Languages

Today I tried to write someone an email in Spanish. A simple, short email, maybe ten lines long at most. Shouldn't be a problem, right? I lived in Spain for a year. I majored in Spanish. I've even dreamt in Spanish before.

The problem is that I've been in Italy for three weeks. Speaking Italian 80% of the time, or more.

Italian and Spanish are terribly too similar. Deceptively so.

This simple little email took me almost half an hour. I might be exagerrating. But, still, it should have taken less than three minutes. And I still think there were mistakes...Italian words and Italian grammar strung throughout...

Oh well.

Too bad the email went to the person in charge of maintaining a list of Spanish tutors and translators in the Ithaca area... It wasn't about that, it was about babysitting a baby that hasn't even been born yet... But, still...I don't know how much longer I'll be on that list...

Alguien me puede hablar en espanol? Necesito practicar...

No worries

Hello!

Delta pretty much did nothing to help us (he can't even take the return flight). But, my very clever mother found Joel a flight to Rome on AirBerlin for not too bad considering it was less than 24 hours before the flight. The people at the school were kind enough to pick me up at the airport Friday without Joel, take me to the apartment, and pick me up to meet Joel at the train station the next morning after he took a 10 hour train from Rome.

Now we're both here, have eaten lots of tasty food, been inside a fortress, relaxed, slept, etc etc etc.

Yay!

P.S. Since Delta wouldn't let Joel take the return flight either, Joel's flying back on the same flight with me! Yay!

Please pray

Joel missed his flight. He was supposed to arrive at Port Authority three hours before his flight was to leave and then take a shuttle (they leave Port Aurthority every twenty minutes) to JFK. Two problems, there are apparently two buses(?) that leave Ithaca at 12:40 on the way to NY, one arriving at 5:55 PM and the other at 6:46 PM. I'm not sure how that works (didn't read that until ten minutes ago), but suffice it to say we were assuming he would get there at 6. He didn't. Then the shuttle took an hour and a half to get to the airport so he arrived about half an hour before his international flight was supposed to leave. They made the last call for boarders before he was even close to half-way through the baggage check-in line.

He was flying into Pisa and the flying RyanAir to Lamezia and then a train to Catania...

We don't know yet when Delta can get him where. I arrive in Catania Friday around noon. I really would like him to be there already...or at least very soon afterwards...

Please pray with us for the trip and the complications and for God's glory to be evident.

Summer plans

Some of you might be wondering what we'll be up to this summer. Or not... But, if you read on you'll find out anyway.

From May 21st or so, to June 20th more or less, Joel and I will be in Catania, Sicily. Joel will be taking courses of some sort at a school there.

The dates are a bit ambiguous because Joel will be leaving a day before I do and leaving a day later (we bought his tickets before mine). He leaves the 20th and gets there on the 21st whereas I leave the 21st and get there the 22nd. I leave June 19th and he leaves on the 20th. A bit confusing, but it should work out. Funny thing, even though we bought my tickets over a month later than buying his, they were almost $500 cheaper!

Before we leave we have to pack up our apartment. Our current lease ends at the end of May and our new lease, at a new place, starts in August. A kind family from church is letting us use their basement to store all of our stuff in the interim. I took over the first load of boxes today! Mostly books but also some Christmas stuff and our tents. Since Joel still has papers to write...I'll be doing most of the packing. It was good to get started.

So, we'll pack up our stuff and put it in the basement excepting a couple of bags that will hopefully have all we'll need for the next two months. Then, off to Italy! While we're there Joel will study and I will...well, I'm not sure, exactly, but I will. :-) I'll spend at least some of the time teaching myself to knit socks. Also I'm sure we'll spend some time on the beach, maybe go on a couple of day trips to Syracuse or Palermo or Etna, cook a good deal, and hopefully have quite a nice time. We'll have our own apartment the whole time we're there, so that will be good. We're hoping to locate a church in the vicinity as we will be there for four Sundays. If you know of any...please inform us.

When we return from Italy we will wander on to Chicago to hang out with my sister and her husband. Here we come, Windy City! While there we will also go to the Ford Center/Oriental Theatre to watch Fiddler on the Roof (with Topol himself playing Tevye!). I'm really excited about that. :-)

From Chicago we will come to Oklahoma (at some point in the last few days of June). We plan on hanging out with people that we really miss, seeing babies, attending a wedding, eating at the Greek House, and other various and sundry activities.

Eventually we will leave Oklahoma and hopefully head next to Mississippi to see my brother, sister-in-law, nephew, and niece (the last of whom we have yet to meet!). We might even all go camping while we're there!

Then on to Vermont to see Joel's family and to help with a bridal shower for my brother-in-law's intended. :-)

At the end of all of this (early August) we hope to find ourselves back in Ithaca so as to move into our new apartment, settle back in, see people we will have missed, maybe plant some flowers, and get ready for the new semester. Wow...I'm tired just thinking about all of it!

