Coming up on a year of taking French lessons using Duolingo, and I recognize I’ve got a long, long way to go. Nothing impresses that on a person like listening to someone sing softly and rapidly in French, as Lous and the Yakuza did in a remarkable Tiny Desk Concert on NPR. It really wasn’t…
I’ve been toying with the word inveterate in my mind for a couple of weeks. It would make a good New Year’s Day post, I figured. I mean, just look at the definition in the dictionary, practically screaming for a post: Inveteratein·vet·er·ate | \ in-ˈve-t(ə-)rət\Definition of inveterate1: confirmed in a habit : HABITUAL an…
“Build streaks. Do the work every single day. Blog daily. Write daily. Ship daily. Show up daily. Find your streak and maintain it.” – Seth Godin, The Practice I made a relatively big deal (by my standards) of blog number 900. Well, this is 914 and I just keep quietly going. I have some exciting…
I’ve been skimming the surface with the French language for eleven months now. Eleven months of daily lessons on the Duolingo app, making sure I hit the bare minimum and some days a little bit more. And as you might expect I’ve learned the basic words that they repeat in their lessons, struggle a bit…
“C’est une prévoyance très nécessaire de sentir qu’on ne peut tout prévoir.”(“It is a very necessary forethought to feel that you cannot foresee everything.”) – Jean-Jacques Rousseau Prévoyance. The word tantalizes me, capturing my imagination, tauntingly just out of reach. It’s a French word, essentially translating basically to “foreseeability”. Prévoyance is powerful when applied to…
“All things are really only words in a tongue of endless gobbledygook that someone or something is writing in a book that is the history of the world. In herds, you, I, everyone, Carthage, Rome travel, and my unfathomable life too, and this stigma of having been an accident, a cipher, an enigma, of being all…
I quietly shelved plans to hike yesterday. Thunderstorms in the forecast, friends coming over, yard work to do… you know: excuses. Instead I did projects and regretted not getting out there and hiking. Lesson learned. But the bulkhead looks better than it ever has with a fresh coat of paint and the lawn has been…
“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb Today is June 15th, which is the halfway point of the month that concludes the halfway point of the year. The first half of 2020 felt like a decade with the massive shifts happening in…
I thought I was doing pretty well learning French until the four people in the row ahead of me on a flight back when the world was almost normal started speaking rapid-fire French to each other and I realized I have a long way to go. It was like putting a student driver in the…
I was presenting a PowerPoint slide translated from German to English Tuesday, wrapped up our meeting and was discussing a few key points when a woman next to me quietly yet publicly slid a piece of paper across the table to me. It seems there was a typo on one of the slides and she…
