Granny Square Blanket: Done.

I finished my granny-square blanket a few months ago, but forgot to post the picture.  In case anyone is interested, I used a J-crochet hook.  Final blanket measures about 1.5x1 metres, and contains 24 squares.

Nice and warm.  And washes easily in the washing machine!



Front View

Back View

      

Homemade Nut Butters---- YUM!

I fully intended to provide a picture of the lovely golden hazelnut butter I made yesterday.  I had the camera sitting in the kitchen.  I put the nut butter into a nice white bowl so it would photograph beautifully.  But then I took a tiny taste.  Then another.  Then another.  And, well, pretty soon it was all gone.  All that was left was the bowl.  And I licked that clean, so there really wasn't anything left to photograph. 

I don't make nut butters often because it is a long process, and I usually eat the entire thing in one sitting.  So I make it as a treat.  Around these parts, nut trees grow all over the place.  Hazelnuts, almonds and walnuts grow in places like parking lots, parks, backyards.  So getting fresh picked nuts is quite easy. 

Making nut butters is simple.  Roast the nuts.  Cool.  Blend in a blender until smooth (I like mine kinda crunchy).  Add a bit of oil to make it blend smoothly.  I like mine plain, but you can add some vanilla or honey or sugar.  That's it.

The biggest nuisance for me is cracking the nuts.  I've got a nutcracker that cracks exactly one nut at a time.  It takes me two hours to crack one kilo of nuts.  After separating the shells from the nut-meat, I end up with half a kilo of shelled nuts.  Half a kilo of nuts will make about half a litre of nut butter.  That isn't a lot.

I only made 200 grams of hazelnut butter yesterday.  So I don't feel too horrible about eating the whole thing in one sitting.  But I wish I had more...so I could take a picture.

Croatian Saffron anyone?

I watched a show on television last night about saffron.  Saffron is the world's most expensive spice at about 3000-5000 euro per kilo.  It is made up from the three thread-like stigmas found in the middle of the purple crocus flower.  It takes something like 225,000 stigmas to make a kilo of saffron.  Each flower must be hand-picked, and each stigma must be gently pulled out of the delicate flower by hand.  Lots and lots of work.  But worth it.

I'm writing about it here, because they grow saffron in parts of India, Greece, Morocco and Iran.  But it is also grown in Spain, and interestingly in Sardinia and the Abruzzo part of Italy.  This last part is very interesting to me because there are many parts of Croatia that would be well suited for saffron cultivation, and yet I don't think it is being done here.  Of course I'll check this out, but as far as I know it isn't being done.  Maybe I'm naive about this stuff, but it seems like an awesome cash crop that could probably be grown nicely on many of the Croatian islands, and pretty much anywhere along the coastal regions.

I've never actually tasted saffron in my entire life.  I'm planning on trying some soon to see what all the hoopla is about!

Curly hair challenges

Ok.  I have curly hair.  If you've got curly hair, then you'll know what I'm talking about when I say that it is difficult to find a good hairdresser.  You can't cut curly hair the way you cut straight hair.  Honestly.  Because curly hair, well, it curls when it is dry.  So you can cut wet bangs perfectly straight across.  But they ain't drying that way. And no two curly people are the same.  Actually, each individual curl is unique.

I had the incredible good fortune to find possibly the world's best curly-hair hairdresser back when I was in highschool in Canada.  Tony had two great things going for him:  he loved to cut hair, and his wife (and business partner) had curly hair!  What a combination!  Tony always knew exactly what to with my hair.  Long, short,...it didn't matter.  Tony made magic happen each and every time.  And that's why he was my hairdresser for over 20 years. 

Jump ahead to Croatia.  Tony still makes magic happen at his Salon Profilo in Canada, but I'm about five thousand kilometers away.  I hope Tony is not reading this because I'm going to make an admission that would make him cry (and laugh a lot!)  I haven't been able to find anyone who knows how to cut curly hair yet.  So for nearly 3 years....I've been cutting my own hair.  Folks, it ain't pretty.

Here's what I've learned about cutting your own hair:

-cut it dry, because you'll always cut it too short when it is wet
-trim off a tiny bit, then wait a day, and trim again.  Don't try to do it all at once.
-don't cut your hair when you are in a bad mood.
-don't cut your hair when you are in a really good mood either
-cut it when you are in a sensible, logical mood.
-buy several nice hats for all the seasons...you'll need these until things grow out a bit.

