Not all those who wander are lost

[sfuqua]

Well the gods have answered some requests and not others.

It is raining here in San Jose. Cold blowing rain. It rained yesterday. It is supposed to rain tomorrow and the next day and then later in the week. There is a little flooding from clogged drains. Nice.

There are the requests that are not answered. I spent the day in the hospital again with my wife. Her heart keeps throwing symptoms, even though the doctors seem to have already worked through most of their strategies. Frustrating and frightening. She's home now. She had a few good weeks of exercise, but this morning she couldn't climb the stairs to her room to teach.

We fight on, we fight on to victory.

I have been pretty critical of the country where I was born. I have often felt like an outsider here. Perhaps this is because of my values, or perhaps it is just because my family moved around a lot, so I never developed a "home" . I lived in eight different cities getting through my first 18 years of life, so most of the time I had the wrong accent for wherever I lived. It wasn't nearly as hard as what kids go through who change countries and languages during their school years, but I don't have a bunch of childhood friends that I still know...

Anyway, sometimes things happen that remind you of where your roots are. I've talked several times about being English, Irish, Viking or whatever, at least as far as my DNA goes. But there is another part of the story. Pretty much all of my ancestors left England before 1750 and moved to Virginia and Maryland. This slice of England was part Irish, Scottish, Anglo Saxon, and Scandinavian, just as a similar slice would probably be today, leaving out more recent immigrant families. Anyway this slice of England moved to Kentucky after the Revolutionary War. There they mostly stayed, and later waves of immigration from Europe never reached there. Anyway, my ancestors were from Kentucky for several generations back. All of them. Even though I only lived in Kentucky for about 3 years (my parents left there after WWII). I was born after they left, but I always went there to visit relatives as I was growing up, and in some ways Kentucky was more of a constant in my life than the towns we lived in. Bowling Green Kentucky is where my mother's family is from. Everyone there is some sort of cousin. Everyone. But strangely enough my close relatives have all moved away from there. But the town is mostly second cousins.

In 1998, I was teaching at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. After class the sirens went off to tell us that there was a tornado no more than 10 minutes away. My wife and son were at home alone, and since we had just moved to the United States, I wasn't sure that they knew how to get to shelter if a tornado hit. I got to my car in the parking lot, and the tornado was visible one one side of me while my family was in the other direction. It was coming toward us rapidly, so I decided to run in front of it to get to my family before they were hit. I wanted to be with them. I took off down the road. I didn't look in the rearview mirror much. The cloud was wide and ugly, not a graceful funnel cloud at all. I was able to stay ahead of it. It took out a gas station. It ate a huge Barnes and Noble bookstore. As I started to get near the apartment where we lived, debris and hail started to hit the car and around the car, and a huge roar started to get closer and closer. I got home and ran into the apartment with stuff hitting around me. I kept my backpack over my head because it looked like it would be pretty easy to get knocked out or have one's ear torn off. When I got in the apartment I found my family exactly where I planned to go with them, in a walk-in closet away from windows. The neighbour and her kids were in the closet too, and I put my arms around them also as we lay on the floor, the roaring increased, and it got dark. Windows broke, and suddenly the roaring began to subside, and it got lighter. There was some broken glass on the floor. There was still a huge amount of rain, hail and stuff coming down. I told the family to stay in the closet while I checked outside. Sometimes after a storm big debris or even cars can fall out of the sky minutes after the main cloud passes. When I went outside I could see that every tree was stripped and every car parked there had broken windows including ours. Our apartment complex was missing windows, but was not badly damaged.

I stood there and thought about how close things had been and I started laughing. I was still laughing when my wife stuck her head out a minute later. She said, "Are you crazy? Look at the destruction." I answered, "You don't get it. We're alive."

A building was destroyed just before the tornado reached us. Houses were destroyed after the tornado passed us. We were spared.

