Southern Living

I don't take many magazines anymore, in fact I only take one: Southern Living.  All its articles, pictures, recipes are about the South, from Maryland to Texas and all the places in between.  That's where we live so I love reading about this part of the country.  It helps us plan trips, gives good gardening tips and has the best recipes anywhere.  One year for our daughter's birthday I made a Key Lime Pie for her based on their recipes.
But more than anything else I love the pictures.  A couple of months ago they had a pictorial on growing lettuces in containers.  One of the pictures really caught my eye and I knew I had to paint it.  Finished it yesterday and it's upstairs drying so we can frame it and hang it.  Have to put it some where in the kitchen.

My Painting

Languages

I saw a funny little blurb somewhere, can't remember where, that soon China will be the largest English speaking country in the world.  It always amazes me how other nations insist on their  citizens learning another language, usually starting at a young age, and a foreign language is not a requirement in high school or in many colleges here in the States.
There was a joke I heard when I was a Bilingual teacher:
What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages?   Trilingual
What do you call a person who speaks 2 languages ?   Bilingual
What do you call a person who speaks 1 language?  An American

It's sad but true.  Other than people who grew up in a home where a foreign language was spoken most Americans only speak English, and not even that very well.
I've lost a lot of my Spanish since I retired from teaching and don't speak it every day, but I'll never forget it, and keep several Spanish textbooks on my Kindle so I can practice a bit from time to time.

I speak a bit of German too, what I call kitchen German, I can shop, order food and ask directions.  We lived in Germany and I took classes in it, but we lived on an American base and didn't have to use it daily.  If you don't use it you'll definitely lose it.

Mac grew up in a house where the parents spoke Spanish to each other, but not to their kids (not after the first one because the school complained when he started school and he didn't speak English) and though he understands it, has a great accent, can really trill those "r's", he doen't really speak it.  In college he took German and when we lived in Turkey he really got quite good at Turkish,  a language I could never get a handle on.

I think learning a foreign language is important, our daughter took German classes when we lived in Germany, French all the way through high school, Spanish in college and Japanese classes for years.  She says that she regrets that she didn't do an undergraduate degree in linguistics.

On April 16 Dawn Treader  at Beyond the Lone Islands wrote about what languages she could speak and read in, I was amazed.  It made me feel very uneducated.

What do you think?

I Need a Mulligan

Using our backyard and the putting green we golfed today and Mac absolutely skunked me.  He even eagled one hole.    Whereas my long game, or what passes for a long game in our backyard was totally off.  I had to take a drop because of one lie (we're talking major stickerweed infestation here) and had to hit left handed for another.  I had a beautiful putt going and my ball decided to stop and  just sit on the lip of the cup.  Mac made an almost identical putt and his went in.   My only excuse is that I was tired from housework and aerobics.  He laughed.  Wait till next time.

Piano Tuning

My piano tuner came today, it takes about an hour to get it to sound like I haven't been hammering on it for a year.  As we sat in the other room Mac commented that it sounded, literally, like a rather boring job.  I said that at $100 an hour it was pretty lucrative though.
Miss Kitty hates to hear the piano being tuned.  Though she enjoys my playing and has been known to pick out a few notes herself she becomes quite "bat-earred" when it's tuned.  She'd probably pay him not to do it.

Another Great Book

I go through long spells of reading books that are ok, not great, not brilliant, just ok.  Then I get lucky and start hitting some gems.  One of those gems was The End of Your Life Book Club, and from that book I found The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett.  Bennett is an author I was not familiar with, but I should have been .  He is better known as a playwright and wrote the play The History Boys and co-authored the screenplay for the movie.  I LOVED The History Boys!  He also wrote the play and screenplay for The Madness of King George another movie I love.  So I shouldn't be surprised by his absolutely brilliant little  book The Uncommon Reader, it was wonderful, and far too short at 120 pages.  I plan on rereading it immediately!
The story is simple, one day while chasing her dogs outside at Windsor Castle Queen Elizabeth notices a Book Mobile, a traveling library from the City of London parked out back.  The dogs enter it and she follows.  Inside she chats with the driver/librarian and the lone patron, Norman, who turns out to be a worker in her kitchen.  Not wanting to be ungratful, and though she's not much of a reader, "she read of course, as one did, but liking books was something she left to other people." she checked out a book.  She worked her way through the book and meant   to  have someone else return it the next week, but   instead finds herself in the book mobile once again  where,  with the help of Norman her kitchen helper she checks out another book, and soon her fascination with books  really takes off.   To the  dismay  of nearly everyone she turns into a reader.
Oh it was so much fun to watch her journey through books and how she grew as a person.
What a great movie this would make, I picture Judie Dench or Helen Mirren (hasn't she played her once before?) playing her.
If you're looking for an amusing, well written book I couldn't recommend it more highly. Mac, after listening to me go on about it, says he's going to read it too.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Busy, not like a beaver particularly, though I do waddle a bit like one.

