Figs are fine

The figs are starting to ripen.  Hallelujah! 

This little fellow below isn't quite ripe yet, but I took a picture just to show what the inside looks like at this stage.  The fruit is actually the flower turned inside out, if that makes any sense at all.







And here's what a tree looks like:

Interesting Fruits

Now that  grammar classes are done for the summer, I can get back to what matters most to me:  food!  I've had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Istrian countryside in June and couldn't help but be amazed at the bounty of fruits growing everywhere.  I took some pictures of things that might be pretty everyday for people who live in these parts, but are amazing for someone like me who comes from a much colder climate.

First up:  pomegranate.  This tree is about 4 or 5 years old and is covered in gorgeous saffron-colored blossoms:




A flower that has started morphing into pomegranate fruit:

 

 And one tiny perfectly formed pomegranate fruit that needs about 4 more months before it is ready to enjoy in October. 

 

Here's the one picture I have of a persimmon tree.  These fruits are about the size of a crab-apple right now, and will grow to the size of a grapefruit and turn bright red/orange in November/December.

Here's another interesting fruit:  the quince, a sort of cross between apple and pear.  This quince tree is about 12 years old and the fruits are hard and fuzzy right now.  They will grow quite large to the size of a very large potato, and they will remain quite hard, and will turn a golden yellow color.  Quince needs to be cooked and makes great compote.

 

Fruits amongst the lush leaves:

And a close-up of the fuzzy fruits:

 

I'm off to take pictures of the figs and olives right now.  However, if the early figs are ripe, I will put the camera away and help myself to some figgy goodness!

I made it!

So I wrote and passed all my exams.  Whew!  What a relief.  Now, I'll take a bit of time to let my brain relax. 

Ahhhh, it feels better already.

Thanks to everyone who sent along their good wishes!

Exam logjam

So, I passed my midterm exam with an admirable grade.  But there's hardly time to take a short breather because the next exam is just 10 days from now.!  And this is the final exam which covers everything from the entire course.  Can you hear that weird noise... it sort of sounds like the noise those long skinny balloons make when the street busker guy is twisting them into balloon animals?  Well, that squeaking is coming from my brain which is stretching to accommodate the mountains of new grammar and vocabulary that I take home every day from class, and which need to be studied, memorized and understood for this exam in 10 days.  

Everything is on hold for the next 10 days (including blogging) while I study and study and study and study, with small breaks for eating, sleeping, weeping, then back to more studying.

I'm praying that the jingles stay out of my head for this one.  These last few days of studying have been rudely interrupted by my brain singing Strangers In The Night (Sinatra version) in an endless loop over my dative possessive pronouns.  Why can't my brain sing instrumentals? 

Pronoun purgatory.

I have to write my midterm Croatian exam tomorrow.  I'm studying hard to keep my cases straight, and learning new vocabulary at the speed of light, and trying to remember when k changes to c and when a singular masculine noun is alive vs not alive, etc.  I can store most of this stuff nicely in my brain, but I've got a block when it comes to pronouns.  Seriously.  Don't ask me why I can't remember these things.  The pronouns in Croatian are a bit of a handful.  In English they are pretty easy to keep straight:  I, me, my, theirs, them, his, him, etc.  Simple stuff.  And I study them in Croatian.  Really really study them.  And I feel super confident when I sit down to write a test...and then it happens.  Whammo-bammo, the pronoun section of my brain goes out for coffee and leaves something useless in its place, like a pop tune or an old jingle.

So here's what's going on in my head as I'm trying to write the pronoun section of the exam:

Me:    Alright pronouns! I know this stuff like the back of my hand. Let's see, second person plural locative.
Brain:  we're sorry, all our operators are busy; please hold the line
Me:  okay don't panic, I'll just go to the next one.  Hmm, this one needs third person singular masculine in the accusative.  No problem.  I know this one, it goes like...
Brain:  YMCA, it's fun to stay at the YMCA
Me:  oh help!  come on, I know this stuff.  How do you say 'with her' in Croatian?
Brain:  I'm a Pepper, you're a Pepper, he's a Pepper, she's a Pepper
Me & Brain:  wouldn't you like to be a Pepper too!  Be a Pepper, drink Dr. Pepper! 

