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Thank you to my old pal Fiona, who wrote me a lovely email to say she enjoyed catching up with me via my Tenerife blog ramblings “…but what’s with all the beigeness?”
Okay, you got me Fiona. I am not a great blog designer and am stuck with Blogger’s pretty boring standard templates. Word Press is a lot more exciting and easy to customise but I have found an exciting new green template to play with. Will that do?
Don’t know what I’m listening to Fiona for anyway. At school she was always the one with welly welts and crimplene trousers.
This nut obviously didn’t fall far from the tree because whenever I get into a Taz-tizz the kids ask me who is coming. The only difference is that when visitors drop by in Tenerife they are coming for weeks.
Tito didn’t help by waiting until the very last minute, when I was in the shower pre-arrival of my glamorous Parisienne sister-in-law, before stealing a toilet roll and tearing it to pieces all the way up the hall. I hadn’t yet noticed so he slouched back into the bathroom, bumbled about till I looked out from behind the curtain and galloped giggling off with another one. I shrieked and pelted after him and he shot into the garden where he quite obviously laughed his silly head off at me soaking, towel-wrapped and fizzing in the doorway.
You cannot imagine how large the detritus is from a shredded toilet roll unless you’ve tried to stuff one behind the sofa in the seconds before your sister-in-law waltzes through the door.
Impressions hardly mattered by the next morning anyway when Tito stole and shredded my s-i-l’s trendy (and expensive) espadrilles.
Tito, by the way is my dog not a naughty child although he really is a brat right now. He steals anything for a game of catch-me-if-you-can, shrieks like a scalded cat if I try to leave him in the house alone, bullies Skye and would be more likely to bolt for freedom than come back if I gave him half the chance out of doors.
Thankfully we had a visit from Sharon from Happy Tails today and as always she had a couple of tricks up her sleeve to help me with my four legged enfant terrible. Not that our French visitor is likely to warm to the little bugger but at least I now have a Plan B for the next time he wants to play Toilet Roll Takeaway.
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I am ashamed to say my level of Spanish is fairly dismal. Though I can usually understand the gist of what is going on around me and even think up a pithy reply in my head, the second I am put on the spot all vocabulary deserts me and I am left mouthing silently like a goldfish.
As one of my New Year resolutions in 2006 (that and doing something about my habit of putting things off), I promised myself I would get my Spanish speaking skills at least up to the level of my then two year old son. I figured if I could just keep up with him then I’d be doing fine. The trouble there is that he never stops talking and he doesn’t much care what language he is doing it in. Now at four years old he prattles on in Spanish at machine gun speed and I am left in the dust.
Formal lessons – I can’t imagine when I will ever have the time to commit to them. Easy as it is to simply say make time, I couldn’t squeeze the extra two hours a week in even if there were 26 hours in every day.
So that leaves me with online courses. My mother collects Spanish courses like other people collect stamps. It doesn’t seem they are doing her very much good though as her Spanish only improves when she is participating in classes. She prefers the personal feedback I guess but the point here is that I didn’t want to look into anything she had already tried. That crosses out Pimsleur, Michel Thomas and a few others.
So having hunted around I found two possible downloadable courses, Rocket Spanish and Synergy Spanish. Costs for either are not unreasonable ($100 for one and $60 for the other) though I am more attracted to Synergy simply because its premise is that with learning only 138 Spanish words you can communicate naturally and in any situation. 138 words. I can do that! The Synergy course creator also emphasises that in many situations being bold is far more important than being perfect. I think if I could ditch the need to overanalyise what I am trying to say, I’d get on much better.
The other, Rocket Spanish seems more interactive with vocabulary games, grammar games etc. Maybe it would be more fun to learn with. As I am not 100% decided, I have downloaded the free trial of both and will let you know how I get on.
Well what a match! And what a lot of sore heads round my neighbourhood this morning if all the tooting of horns and blowing of trumpets is anything to go by. I don’t get the attraction myself but it seems that after every successful game any young male worth his testosterone is honour-bound to leap into his car and drive up and down the roads tooting his horn.
Well done boys. I am a bit away from any road and I am as interested in football as I am in the evolution of sea slugs but I can tell from the flurry of car horns that Spain won the footy tonight.
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