Things didn't go so well for Bowling Green last Friday night. A bigger tornado, an EF-3, hit the town at night. It blew debris 10 000 metres into the air. Many people were asleep. People couldn't see the storm coming. 500 homes were completely destroyed. Many, many more damaged. 15 people died in the town. Many are missing. Many of the dead were children. Hundreds of businesses were destroyed. The whole town seems traumatised, as one might expect. I would include pictures, but that seems ghoulish, and you've all seen destroyed towns before. The true horror of it only kicks in when you know the place...

Anyway, my cousins are all OK, as far as I can tell. One cousin I was worried about was at her son's house and didn't even know that a big storm had hit.

Anyway, in their time of trouble, I am reminded that I am from Kentucky, whether I grew up there or not.

[Cerebral_Arbitrage]

Sfuqua, I wanted to send you and your wife my best. I hope you both are hanging in there. And by the way, your tornado story is absolutely insane - like a scene from a movie. I'm glad your particular movie had a happy ending.

[iguanamon]

Anyway, in their time of trouble, I am reminded that I am from Kentucky, whether I grew up there or not.

As a native Kentuckian who left for the Virgin Islands, I can relate to this. There's a quote that Happy Chandler once said that I think is appropriate. Happy was a former Governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, twice. He left Kentucky to become the Commissioner of Major League Baseball who approved the entry of Jackie Robinson as the first African American to break the race barrier in MLB.

I never met a Kentuckian who wasn't thinking about going home or actually going home

You've gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you're studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.

edit: edited for syntax.

[galaxyrocker]

I never met a Kentuckian who wasn't thinking about going home or actually going home

You've gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you're studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.

That quotes by Chandler and Echols hit hard at times like this. I'm from the western half of the state, thankfully there were no fatalities, and few if any really serious injuries, in my hometown. Lots of damage, though, former student lost everything in their house, while also expecting their first child in February, and I know several others who lost houses in it. Thankfully none of my friends or family were affected apart from lost internet; really makes you realize how lucky. I lived in Bowling Green for years, and the tornado came within a mile of where we used to live, though thankfully my roommate didn't really notice anything or even get much damage. It's going to be really weird driving through it when I'm back home fro the holidays though, and visiting all of those people. Thankfully, again, it doesn't seem like any of my friends had anything serious happen, but not all were as lucky.

It's shocking for me, even being half a world away currently. Can't imagine how it is for those back home.

[iguanamon]

My sister went to WKU and lived in Bowling Green for several years. Kentucky is a small enough state that everybody knows somebody or is related to somebody. I have worked in Mayfield and Bowling Green in my job. The extent of the devastation is shocking. It reminded me of post-Hurricane Maria here. My heart goes out to those who are suffering.
One last quote:

Living away from my native place I became more consciously Kentuckian than I was when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do, change your mind, utterly transform one's perception of the world of home.

Edit: I just learned that bell hooks passed away last night in Berea, Kentucky at age 69. She was an author and an intellectual giant. May she rest in power.

[luke]

My trip to visit family, which I've done several times this year takes me through the heart of Kentucky. Google maps uses a shortcut and about an hour or two of the drive is on small roads (one lane each direction). But BEAUTIFUL!

I was telling my sister how beautiful Kentucky is. That's saying a lot, because where they live is also beautiful, but not Kentucky's rolling hills.

To my brother, I mentioned that this looked like a GREAT place to grow up or raise a kid. When we were kids, being able to run around "in the woods across the street" was a great part of being a kid. We were on the edge of town. All these years later, that's no longer the edge of town, but Kentucky took me back to those good parts about growing up.

Hope your wife is feeling well today!

[sfuqua]

It seems that the goddess has decided to punish both sides of our family with apocalyptic weather. The Filipino half of the family was hit with a super typhoon earlier in the week. Nobody died, but the part of Leyte where most of the folks live experienced 200 kph sustained winds with gusts up to 300 kph and a two to three metre storm surge. They got out of the way and got to higher ground before it hit, but property damage was pretty complete -- roofs off, water and mud everywhere.
There isn't power or cell signal where they live and there won't be for a while. They are in a state of shock, and I guess we are too. Here we go again. I think that the family "travel to Europe" fund is about to become the "Rebuild houses" fund.

