able to understand me as long as I didn't use long words, and spoke slowly. Similarly, she said that my French accent was pretty good, and applauded when I understood a sentence in French (about ten percent of our conversation was in French; like her, I needed it to be said slowly, and, truth to tell, I had to guess at the composite meaning of the sentence). We'll talk again, I think. That was pretty cool.

I've been reading Ten Letters, a book about ten letters which were written to Obama (he gets twenty thousand a day, and six days a week he sees and responds to ten of them, selected by his staff). It's an encouraging and a sad book -- encouraging because people are actually getting through the presidential bubble, and getting a response; sad because it highlights how incredibly hard ordinary people are having it, battered by the recession and it secondary effects. Others in the book are fiercely conservative, screaming at the President. That level of hatred -- how can we ever overcome that? When what one side thinks is a very good thing is thought intolerable by the other, and political leadership is as polarized as they are -- I doubt one person can.
Also reading Six Frigates, about the founding of the US Navy, which started with the construction of, you guessed it, six frigates (almost immediately cut back to three). The book is amazing in its descriptions of, of all things, the days of the French Revolution, when the guillotine was so heavily used, the gutters in the streets literally ran with blood. I like this book so much, I want to buy it. Not to mention, read more French history. Am I becoming a Francophile? Maybe just a bit. Last night, sitting in the recliner, cat on my lap, listening to a CD of French singers while I read -- so nice.

Yesterday I had chocolate cake at my sister in laws house, and it was incredible. We brought a bit home, and it's still good. So often cake is, at best, chawklit, with a heavy texture and a heavy icing. The kind of thing usually labelled as Death by Chocolate. This has a light texture, with a butter cream icing. Very rich. Makes me want to bake again, I tell you. Not that I could ever do anything this good, but still.

We think that we're going to redecorate the room that my mother had used as her living room. Our daughter really doesn't want us to -- you can still open the door and see my mother where she so often was, sitting, bundled up, at the table, and my daughter likes that -- but we think it's time. Not the least because we expect to have multiple visitors this summer. About which, well, I don't know if they're really coming. My guess is about a sixty percent chance. If they do - I hope they do! - we want the room to look nice for them. Make them feel welcome.

So, interesting day.