 Note to self:  gotta change that profile picture of myself...there's a lot less curl now, and hair in general.  Or maybe I'll just photoshop a hat onto my head!

I made it!

Update on my exams......

I made it through with flying colours and can now proceed on to the next level.  I'm happy, but totally exhaustified (that's a new word I made up...it consists of exhausted + horrified = exhaustified.  It means:  to be horrifically exhausted.)  There's another week of classes, then a very very early spring break, and then back to hitting the books.

Danas, nema sunce (today, there's no sun).  And it is cold.  And might snow.  As a Canadian though, I live with the eternal hope that the cold weather won't arrive tomorrow and instead will be replaced with sunshine, warmth, blooming tulips, green trees, and heck...maybe even wild strawberries popping up in the grass.  A girl's gotta have dreams.

Final exam!!

Hard to believe, but the end of the first semester of my language class is just around the corner.  I'm studying hard for the final exam that takes place over two days next week.  Day one will be the written exam, and then Day two will be the oral exam.  If all goes well, then the second semester begins in February and goes right through to the middle of June.  I can tell that the language is starting to settle into my brain and I'm able to think a little bit in Croatian.  I can even make out the newspaper headlines most of the time, and reading signs on the street is becoming a little more clear.  I try my best to read the subtitles on TV...but they talk too fast! 

All in all, it feels pretty positive!

Okay, back to studying.  I'll post test results as soon as they are available.

Fingers crossed....

It is 2011

Happy New Year 2011 !

I hope that everyone had a very good holiday season. And I'm sending out wishes that 2011 is awesome for everyone. I mean awesome in a good and healthy way. I've definitely got resolutions for the year ahead. I know that lots of people hate resolutions, but I love them.

Resolutions:

1. Get fluent in Croatian. I mean FLUENT
2. Start writing my cookbook
3. Take more pictures of the food I'm cooking (instead of eating the food before I get the camera ready ;-)
4. Eat more figs.
5. Find a steady source of good olive oil (the mellow kind that I love)
6. Spend more time at the seaside in the summer
7. Find a place that carries shoes in my size (story about shoe sizes in Europe to follow later)

And that's it! Well, for this year. Looks like a very do-able list to me.

Onwards and upwards!

Happy Holidays 2010

May your days be merry and bright....

Have a lovely holiday season y'all!

Grammar exam

I just realized that I haven't updated this blog since mid-November, and it is almost mid-December! I've been busy. My language class and studying is taking up most of my time, along with cooking and catching a big cold :-( That's the problem with getting glutened; it isn't just the immediate resulting illnes, but the domino effect of illness that just keeps going and going. I don't usually catch colds, but I caught this one and it ain't pretty. I also have a big grammar exam on Monday, and have had to study while shivering under a blanket and drinking copious amounts of tea. Hopefully the worst is over, and my ears and sinuses will be clear and happy by the time the exam rolls around.

I have to say that I can't wait for the Christmas break so I can just catch my breath! We get 2 weeks off school, then back for more intensive lessons until the end of January. Then the ginormous final exam. Then we'll see what happens.

By the end of this level I'll be able to speak in simple present, past and future. SIMPLE. So anyone out there hoping to talk to me in Croatian, please keep to short simple sentences, and then give me lots of time to think my answer and then let me slowly say it all out loud. It'll be slow and awkward at first, but it'll speed up quickly.

That's it for now. I've got to spend a wee bit more time on some irregular verbs in the past tense, and gotta get more vocabulary in before bedtime.

Send lots of good grammar vibes my way!

Another Nano come and gone...

Okay, it looks like I'll be a little bit short this year on my nanowrimo challenge. How much short? Well, you need 50,000 words to cross the finish line, and the finish line is November 30th. Today, one day before the finish line, I'm 40,158 words SHORT.

I only made it to a bit under 10k because I got the glutening of a lifetime 3 weeks ago. I'm just starting to feel normal today. To anyone out there who thinks that just a wee bit of gluten won't hurt someone with celiac: let me tell you YOU ARE CRAZY. Okay, now that I've got that out of my system, I feel better. It is freezing cold outside, but sunny. There's a blue sky, and a pot of hot orange pekoe in the kitchen.

