BerthaBlog

None of the local community colleges offer their Spanish classes during the day—they schedule them for night time when people get off work. Unfortunately when I try to take classes at night, I wind up paying for all the classes but going to about a quarter of them because my mate has to work late on some emergency on class nights.

So now I’m looking into audio courses. From what I see online, most of them cost about $200 or more for a set of 15-16 CDs. Only real question is which ones are likely to be any good. Leaning towards the ones using something called the “Pimsleur” system, which according to their propaganda was developed by a linguist who studied how people learn languages.

Anybody out there who’s tried one of these and can recommend/warn me away from it?

Whatever my kids had a couple of weeks ago, I finally managed to catch it. Spent the last few days coughing and sniffing and bitching, not necessarily in that order.

Amazing how fast the place goes to hell when I’m sick. I mean, my house is never going to make the cover of Better Homes and Gardens, but I do try. Most of the time the bed is made, the laundry is done, and the kitchen counter is reasonably tidy. But let me be too sick to do basic maintenance for a few days, and suddenly nobody has clean clothes and there are dirty dishes piled up next to the sink and overflowing onto the stove. At least this proves I do things during the day, when I’m not sick.

Generally, as I’m starting to recover from such an illness, I reach a point where I’m still too poorly to do much work, but starting to feel well enough that it bothers me the work isn’t getting done. So I’ll keep trying to go tidy things up, and my mate will keep herding me back to the
couch so I won’t overdo it. From the couch I’ll bitch and moan about all the little chores that I really need to get started on. He refers to this as the Pain in His Ass phase of my illness.

Hopefully the current cold will be gone by the weekend so he won’t have to kill me.