IronMike's 2023 log: Fewer means better, right? (EO & RUS)

[IronMike]

Congrats! My life goals are to be

awkward or inaccurate [in] phrasing of ideas, mistaken time, space and person references, or to be in some way inappropriate, if not strictly incorrect.

That explains the entire 40 minutes of my dang OPI!

[Caromarlyse]

That really is wording for the CV, isn't it?!

[IronMike]

Dankon al Radioclare for the tipper to this happening today:



Unfortunately due to 503 errors* I didn't get in till it had been going 50 minutes, but I see it is being recorded, so I'll listen in after.

*This is in no way an attack on Rick & Co. I know they're working their butts off fixing this.

[IronMike]

Since finishing my Russian tests I've gone back to the Middle Egyptian course I started back on November 1st. I wrote to the moderator to inform her that I'd be auditing until I was done testing and she wrote a nice email back. I'm sure she was figuring I'd drop out entirely (and maybe I still will? I dropped Hoch and Coptic over the last 4 years, after all), but I am going through the lessons I missed.

The last exercises I submitted before concentrating on Russian were the third set from chapter one, around mid-December. I've since gone through chapter two (2- and 3-consonant signs; ideograms; variant spellings; plural nouns; royal titles & names; dates). I did all the exercises and checked my answers against the collations the moderator provided after the students submitted. Got most of them correct.

Started chapter three on Thursday (abbreviations; change of order based on prestige or spacing; defective writings; titles; epithets; and the all-important Offering formula). Did the exercises bringing me up to 23 January (all correct!), so about 5 weeks behind. Will do the next set of exercises tomorrow (which'll put me to 30 Jan).

[IronMike]

In chapter 4 of the Middle Egyptian. Good stuff coming up now that we're learning verbs. Quite interesting. The offering formulas were fun, I'm about 2 weeks behind the class now.

Esperanto is coming along. Reading many blog entries from Libera Folio. Also listening to Kern.punkto and Pola Ret-radio. The March Esperanto-Sumoo is coming up 13 March. Haven't decided yet what book I'm going to read for this one.

And of course Russian. Lots of Russian reading due to the current crisis.

[IronMike]

Caught up with the Middle Egyptian class. Submitted last Sunday's homework and got it almost perfect. Just submitted this coming Sunday's homework as we're traveling to Sin City this weekend to visit our son and soon-to-be daughter-in-law.

Esperanto-Sumoo starts Sunday. Gonna bring something to read to Vegas, not sure what yet. Something pb so I don't have to carry anything heavy. I have plenty of novels sitting on my shelves. I'll read one of them.

[IronMike]

OK, so Vegas. Oy.

It's no Reno, thank God. (In Reno, where we stopped when we were moving from Monterey, CA to Washington, DC, we ran by a Starbucks on a Sunday morning before continuing our trip, and we saw more than one person sitting at a slot machine drinking beer (at 9am), smoking and on oxygen.) But Vegas is not my jam, bruh. I'm not into gambling, and sad to say the people we saw in the dozen casinos we went into looked neither hearty nor hale. And the smoking. Too much of it. Drove my nose crazy.

Did hear some foreign languages, so that was nice. Wife and I stayed at Caesars for three nights of the six nights we were visiting our son and DIL. While walking through the Forum Shops of Caesars, we went into a gallery for Vladimir Kush. Lovely, strange, Dali-esque art. We asked the woman running the place if the artist was Russian: she was immediately apologetic: Oh no, he used to be. But he's an American, has been for 20 years. I went out of my way to explain to her that we didn't care if he was Russian, but I'm sure some might have walked in and turned around as soon as they realized the artist is Russian. Sigh...

But I did get to use my Russian for about 10 minutes, which was nice. My wife always gives me crap when I "accidentally" bump into some Russian tourists as an excuse to speak Russian. This time, it was natural. ))

Crazy other stuff too, to include someone stealing my government credit card info AND my Hilton Honors info and booking a room in Tampa. I called the hotel and prep'd them for the a$$hole's arrival. They let him almost check-in, took copies of his ID and credit card, then asked him about stealing my info. He ran out of the hotel. I got my hotel points back.

When we got to Las Vegas, we had to wait over an hour (at 10pm) in a rental car shuttle line till I could get to our rental. Our son came and got my daughter and wife. When I got to the rental car center I stupidly got in line and waited 20 minutes for my car. I say "stupidly" because it turns out I'm a FastBreak member so I could have gone right out to the garage and got into the car. Doh!

Then upon returning to the airport in DC, it took me 4 attempts to finally get an Uber (at 11pm, due to our flight being delayed an hour), and then only by paying a bit more for Uber Comfort. 8 minutes out and the guy cancelled the trip. I then got charged $28 for his trip, as well as $44, $45, and $54 for the three previous attempts (all these via email).

My daughter ordered an Uber and this driver actually came. Then I got an email saying the $28 was refunded. Interestingly, the other 3 charges were not on my Venmo, nor did my bank see them. Crazy weird.

It was nice though to see the boy and his lovely wife.

[IronMike]

Middle Egyptian still going well. Last two weeks we've been working on Nakhtankh's coffin. We're using the British Museum's picture of the coffin, at least for the east side. This Sunday will be the last homework for ch4, then on to ch5 where we get into past tense!

[IronMike]

Still here, just busy. Keeping the Esperanto and Middle Egyptian up. Just submitted the first homework for chapter 5; it was blessedly short. Past tense and familial relationship words, so that's nice. We're half done with the book already.

Reading a new Eo novel: Tiu Toskana Septembro (That Tuscan September). Italian detective story, good start. Simultaneously I'm translating the fantastic Mi Stelojn Jungis al Revado (I hang stars to my dreams) for our writing group. I haven't been coming up with ideas for the writing prompts, and one of the rules of our group allows you to submit something you'd been working on, so... I've translated some chapters from Medalionoj (Medallions), a book about the Holocaust and the others in the group liked them. Medalionoj has an English translation, so I could check my translation against that. Mi Stelojn doesn't have one, so it is more challenging and, frankly, exciting. I'd love to professionally translate that book someday; I think the English-reading public might enjoy it, sad as it is.

[IronMike]

I'll finish Tiu Toskana Septembro in the next day or so. I also had to drop out of NASK this year due to timing. We have to move out of our rental and into our house the week of the Esperanto program. Oh well. At least NASK happens every year.

Since I won't be doing the Esperanto program this summer, I'm going to try and start the BCS class with the DLI instructors early. Who knows. I'll keep reading Esperanto till any BCS class begins.

And now I'm watching Amazing Race season 24 and the contestants must learn some Welsh during a boat trip through an aquaduct. So nice hearing the language. Close to Cornish.