Bliss.

Nanowrimo Midpoint

I'm almost halfway through Nanowrimo and I only have a bit over 9,000 words. Eeeek! That's around 700 words per day. Not a good pace. To help myself get motivated, I did what lots of writers do when faced with the need for a writing jumpstart: I headed to the office supply store! There's nothing like browsing through aisles of pens and pencils, sharpeners, erasers, ring binders, markers, file folders, sticky tabs, white out, rulers and office chairs to make a writer's heart sing. I bought two gel-ink pens (one fine tip, one medium tip) and whistled all the way home. In the olden olden days before I knew I had celiac, I would have also grabbed a chocolate-almond croissant and a hot chocolate. But these days, I have to stick to treats without the gluten (or sugar). So gel-ink pens are it.

Now, back to writing, and maybe some doodling in the margins. These gel-pens are awesome for cartooning......

Finally Farinata...

Finally, I am getting around to posting my recipe and pictures of the farinata I've been making all year. Farinata, which means 'floured' in Italian, is made with gluten-free chick-pea flour. I grind my own beans into my own flour....but you don't have to. Just buy some finely ground chick pea flour from your grocery store, and go from there. Note that it may also be called: besan flour, ceci flour, garbanzo bean flour, or chickpea flour. If you want it gluten-free, then make sure it says gluten-free on the package...not all of the types of chickpea flour out there are gluten-free.

Okay, here we go:

The first thing you need to know is that the batter needs to rest for 2-3 hours. This resting period is necessary to let the flour ferment a little bit so that it is easier to digest.

The second thing you'll need to know is that you'll need a scale to weigh the flour. I know this sounds like a pain, but different flours have different weights. A cup of wheat flour does not equal a cup of bean flour.

Third thing: do not skimp on the amount of olive oil.

What you'll need:

-a shallow baking pan...like a jelly roll pan (it needs to have a lip around the edge at least 2 cm high)
300 grams finely ground chickpea flour
1 litre water (not hot water, cold is okay, room temperature is okay too)
2 big pinches salt
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
plus about 5 more tablespoons olive oil (or enough to coat the bottom of your baking pan)

Method:

Put the flour and salt into a big mixing bowl, and make a well in the flour like this:




Then using a whisk, whisk in the water. Whisk for about 2 minutes making sure there are no lumps. The batter will be rather thin and have lots of bubbles forming on the surface. Like this:



Cover the bowl of batter with a towel and let it rest.

After the resting period is finished, and you are ready to bake, preheat the oven to 200C.

Take a spoon and skim the bubbles off the top of the batter. Then whisk the batter one more time for about 30 seconds, and then skim those bubbles off too.

Now add 4 tablespoons of oil to the batter and whisk again.

When the oven reaches 200C, pour the rest of the olive oil into your pan enough to cover the bottom. And then place the pan in the oven for about 2 minutes. Watch the pan carefully, as soon as you can smell the olive oil, take the pan out and be careful because it will be hot.

Whisk the batter one more time, then carefully pour the batter into the hot pan filling it to about 1 cm

Carefully put the pan in the middle of the oven, making sure not to spill any.

Bake for 40 minutes and it should then look like this:



It should be golden brown and crispy.



Use a spatula to remove the farinata. Cut into squares, and eat immediately drizzled with olive oil, salt, and your favourite herbs such as thyme or oregano, or with ground black pepper.

Enjoy!

Got glutened :-(

Just need to vent and be grouchy:

I got glutened 4 days ago. If you are not familiar with the term "glutened", then consider yourself a very very lucky person. For the uninitiated, 'glutened' is an unofficial verb created by us celiac sufferers to describe the act of being unwittingly exposed to gluten. So, it is okay to say: I got glutened, I think I got glutened, that sounds like a glutening to me, etc.

Getting glutened is a big deal for me because it takes 10 full days to feel better. And a full 3 weeks until I'm back to normal. Yup. 10 days. And three weeks. In the meantime I feel like crud-on-a-stick. Plus I've got bruise-coloured bags under my eyes that scare people off because I look like I've got the plague or something.

I'm in the middle of nanowrimo, and this glutening is slowing me down considerably. Bah-humbug is all I can say.