What are your summer plans?

Shearing season

Earlier this year Joel and I realized that our pesto stash wouldn't last us until summer. So, we decided to take action.

We worked on two different levels. We bought a bag of hydroponically grown basil from Wegmans (roots included), a packet of basil seeds (Genovese, of course), and a bag of soil. We took cuttings from the grown plants and planted them, along with the stalks that the cutting left behind. We also started some seeds.

This (see below) is what happened.


Yay!

We decided it was pesto time. You will see the aftermath in the follwing photos:

May they triumph through this difficult season and rise again, with more leaves than they had before!

Mmm. Who can complain when they have a pile of basil this high?

The end result. Yummy!

Reading Instructions

So, there's a little paragraph that has a very important third sentence in the instructions for federal tax form 1040-A:


Scholarship and fellowship grants.
Scholarship and fellowship grants not reported on Form W-2 must be included in the total on line 7. Also, enter “SCH” and the amount in the space to the left of line 7. However, if you were a degree candidate, include on line 7 only the amounts you used for expenses other than tuition and course-related expenses. For example, amounts used for room, board, and travel must be reported on line 7.

While filling out our returns (one federal and three state forms, gleaning information from three W-2's and two 1098-T's), I remembered the first half of that paragraph, but not the second. So, all the numbers seemed high and we owed everyone something. As we were writing out the checks I was double checking to see if we needed to write in the SCH thing or not and re-read the paragraph. Whoa....that changed everything. We re-figured all of the numbers and we only owed two states and the other state and federal owed us refunds. It made for a total difference of over $1400 in our favor! That's a lot nicer than paying so much.

The papers are all being slid into envelopes now and will be mailed in the morning. I sure hope we filled them all out correctly...

A good book

Most of you probably know what I'm about to tell you. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is a wonderful and must-read book.

I started a recent plunge into Dickens with a book of his Christmas stories that I found at a near-by used book store on their outside one-dollar-a-book shelf. I ended up reading The Cricket on the Hearth, and literally sobbing over the events in the Peerybingles' life (and tears of rejoicing). I convinced Joel to let me read it to him; again I cried and his eyes were not particularly dry either. I wanted more Dickens--I think his only work I had read previously was A Christmas Carol. What we had on our shelves was Pickwick Papers so I started to read it. It probably wasn't the best to follow with. I will finish it at some point, I'm sure (I really don't like not finishing books), but it wandered a bit much for me.

I read a few other things in the meantime (including Do Butlers Burgle Banks?, which was wonderful!), but soon found myself looking for a book again. Joel suggested A Tale of Two Cities and checked it out of the library next visit. I had no knowledge of the story of this book other than having heard it was a good book(on a similar level I had heard that Grapes of Wrath was good and I had heard other sources tell me that that one was quite overrated). Also, having just been wandering about with the reknowned (and quite annoying) Mr. Pickwick I was not terribly inclined to pick up another Dickens (having so quickly forgotten the joy of reading The Cricket on the Hearth).

About a week after we had checked it out, I still hadn't cracked the cover. An occasion presented itself where I was washing dishes and Joel offered to read to me (it makes them go so much faster...well...sometimes slower, but much more smoothly either way). I think we had read two or three of Grimm's fairy tales the night before, so he didn't want to read another of those. And we were both currently reading in Numbers which isn't particularly suited to reading aloud. So, he asked if I had started A Tale of Two Cities, I said no, and he read the first chapter. It was definitely an intriguing chapter, if a bit confusing (especially amidst the sounds of splashing water and clanking dishes). So, I was caught. We continued to read when we had spaces of time (and especially when there were dishes to be washed).

Last night around maybe nine or ten o'clock we started where Mr. Lorry is first proposing to go to Paris to help stabilize Tellson's accounts amidst the mass confusion of the times (about a hundred pages from the end). We finished at three o'clock this morning.

Such a good book. At times I wanted it to stop where it was. I didn't want Charles to go to France. At that point I closed the book and half-filled a bowl with M&Ms and refused to go on for awhile. When I first started to realize Sydney's plans I started making up the story as I went for a little bit (it involved an invisibilty cloak and lots of happily ever after). Joel started to read the next chapter and then couldn't anymore so he handed it over for me to read. There were a few moments I couldn't read, but I wouldn't let Joel take back over.

I wanted to fight the ending, just as sometimes I want to fight Jesus going to the cross. Why did He have to do that? He didn't deserve it and it made for a very, unimaginably so, black day. But oh, what a sunrise on Sunday, and oh, the joyous repercussions for a sinner like me.

That's why A Tale of Two Cities is a good book. It pushes me to the cross.