Like much of the world, I find myself getting frustrated by the continuing pandemic. My daughter is getting discouraged about the future, and that is a bad look for a 15 year old. Her trip to Germany next summer got cancelled, and I wonder if they will ever do such trips again. Anyway, today she said that she just wants to get really good in German. She talked again about trying to move to Europe when she gets older. Sounds OK to me.

I just can't seem to find the motivation to push myself through a few months of building up my French and Portuguese skills, at least not right now. I think it would be a logical thing to do, but at this point, I need something strange to distract from yet another covid wave.

A few months (or years?) ago, I set up some anki decks for Latin and Ancient Greek. I got Anki decks Milner's Latinum course on Adler's Latin text and the Ollendorff Greek course. I combined these decks with decks I made from the Assimil Latin, and Ancient Greek books. The Assimil decks are extremely rough. I used Google translate for the Latin course and Yandex for the Greek cards. Both decks are riddled with errors. Whenever I hit a card for the first time, I need to check the translation, which is in itself a learning experience. I also have an 8000 note shared deck that covers Wheelock's Latin. I have ebook copies of all of the books involved with this, and physical copies for the Assimil and Wheelock books. I have the Assimil audio for these courses and the audio for Milner's version of the Adler Latin course.

I got all of this, and then didn't follow through before, I've been fooling around with them the past few days. It is nice to study something that takes me far away from the here and now.

This forum is full of people who know more about Latin and Greek than I do. My first impression is that Latin is too hard to learn, and Greek is just ridiculous, nobody ever spoke that language, it is just a joke to abuse students.

Roman civilization was obviously sick. To think of all of those babies being forced to learn to drill declensions and conjugations before they were allowed to ask for food. Of course the same thing must happen to Russian children today. Poor kids.

I actually studied Latin for two years in high school, or more to the point goofed off and didn't do my homework through two years of Latin in high school. The first year my teacher actually intended to teach something, and I think I learned a little. The teacher for the second year didn't teach anything, but we did talk about Roman history a lot, and I did develop a love for classical civilization. I've read a bunch of Greek and Roman authors in translation, and I always enjoyed them.

Right now I'm pretty happy just fooling around with Latin and Greek. I may suspend the Greek deck and just work on Latin for a while. There seems to be a tradition in some schools to do Latin first and then Greek later. We'll see.

[BeaP]

Like much of the world, I find myself getting frustrated by the continuing pandemic. My daughter is getting discouraged about the future, and that is a bad look for a 15 year old. Her trip to Germany next summer got cancelled, and I wonder if they will ever do such trips again. Anyway, today she said that she just wants to get really good in German. She talked again about trying to move to Europe when she gets older. Sounds OK to me.

Don't let her be discouraged. There are a lot of jobs here where a native English speaker has huge advantages. You can even get a decent pay as a teacher, as the number of private schools offering bilingual education is rising. There are also a lot of programmes helping students to study at foreign universities. She's so young that she has time to change her mind a 100 times and to correct a 100 mistakes. All opportunities are there, even if she has to wait a bit. The pandemic will be over or people will adapt to it.

[sfuqua]

My wife is doing much better and my daughter seems more upbeat. I'm walking in the cold mostly between rain. It may snow tonight, which will be the second time I have seen snow here in the past 24 years. Our rainy season is doing great; we are ahead of where we are on an average year at this time and we are already 45% of the average amount that we get in an entire rainy season. Just keep it up rain gods, just keep it up...
Between rains, the wildlife is starting to go through some of the things that they do in Spring. With no big, freezing winter, different species seem to pick different times to go through the annual cycles of life. Geese have started flying around in pairs, and the squirrels (I think the males), have started running around aggressively near their home trees; some are even squawking and cursing from their trees. Most of the trees that lose their leaves have lost them by now. It is California winter.
If it snows, it will melt shortly after dawn. I plan to get up to look for it; it will snow in the mountains around us, but it may not get down into the valley where we live.