I'm the most careful of eaters. The most careful. I can't stress this enough. I'm one of those people who is super-sensitive to the tiniest traces of gluten. So trust me when I say I'm careful about what I choose to eat. And yet I still get glutened. It is rare. But it happens. And there's nothing I can do about it. Except to endure.

So that's what I'm doing right now. Enduring. And trying to nanowrimo at the same time.

Bah-humbug again........

Nanowrimo Day 1

Being a writer is a lonely endeavor at the best of times, but being a writer in a country where I don't understand or speak the language makes it doubly difficult to be a writer. Why? Because it is near impossible to go out and get writerly support in person. Oh, there are writers in Croatia. Tons of writers. Lots and lots of writers. Good ones too. Deep thinkers. Smart writers. But, they write in Croatian. And they have writer groups in Croatian. And they support eachother in Croatian. So the problem is all mine. Until I can fluently communicate in this language, I'm on my own.

It is day one of Nanowrimo. And I've got no write-ins to attend. There's nobody to meet up with at a coffee shop to compare notes, have a word war, or complain about not having enough hours in a day to do all the writing. I know that none of this should matter, and that a real writer writes and gets through this. Normally I'm pretty okay at pulling up my own bootstraps. But during Nanowrimo, I get to feeling a little isolated. Like Tiny Tim, with his face pressed up against the window of a house where good food and good friends and family and laughter are being served up. Only he's on the outside looking in.

Luckily I have online support. Lots of it.

Okay, enough moping around, I've got about 900 words to go to make my daily goal. Onwards and upwards!

Grammar indigestion

My language class is in the thick of learning verbs and verb cases. We don't use cases much in English, so this stuff is MIND-BENDING for me. I mean brain-twisting-gray-matter-sizzling-help-me difficult. Lately, I get a stomachache at around the 2.5 hour mark of class. Like I've eaten too many verbs, or ingested too much grammar, and that one more noun or possessive pronoun or weird exception-to-the-already-bizarre-rule will make my insides explode. Pop! Kapow! Bang!

And I'm not the only one having difficulty with this stuff. Sometimes I swear that I can actually hear other students sweating. But, apparently it gets better. I'm guessing it is probably just like the G-force and anti-gravity training that astronauts go through. Sure they've got to black out and throw up a lot, but only until their bodies adjust, and then they get the sweet reward of being able to float around in space.

For astronauts and learners of new grammar....it is all worth it in the end.

Nanowrimo 2010

How did an entire year go by? Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) starts next week on November 1st. I haven't touched my Nanowrimo 2009 project AT ALL! Not at all. Not even one word. As a matter of fact, I can't even remember what story I was working on. How did the time go by so quickly???

I'll be digging up my old project this week and taking a cold hard look to see if it is worth re-jigging, or if I should learn from it and try something new. It seems that life in Croatia is different than my old life in Canada. My old life was consistent, predictable. And thus I could work on my writing in a consistent and predictable way. My world was not changing much inbetween writing sessions. But here in Croatia, my life changes minute by minute. Not much is consistent and nothing is predictable. So when I put down a writing project for even a couple of weeks, I return to the project which is in the same condition when I left it. But I'm not in the same condition. I've changed. My life has shifted. Things are not the same. I'm not the same person I was 2 weeks ago. So taking up an old writing project becomes difficult because I am a different person.

Ever heard of that old telephone game where one person whispers a sentence into another person's ear, and that person whispers it to the next person's ear until 10 or 12 people later the last person says the sentence out loud and it resembles nothing like the initial sentence? So, something like: Barney has a grocery store, comes out as: Aliens make good traffic cops.

That's sort of what's happening with me and my stories right now. Hopefully a month of Nano will help.

I'll keep my fingers crossed, .....

Crochet anyone??? Da da da!

It seems that studying Croatian grammar makes me want to crochet. A lot. Don't know why this is, but it is true. I yanked out a granny square afghan I started last year and have been obsessed with getting it finished. I made 25 of these squares last year, but have been struggling to crochet them all together because it is a tedious, unforgiving task. Thus, I put the project aside.

Until now. Maybe, just maybe, crocheting 25 squares together is less tedious than memorizing verb cases. Hmmm, could be. I remember back in my university days that whenever I had to study for a major exam, I would suddenly take a keen interest in cleaning the toaster oven, or defrosting the freezer.

