where his civilizations, including our own

Well, it wouldn't be LJ without memes, would it?

What I'm reading:
A lot of posts and comments from you all! :D I have no idea how I kept up in the days when LJ was even more active than this.

What I'm modding:
Not in charge of any fannish activities but my own at the moment, thankfully.

What I'm thinking about:
What I'm going to make for dinner for the next few days. My kid's school play this weekend. More ideas for French vocabulary building. Also thinking of a few friends who are having a rough time of it lately. ♥

What I'm creating:
Things to post later in the month. I've got several posts half-written, but none finished today, which is why you get a meme. :P I'm also making iced rooibos tea. Yum.

What I'm watching:
I don't watch TV but lately I've been watching the Hearthstone streamer StrifeCro almost every night. I'd like to think I'm learning something from watching such a good player, but I will admit that his calm voice also makes me super sleepy so it works out either way...

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment wherever you're comfortable.

So, in my 2014 wrap-up post I mentioned that I had resolved to get better at French. I think it's going fairly well, though learning a language is one of those things where the more you know, the more you grow to understand the depth of your ignorance.

French has been a lifelong struggle for me. My mom's parents were immigrants from France, and she was fully bilingual. I learned some French from her talking to me as a kid, but she had estranged herself from the entire rest of her family before I was born, so there were no monolingual relatives around (which is the circumstance under which kids tend to retain heritage languages).

When they started offering languages in school, I picked French over Spanish without hesitation, even though Spanish would obviously have been far more useful in California. I wanted to learn my mom's language. I didn't give it much thought at the time (what can I say, I was twelve) but in hindsight I think I was really hurting for family connections. This was around the same time my mom was pushing away my dad's family as well, for stupid reasons that aren't relevant enough to go into here, and it gave me an isolating feeling of being cut off from my roots.

Anyway, French class. Since I had a slight head start, was highly motivated, and loved the teacher, I did great. Unfortunately, when I moved up to high school, the teacher there was an absolute asshole, so my two years in middle school were the only formal instruction I ever got.

Every once in a while I've tried to pick it up again, but I've never been consistent enough about it, and have felt discouraged with just how little you can say and understand at an "intermediate" level. Which of course has left me stuck at that level. The biggest barrier for me is vocabulary; I think my mistake has been that I tried to learn mostly by reading, but I wasn't stopping to look up words when I could figure them out by context. But being able to get the gist isn't fluency, especially not when it comes to being able to actually talk or write rather than just read.

Fortunately, the internet is full of free tools for this sort of thing. I finished the French Duolingo course pretty quickly and easily, and I still use it to practice a bit. But what I think is starting to make much more of a difference is building up my vocabulary using Anki, a program to make your own flashcards. It keeps track of which cards you get wrong and repeats them more often until you start getting them right, while easy ones get repeated at much longer intervals so you don't forget. (Duolingo's review function doesn't seem to remember which lessons I struggle with, but just gives them at random.) Now instead of skimming over words I don't know, I write them down to add later, and I actually learn them. It's so exciting to be reading a book or playing a game (I switch my games to French for practice) and come across one of the words I put into Anki from another source and realize that YES, I KNOW THAT ONE!!!

So I hope this is going to be the time when I really learn it and don't give up. It feels like it is.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment wherever you're comfortable.

I guess I'll start off with a RL update, since that's what's been occupying most of my brainspace lately.

The big time-and-energy-sink has been a real estate deal. My brother and I have had joint ownership of our mom's old house since she passed away in 2004. When I decided to move out of the area a few years ago, he wanted to keep the property but didn't have the money/credit to buy me out, so I let it go with his promise that he'd buy me out "someday".

With some people this might be a terrible plan, but I've never known my brother to do a deceitful or selfish thing in his life, so it made sense to me. And six years later, he delivered. He's buying me out. Isn't it nice when people can be counted on? It does happen sometimes!

Of course, I vastly underestimated the amount of work that would go into not only transferring ownership of a property (the tax forms alone are phenomenally complicated and I had to get an accountant to help), but doing so while on the opposite coast from all the other people involved. April turned into a month of endless phone and email tag with people who could never seem to remember that it was three hours later for me, nor understand that I don't live in a major urban area with title insurance companies on every corner. It also didn't help that the escrow officer kept making mistake after mistake on the grant deed paperwork (the worst was a decimal point error that stated my tax withholding as 1/10th of what it should have been... seriously) and one of the necessary bank people had a vacation scheduled right in the middle of everything.

But! I think as of this past week, I have finally gotten my end of the paperwork squared away, and now it's just waiting on all of it to get fedexed back to my brother so he can sign things as well, and that should be it? I think?

And then I get the money. The property is in the San Francisco area, which, for those who don't know, is the second most expensive place to live in the continental US. So, half of a house there ends up being worth more than an equivalent house where I live now. You see where I'm going with this?

We've lived in the same apartment here in Vermont for years, and although it's in a great location and we love our landlord, the neighbor noise can be really bad. So we've been looking for a house. hannelore is actually friends with a realtor, who has been super helpful so far. It's good to have someone reliable on the job.

Overall I am fairly happy with how I've handled all this. It hasn't been without a few emotional crises (both the kind of silly "I'm not enough of an adult to do this!" and the slightly more reasonable "Letting go of connections to the city and house I grew up in is hard") but I'm weathering them.

If you read all this, I commend your patience. I promise the rest of May's posts won't be about this, and will, I hope, be far more interesting!

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment wherever you're comfortable.