How did I ever find time to work?  Did I have my students working for me?  I barely get things done now that I'm retired, I must have been much better organized.

Monday wasn't too bad I finally got cushions made for my outdoor chairs, that's only been on my to do list for 3 years, but  it took me forever to:
a)  find an outdoor fabric I liked
b)  find an outdoor fabric that didn't cost an arm, leg, firstborn cat
c)  figure out why my sewing machine wasn't working right, eh, that will have been pilot error

Then I started a raspberry pink throw for what's going to eventually stop being the white bedroom and become the pink bedroom or at least one wall of it.

Tuesday was spent grocery shopping, have I mentioned I hate grocery shopping and hauling tons of groceries up the stairs?  We've started pricing dumbwaiters.

Today  Mac and I walked 2 miles and then made peach jam, all of their jar lids have popped so they're ready to put up.

We also wrapped a painting that sold on Ebay and need to get another wrapped.
Then I listed 7 more paintings.

In between I did my aerobic exercise, I'm really getting too old for all of this.

Mustn't Grumble, HA!

It was 87˚ here yesterday, working in the garden I sweated enough to fill a small goldfish pond.  Doing my aerobics was even worse.  Then the rains came, and that's a good thing because it washes some to the pollen out of the air, pollen that has been running around 5,500 parts per cubic meter.
So the rains came, the air cooled and today the high is supposed to be 69˚, but it's going to be a real struggle to reach that because it nearly noon and it's only 54˚ and it's not acting like it plans on warming up much more.  Now I know that 54˚ isn't really cold, but compared to 87˚ it is and my bones and joints would be the first ones to tell you so.
But I'll be good and I won't grumble because then it might turn 90˚.

New Purse

I've been carrying my backpack purse forever, I'm not very stylish, and I began to worry that I was going to wear it out and I need it for when we travel.  So while shopping the other day I gave the purse aisle a look and found this one that's not quite as big as I like, but I refuse to carry what look  like oversized messenger bags and that's what most people seem to be carrying.  Nor am I attracted to the neon sacks that are posing as purses these days.
Last year I was all into polka dots, this year I think I prefer little checks.

When You Live Next to a Lagoon

When you live next to a lagoon here in the south you never know what you might find on your doorstep.  I opened the front door and found a snake on our welcome mat one time, but I guess we're luckier than the lady who lives in Hilton Head, South Carolina.  She opened her front door yesterday morning about 5 am to take her dog out for its morning walk and found a 12 foot alligator on her front porch.
Security in their gated community were unable to lure it back into the lagoon next to the house and professional animal wranglers had to be called in .  At first, figuring the home owner had exaggerated about the size of the animal, all alligators look huge to nonprofessional alligator folks,  they only sent one man.  They ended up having  to send for more help because the gator was about 12 feet long and weighed more than a 1,000 pounds.
Some gators get relocated away from urban areas, but this one was too big and too aggressive, he was put down.
Right now we have 2 gators living in our lagoon, one about 4 feet long and the other about 7 feet.  Probably time for the bigger one to be removed, certainly don't want to find him sunbathing on our back deck.

In Times of Sorrow

I feel so sorry for my country, this use to be a wonderful place to live.  Neighbors knew each other and watched out for one another.  Doors were left unlocked.  Children played in the streets.  Families ate together.
The country of my childhood it no more.
Whether it was a foreign national or a home grown loony we're once again reminded of how unhappy people are, of  their need to spread hatred and fear.
I sat in my garden yesterday and though it soothes me it doesn't heal.  Is there a way to heal a country?  Is there a way to bring people together?  I thought after 9/11 we had a chance, but it slipped by, we're more divided, more angry, more fearful than ever.
It's too sad for words, how many times are the scenes on my tv to be repeated?

The Masters

We're not golfers, but we do enjoy watching it played, the courses are gorgeous, and none more so than the Augusta Golf Course where the Masters is played.  It started Thursday and in homage to that Mac resurrected our putting green, planted some new rye grass, relined it with pea gravel and made a Duffer to hold the hole flag and sort of protect our satellite dish.
We played 6 holes today with our own strange set of guidelines and I won by a stroke, that won't happen again.
What I feared when we had such a long winter, even though it could only be considered cold by a thin-blooded southerner, seems to be happening.  We're going from winter to summer, giving spring a miss altogether.  Yesterday it was 88 here and though it's a bit cooler today it definitely feels more like summer than spring.