Lucky for me, studying and crocheting can be done in unison. Sort of. Well, not really. Never mind. Enough procrastination for now, and back to the books for me.

Vidimo se (see ya later)

Language school number 4

Today was the first day of a brand new language course at a new school for me. I decided to go to the Croaticum language school run by and at the University of Zagreb Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences.

After a few hiccups with the registration process (long story short: they sort of forgot to enroll me), I finally got things settled and am now ready to learn more grammar. This is another intensive program (they love these things over here!) and goes 5 days a week, for 4 months.

I'll keep you posted on how things progress....

If the grammar fairies are reading this: please sprinkle fairy dust on this whole experience. Thank you.

Do bugs think?

There is a giant bug flying around the apartment today. I'm pretty sure that it is one of those jumbo-sized bees because it has a sort of bee-like buzzing sound. The sun is out and there's the most lovely late summer / early fall breeze blowing through the leaves on the tree across the street. So I opened all the windows and am now enjoying the sight of my white sheer curtains billowing from time-to-time. I'm guessing the giant bee got in through one of the open windows, and since we have no screens here in Croatia, the odd bug flies in on occasion.

It isn't weird for a giant bee to be floating around here. What is weird today though is that the bee seems to be trying to get outside and it keeps bumping into the glass on the windows. I keep pointing to the open window and saying out loud: just turn left a little and then go straight. And this bee keeps following my instructions. It turns left, then flies straight out the window.

About three minutes later, he is back in my livingroom, bumping into the glass again. I've told him about five times now to turn left and get outside. It got me wondering about what's going on. Maybe it isn't the same bee each time. maybe the first one told all his buddies that my place is a great rest-stop. And maybe the original bee is a little dyslexic and told the other bees that to get out you need to turn RIGHT, then straight.

I'm going to go with that explanation. Because the other explanation (one with more of a Stephen King slant) involves giant bees that speak English and who have the ability to turn humans into their slaves. Or something along those lines. They could even be alien bees from another planet. Or tiny vampire bees. Or tiny vampire bees from outer space.

Or they could just be a little dyslexic (and who isn't?)

New language vs Music Theory

It is September, and that means a return to some sort of Croatian language lessons. I'm searching, searching, searching for a class that runs once or twice a week, for maybe 1.5 hours per class (that means 3 hours per week), and a class that takes its time. I have no need or desire to learn ten new concepts per class. I have no need to rush. What I need is to be taught one concept at a time, thoroughly and given enough time to go home and practice before I come back to learn a new concept.

This is how most people, (who are not of the child prodigy or genius variety), learn to read and play music. Music is a language. A foreign language to everyone who comes to it. Music theory is much like learning grammar in that the rules and guidelines will enable you to read, compose and play more and more complex music in an eloquent way. And it takes time, lots of time to learn. Grade 1 piano generally takes an entire year to accomplish at a pace of one hour per week of lesson coupled with at least one hour of practice every single day (more of course is better). Lesson five can only begin if lessons one, two, three and four have been understood. Trust me, there's no use trying to learn to play with two hands at the same time if you still can't remember where the notes sit on the lines and spaces of the staff.

I vividly remember my first year of music class in highschool where I was given the clarinet to play. Without one word of exaggeration I will confess that it took 2 solid MONTHS for me to figure out how to hold the thing comfortably. Just to hold it. And balance it. The first entire year was clumsy. Year two was better. Year three was really good. Year four was pretty awesome; I could play Sleigh Ride like nobody's business. But even after four solid years of playing..I was nowhere near good enough to play in a professional orchestra. I probably would have needed another three to four years of full-time solid study to get good enough for anything beyond the basics. (check out this video on YouTube of Sleigh Ride. Pay close attention to the clarinet around the 2 mintue mark ;-)

Thus I believe languages all over the world would be learned better if the teachers and course writers were all forced to learn to play Sleigh Ride on the clarinet to the level of awesomeness and given a short time to do so. Like a month.

Hmmm, that actually sounds like it would be a pretty fun reality show to watch!

Blueberries. Just because.