It's grammar-jingle-dyslexia.  With flying monkeys and hula hoops.

If the teacher only knew what was going on in my head......

Squid for my sister

I'm posting a picture for my sister who has a special place in her heart for squid.  Especially big huge squid with eyes like jawbreakers!  Like this one, which a fisherman caught on a hook in the Adriatic Sea past Porec, and which then made its way to my kitchen.  This fellow was about as long as my arm and weighed about 2kg before I dressed him for dinner.  The suctions on his tentacles kept sticking to the cutting board and to my hands...de-suctioning them from my hands produced this weird SHLOOP noise.  As per usual, we ate every last morsel of this meal before I remembered that I needed to take a photo :-(  But trust me, it was very yummy :-)
Note to sister:  you can double click on the photo for a huge close-up view.

Second note:  next time you're swimming in the sea and you think that's seaweed brushing up against your ankle...think again!

Channeling my inner Nancy Drew

I've been going over lots of the fiction I've written over the years and I've noticed that everything eventually turns into a mystery.  You might think there's nothing wrong with this, and you'd be right.  Mysteries are great to read and I myself have enjoyed reading countless mysteries in my lifetime.  The weird thing is that I never set out to write a mystery.  I start out with something completely different in mind, and somewhere along the line BAMMO!  A mystery emerges.

Think of it this way.  Imagine that every time you get in the car, you end up at the dry-cleaners.  Even if you intend to drive to the grocery store, or to work, or the dentist's office or the emergency room at the hospital.  You end up at the dry-cleaners.  And unless you are living in a Stephen King novel, at some point you'd get a little weirded-out.  Yes?  So, I'm a little weirded-out about it. 

Come to think of it though, I did spend an inordinate amount of my childhood with Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, The Three Investigators, and my most favourite of all:  Encylopedia Brown!  I even thought about an awesome TV series where Nancy Drew and Encylopedia Brown grow up, get married and have kids who are...(get ready for it) crime-solving teenagers! 

So, I guess I should just recognize the pattern, and go with it.  I'm going to take my current work-in-progress (working title:  The Hypatia Curse...but don't worry, that won't be the real title ;-)  and turn it into a true mystery.  But no angels or werewolves or psychics or vampires.  Okay, maybe one vampire and one psychic.  We'll see how it goes.

I feel better already.  Whew!  Mystery solved.

Cherry countdown begins.

The cherry tree behind our building blossomed last week!  As you can see in my picture, the cherry has white blossoms.  Thousands of them.  And in just 30 days, the tree will be covered in dark red, sweet, fat, huge, juicy cherries.

Strange but true. Honest.

Do you know what Croatians call the "@" symbol?  In English, it is referred to as the 'at' sign.  So we'd give our e-mail address as:  myname AT something.com.  Well, around here, they don't call it the 'at' sign.  Nope.  If you ask someone for their e-mail address, here's what you'd get:

myname MONKEY SIGN something.com.

I didn't believe this at first because I thought people were just trying to pull my leg due to my obvious foreignality (I just made up that word).  But apparently it is true that they call the @ symbol, the MONKEY SIGN and I'm told it's because the symbol looks like a monkey.

Now I've been described as a pretty creative person, but I can't make out the monkey.  Maybe a whale eye, a sort of snail, a squished bagel or a strange donut.  But the monkey remains illusive for me.  I'm guessing it'll all become clear to me once I get a handle on some more grammar (?)

It is definitely more fun to speak e-mail addresses out loud using the monkey sign.  Try saying your e-mail address out loud right now using the monkey sign. 

Tell me that didn't make you grin from ear-to-ear :-)

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!