One a day, plus iron

It's almost time for tomatoes. I've gotten the harbingers of tomato, the first fruits. It's all grape tomatoes over here because my crappy yard cannot ripen full sized worthy tomatoes (Brandywines. I'm talking about Brandywines.) before frost in most years. Grape tomatoes at least get ripe, regularly, in quantity, in my less than stellar yard. And some tomatoes are better than no tomatoes.

Most years tomatoes are full on August but it's been reliably hot here and so the tomatoes are early. I'm OK with that. I've been watering them religiously (it's been hot and dry here for quite a while) so that they keep living and growing.

In other news, I'm still sucking at Spanish.

( Read more whining about learning a foreign language? )

I'm two-thirds of the way through the book. Finished it this afternoon while holding my horse on grass and waiting for the weather to cool off. It went pretty well. Dopamine hits the whole way through. Our hero failed to inform his team (students at Ranger School are assembled into teams consisting of six people each, with whom they live and compete and are graded on teamwork projects each quarter) of some fairly important and contentious information which becomes apparent during a bear attack that happens during the second quarter (summer) Team Project Graded Exercise.

Oops. Lasgol, I understand your reasons for not wanting to disclose, but dude, you gotta know that when you're at Ranger School as el hijo del traidor the standards for disclosure are a bit higher for you than for normal students. It isn't fair, but wow, buddy, you blew it for realsies here.

Thus far we've... gotten accepted to Ranger School, survived a murder attempt, hatched an egg of some kind to discover a quadruped... reptile thing that doesn't eat meat and is sorta-telepathic with our hero, and demonstrated reasonable problem-solving skills and the ability to make friends. And, I guess, lose them. And there were quarterly exams and ANOTHER murder attempt and an attempted (but foiled!) assassination attempt against the king and there was ... evil mage puppeteering and the clearing of his father's name and all six of our team get to go to Year 2 with some deficiencies that need to be rectified in their skillsets. Evil Mage in the North is rousing his troops, King (not dead) is mounting an offensive in the spring, etc. There's a shit-ton of goings-on in this book which does keep it pretty motivating even when I'm lost in the grammar.

I've KU'd the second book. Is it literature? No. Is it genre pulp aimed at twelve year olds? Yes, indeedy. But also this makes it very readable for folks struggling with the preterite imperfect and shit. So, yeah. I am not proud.

It is also the season of the year where I have to put the salt in the fridge or it doesn't come out of the shaker. *sigh*

The new spanish-language book is La Sombra del Viento (the shade of the wind, I think) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I am not sure if this is a book I will be able to get through, but I am going to give it my best shot. It's real literature for grown-ups and not a for-youths book. It may be beyond me.

I'm not sure what it's about yet and there are a lot of words that stick me, but when I actually *get* it, it is beautiful.

Todavía recuerdo aquel amanecer en que mi padre me llevó por primera vez a visitar el Cemeteraio de los Libros Olvidados. Desgranaban los primeros días del verano de 1945 y caminábamos por las calles de una Barcelona atrapada bajo cielos de ceniza y un sol de vapor que se derramaba sobre la Rambla de Santa Mónica en una guirnalda de cobre líquido.

"I will always remember that dawn when my father took me for the first time to visit the Cemetery of the Forgotten Books. It was one of the first days of the summer of 1945 and we walked along the streets of a Barcelona trapped below skies of ash and a hazy sun that spilled over the Rambla of Santa Monica in a wreath of copper liquid."

So it's more... flowery than La Ciudad. There is figurative language. (I am not sure what work "desgranaban" is doing ... it seems to mean "shell" or "harvest" or "select" with a side of "being picked or sorted from".)

We have a hero Daniel, who starts the book as a ten year old boy. He lives with his father, a dealer in books (collector's editions and used books and rarities and such). His mother is dead from catching cholera when he was four. They go to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and Daniel selects a book. The book that he selects is called La Sombra del Viento.

I took Spanish in high school. My dad has a beach house in Mexico. (Not on the beach but you can see the beach from the house.) In the US, probably Spanish is the most useful language to learn. And so I am learning Spanish on my phone via Duolingo. It's OK, drills the verb tenses and stuff. I'm going along with it (something like 250 days in a row now) and chugging away at things like "Tu no respondiste mis cartas" and "No lo viste?". And that's fine. I kind of remember some stuff from high school and two semesters of college Spanish. Not tons, but some.

( Por favor, me dijes más )