Blueberry season ended back in mid-July and lasted only about 2 weeks. I took a picture of these beauties that came in all sorts of shapes and sizes and levels of tartness and sweetness. I wasn't sure what to do with the picture, so I decided to put it here. A picture will have to do until they come back in season just 11 months from now!

On storks and salami-corn

Did you know that storks build huuuuuuuuuge nests on top of telephone poles? No really. I'm serious. I didn't believe it either until we saw these two teenager storks flying around and then landing in their nest. This picture was taken about 30 km outside of Zagreb. There were stork nests all over the place. And these huge young storks flying around learning to get the hang of their wings. I of course made sure NOT to stand underneath the flying storks or under that nest.



It is harvest season around here, and I've been busy getting food from the farm and freezing it all. I've got one of those vacuum machines that sucks all the air out of freezer bags so that the food doesn't get freezer burn. I ran out of big bags, and so was left with a bunch of long skinny bags that are normally used to store things like salami and sausages. So I decided to freeze my corn in the salami bags.

I just took the fresh corn. Peeled off all the outer leaves and corn silk. And just stuck them in the salami bags and then vacuum packed and froze them. In the winter months, I just have to take the corn out of the bags, and stick the entire frozen cob into a pot of boiling water for about 15 minutes for farm-fresh corn-on-the-cob in winter!!!



It worked so well, that I packed my tomatoes the same way! Here are my salami-tomatoes:



Okay, gotta wash, chop and bake about 100 eggplant. Haven't figured out what sort of freezing bags I'll use yet.

Summertime...and the living is restless....

Sometimes my limited diet makes me a little bit crazy. And sometimes it makes me really crazy. I'm usually okay with this life of eating like a tree squirrel. But sometimes it gets to me, and today was one of those days. A perfect summer day. Lots of folks coming back to the city after their holidays. Everyone out in their white pants and yellow shirts to show off golden tans. And everyone eating ice cream cones, slices of pizza, french fries with ketchup, drinking frothy cappuccinos, eating tall pieces of chocolate torte, or lazily stirring a cocktail. They all look so free, and easy-going.

Nobody is having a conniption fit because someone touched their ice-cream with the scoop that touched the cone (and thus got gluten all over everything). Nobody is sitting there licking strawberry sauce off their fingers and wondering if the strawberries were grown locally and organically as promised or if they were actually trucked in from unknown parts, sprayed with all sorts of anti-fungals and antibacterials and rodentcides and pesticides to make them look fresh and thus making a trip to the ER a real possibility sometime in the night. No one gets alarmed when the guy making the espresso is also eating a sandwich (crumbs in the cup). No one slurps froth from their powdered-mix-made cappuccino while nervously reading the teeny-weeny-font of the ingredient list from the packaging to scan for additives, colorings, and preservatives that will require some sort of antihistamine concoction to prevent hives within 15 minutes.

Summertime and I think Christmastime are the times when my food restrictions cause me a wee bit of grief. Convenient food is such a huge part of these times of the year, that it really can make a person who is unable to eat those foods really feel like they are not a part of it all. Like someone on the outside looking in.

I know this feeling is silly because there are so many other problems out there so much bigger than this. But I'm just being honest. I know global warming and economic crises and wars and injustices and all sorts of bad stuff is going on. But today, I got to feeling sorry for myself because I couldn't have a regular ice-cream cone from the regular ice-cream place with all the regular people. Boo-hoo-hoo.

I think I'll treat myself to a nice ice-cold bottle of Italian mineral water that I left chilling in the fridge. What's this? Hey, who left the cap slightly unscrewed and let all the bubbles out?!!!!!!!

Eating figs instead of blogging

I haven't been writing many blog posts lately because it is summer, it is nice outside, and because the figs are in season. Fresh figs are really sticky and juicy and there is no neat way to eat them. It is necessary to get fig juice all over your hands and then have it drip down your arms and drip off your elbows. That's just the way it is. Which makes it really hard to type on a keyboard and get a blog post written. So, I just want to say that I'm not blogging right now...but it is not because something untoward has happened. Quite the opposite actually. There are figs to be eaten, and that's what I'm doing with my time. Bliss!

I hope y'all are doing something equally or even more delicious with your time!

Bully for you......