I'm back on my ASSiMiL deck for French and Spanish. I dropped Portuguese, even though it would be a great language to learn. I just don't think I can maintain the three languages. At some point, I think I want to just read in the languages, and use anki to maintain languages. I can see alternating between Spanish and French, but adding a third one might bring progress to a stop.

I'm troubled by a strong wanderlust for ancient languages. I think my problem is that I would love to be able to read and understand the three big languages, the Romance language, well. I actually enjoy studying Latin, Greek, Ænglisc, Norse, Irish(not ancient, but almost gone), etc more. I've got to decide whether I have the patience to push ahead with the more logical Romance languages, or if I want to enjoy the present and just fool around with ancient languages.

I only have so many hours in the day, so I can't do both. At least I don't think so.

One of the many approaches I find appealing would be to just concentrate on Old English. Old English seems to be supported by a much smaller community than Latin or Greek. Many people study it, but fewer become obsessed with it. Or that's my impression anyway. There are a couple of things I might do which would help the community. I have been threatening to add Old English to the espeak-ng project. To do that, I think I would like to install Linux on my computer again. Right now, I have Windows on it, so that my wife can use it, but lInux is so much better for development, at least for me.
The other thing that I might do is to make an anki deck of the http://www.oldenglishaerobics.net/resources/magic_letter.pdf Old English Magic sheet. This is a pretty famous resource for Old English and I think that a good anki deck might make it easier to internalise.

It is popular these days in the United States to talk about how much people in different regions and different political parties dislike each other, as if we didn't have any problems until recently. A couple of things happened recently which reminded me of what happened to me fifty years ago in Virginia. I had just arrived after high school with my mixed up Minnesota and Massachusetts accent, and I went to buy something at a store. Literally the first person I talked to in the state, picked up on my accent and said, "You ain't from around here, are ya, boy." I answered that I had just arrived, and he asked, "Are you some kind of God D****d, N****r loving Yankee?" I, at least, had the good sense to answer that I was exactly what he said. The United States has always had nasty divisions and stupid people. I didn't have many friends in Virginia. Stupid things like this happened pretty frequently. If I were an idiot, I might have generalised about the former states of the Confederacy.

However, the United States also has a lot of great people. A few years later, after I finished college in California, I was driving across the United States to Virginia, where my parents lived, from California. In Texas, my junk car broke down, and I had no money. I was in big trouble. A Texan family, who ran a hotel, took me in, gave me a room, supper and breakfast, loaned me tools to fix my car and took me to Western Union where I got enough money to buy car parts and gas to get the rest of the way to Virginia. After I fixed my car, the family all came outside and waved at me as I drove away.

We're doing better, and I'm pretty happy.

[sfuqua]

Hmmn, it looks like I'll be concentrating on Spanish for a while...

I had an interesting discussion with my wife this morning. She brought up moving to Spain. Who knows if it will come to anything, but it was an interesting discussion. It is funny how one can live with someone for 32 years and talk to them every day, and still get surprised.

Please don't warn Spain.

Anyway, I have been bouncing around between languages for the past few years partly because I never met a language that I didn't find fascinating and partly because I don't really have any practical reason to concentrate on any one language. If I have a good reason, I think I might be able to control my wanderlust.

Spanish, in its many forms, is so cool...

I'm already at an advanced level in Spanish, which means that I can do a lot of normal things with the language, and call them studying. Because language learning through immersion is like a snowball rolling down a hill, the better you get the faster you learn.

I shadowed 20 pages of my old favourite, La reina del Sur. I studied 600 anki cards in Spanish. The anki deck is too easy and needs some sentences from García-Márquez or something.