Okay, grammar classes are over for a little while, and I can actually get a little bit of time to write. I'm working on a newer story that involves bullying. I got to wondering where the term 'bully' came from and how it evolved, so I went researching on the internet and discovered that nobody really knows. How strange. There is one main theory that the word bully actually started as a term of endearment! Here is how it is explained at The Online Etymology Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com)

Bully. noun. 1530s, originally "sweetheart," applied to either sex, from Dutch boel "lover, brother," probably dim. of M.H.G. buole "brother," of uncertain origin (cf. Ger. buhle "lover"). Meaning deteriorated 17c.

Oh, how bizarre. I'll definitely be working this naming concept into the story. Too good to pass up.

But if anyone knows how bullying got its name...I'd be mighty appreciative if you'd send along any references.

One more grammar class....

Yippee! Just one more grammar class and then I am done for the summer. While I have been really enjoying my classes, I have to admit that my brain stopped taking in new information sometime on Tuesday. It just got filled up, and now I need to go back and revisit all the information I learned over the last 3 weeks. I won't lie about it...learning Croatian is difficult. It makes learning calculus look like a day at the beach. And having to take classes during a heatwave only adds to the drama. The temperature has been hovering around 36C for much of the past few weeks. I'm already tired and ready for a nap when I get into the classroom at 9:30 am!

Hopefully, things will go smoother...and a wee bit cooler in the upcoming Fall session. For now, me and my genetiv, lokativ, instrumental and akusativ cases will be getting to know each other up-close-and-personal over the next few weeks.

Chewy brain

Have you ever chewed a big piece of bubble gum for sooooo very long (like 2 hours) that it eventually got really hard and almost unchewable? Sort of something like road tar, or elephant skin?

Well, that is exactly what my brain feels like today after my Croatian grammar class. And tired too. So tired that when I finally hobbled down to the Dolac market, I couldn't even remember my own name, or the names of things like meat, potatoes, hello, thank you. So I sort of pointed at things, nodded my head, and took home whatever the vendor put in the bag.

Me at the market:

Me: (pointing at veal)
Butcher: (points at beef intestines and a grinning sheep head) You want these?
Me: (nodding in agreement for some bizarre reason. Oh yeah, now I remember, I wanted to cry)
Butcher: Ok. 5 cow colons and I throw in sheep skull for free!
Me: the lamp is on the table
Butcher: Thank you. Bye Bye.
Me: I am, you are, he is, she is

Okay, I made all of that up. But that's what I was thinking in my head. I'm too tired to write anymore because I can actually feel individual neurons trying to pluck verbs from the language centre of my brain.

And it kind of stings a little. Ouch.

You have to admit though that cow colons is pretty funny, yes?

Waiting for God to smile...

Back in my radio college days (yup, did you know they actually had college classes for radio broadcasting?), we had this great instructor who taught announcing. This was a class where you learned how to talk on the radio. You might think that talking on the radio is pretty easy and natural, but it is actually a skill that takes quite a while to get right. Trust me, in the beginning EVERYONE sounds dorky on the radio.

Anyway.... there is a particular skill called 'hitting the post' which refers to the act of talking over the beginning of a song, and then ending on a beat in the music (like the introduction of a new instrument or on a drumbeat), or ending right before the vocals start up. If you did it just right, it was called 'hitting the post.' If you got it wrong and ended your talking in the middle of nothing in particular or worse, if you talked ontop of the vocals, then this was called "stomping the post."

All of us newbies regularly stomped the post. It was awful. And though it sounded easy to do, it was really hard to accomplish. Our brilliant instructor told us this magical piece of advice which is the secret to 'hitting the post.' He told us that we would try and try and try, and still get it wrong. And then one day, out of the blue, God would smile on us, and we would get it right. Just like that! And believe it or not, the instructor was right. Suddenly, one by one, each of us students would just start getting it right. We would just walk into the classroom and declare: God smiled on me!

Why am I bothering with this long tale of my days of yore in radio-land? Well, because it actually relates to the learning of Croatian and I think also the the learning of any language. The beginning of learning Croatian is really wobbly for the student. I am currently having difficulty with the most basic of things, and feeling much like a newborn giraffe struggling to stand up on thin shaky legs. My pronunciation is rough. My grammar is backwards. My brain feels like it is made of lead. And no matter how much I practice, it just ain't happening.

But I have faith. And patience (well, a little bit of patience). I will just keep on doing my best, and I expect that God will just smile on me one day, and it will all come together.

As I try to conjugate some reflexive verbs, and try to memorize hundreds of new words in both masculine, feminine and neutral form.....I gaze up at the heavens every once in a while, just to see if maybe that magical smile is heading my way.

Save your eyeballs. Get kitchen safety glasses.

A couple of months ago, I decided to try out a new recipe I found on the internet for deep fried rice-flour dumplings. The recipe called for rice flour to be mixed with water into a wet paste. The wet paste then had to be made into little balls. Those balls had to be deep fried until golden and crispy. Sounded so easy. And gluten free!

Well, to make a long story short, the recipe didn't go exactly as described in the recipe. But I later learned that the problem I encountered is a nasty possibility and that each year hundreds of people are maimed and sometimes blinded by what I did next:

The rice balls were sticking to the bottom of my pot of hot boiling oil. The recipe said to be careful not to break up the balls because they would come apart in the oil. So I carefully leaned over my pot of oil, leaned my face right into the top of the pot and using a teaspoon, I gingerly tried to dislodge the rice balls from the bottom of the pan. What I didn't know, was that the rice flour had formed an incredibly thick crust around the dumpling...but that the inside was still wet and steamy. So when I moved the balls with my spoon, it caused the steam and/or moisture to escape the balls and make contact with the hot boiling oil. So BAM! Everything exploded. Big time. Like a firecracker of hot oil went off....directly into my face which was looking directly into the pot. So the oil burned my neck, my chin, my cheeks, my face, my eyebrows, my brow, my eyelashes. And my eyelids. And under my eyelids. And into my eyes. I was blinded.

I'll let that image sit with you for a bit.

I won't describe anything more because it still gives me the heebie-jeebies to even think about it. Fast forward a few weeks, and by a miracle that the doctors still can't believe, my eyesight is all okay. The burns all healed up more or less and I only have some very faint scars that are mostly hidden in my eyelid folds. I was lucky, lucky, lucky. Lots of people who experience what I experienced do not come out so lucky.

It got me thinking about safety eyeglasses for cooks. When you think about it, cooking is quite dangerous. Steam, hot oil, bacon grease, all spattering or boiling over at one point or another. Sure, there are oven mitts out there to protect your hands. But there's nothing out there to protect your eyes! I couldn't believe it. So I went looking for a good pair (or two or three) of cooking safety glasses. And I couldn't find any. Nothing specifically made for cooks. Nothing that I could find that is made for the home cook.

I wrote to a few cooking publications to find out if they could recommend any brands. I heard nothing back from them. I tried writing to the Martha Stewart folks to see if she had her own brand, but I couldn't figure out how to contact the appropriate person from their labyrinthine website. I even wrote to the folks at the Jamie Oliver website, who actually got back to me telling me that Jamie Oliver doesn't deep fry his food, and therefore they couldn't offer me any sort of assistance(???!)

With no guidance from the world of celebrity chefs, I grabbed a simple pair of safety glasses from the hardware store. Cost: about 4 euros. So cheap. I couldn't believe that I had never thought about wearing safety glasses while making all of my concoctions in the kitchen.

Well, I wear them now. All the time. If I'm cooking, then I'm wearing my glasses. And that's all I wanted to say on the subject.

Oh, and as for those rice dumplings: after literally scraping their remnants off the ceiling, I lost interest in ever making them again.

And one more thing: the shock from the accident gave me an instant white streak in my hair. Overnight. Just like that. Guess I'll have to update that picture of myself at some point ;-)

Language miracle answered

A couple posts back, I was asking for a language miracle to occur so that I could start learning Croatian properly. Well, a language miracle happened along, and I'm now enrolled in one of those intensive language classes. The class isn't the miracle. The teacher is the miracle. She has tons of energy, is really animated when she is teaching, and is super friendly. Grammar is still hard, but the teacher is making it as painless as possible.

I'd like to write more about the classes, but I have an avalanche of homework to do.

One last thing though.....um, if the universe is listening...I am also in need of a great real estate/property miracle. And a great-health miracle too. Oh, and I'll just sneak in a request for a great publishing miracle. Hope I'm not being too greedy...