I still reread my favorite kids’ books from time to time, and I still have some of the original copies from when I was a kid. My favorites:
What are your favorite kids’ books?
What is comfort food? The best description I can come up with is warm, soft, and easy to prepare, but that doesn’t work for everyone. My comfort foods are mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese, both of which I crave when I’m sick or depressed. What are your comfort foods and when do you eat them?
Among my friends and family, I’m considered something of a computer whiz. There are tons of people who know a lot more than I, but since I used computers daily long before they became a household word (my father was a computer programmer), I’m much more knowledgeable about and comfortable with them than many people my age and older. While I don’t mind helping people when their computer crashes or begins running sluggishly, I have noticed that the problems are almost invariably caused by at least one of four common scenarios. So I thought I’d share some tips; though they won’t be anything new to most of you, experience tells me that at least one or two people out there could use some help.
Problem 1: Continue reading
When I decided to start a site on English, I had no idea what I was getting into. The lessons on English difficulties are fairly easy – I just write down what I know, double-check in the dictionary, and voilà. What turned out to be much harder is writing the ESL lessons. I thought I’d be clever and offer them not just in English, but in French and Spanish as well. That is, there are ESL lessons written in French from the French speaker’s perspective, and the same thing in Spanish. These sound quite tricky, but in fact they’re pretty easy too – since I have studied both French and Spanish, it’s not difficult to approach each issue “backwards” and see it from that language’s point of view.
So it turns out that the really tough features are the ESL lessons written in English! Trying to explain my native language using only my native language, without anything to compare it to and while trying not to use overly complicated vocabulary, that’s the hardest part. I would have thought it would be the easiest – you just never know. 🙂
I’m a voracious reader, though not for what some might call “good” literature, meaning the classics or anything intellectual. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think there’s anything bad about reading light, fluffy fiction that does nothing more than entertain and pass the time, but I’ve been told that I’m mistaken. 😉
Anyway, I love science fiction, and I adore Harry Potter. While waiting for the 7th and final installation in the Harry Potter series, I’ve been spending a lot of time visiting sites and forums, and buying books that analyze the Harry Potter universe. The best site, by far, is of course J.K.Rowling’s site, which not only has all kinds of good info about the ooks and the author herself, but also makes a game of it, with clues and different kinds of hidden treasures scattered around. Great fun!
The other night my husband was in the kitchen cutting a lime for a gin and tonic, and as I was a bit stuck on the Spanish lesson I was writing (on the perfect infinitive), I decided to take a little break from work and pick his brain at the same time (his Spanish is much better than mine).
While pouring my tonic, I asked him for some examples of the Spanish perfect infinitive. He thought a moment and then started rattling off sentences as he picked up his glass and went to sit down. Meanwhile, my brain frantically tried to keep up with the Spanish as well as to find the rest of the lime, which seemed to have disappeared. A few seconds later I laughed as it was right in front of me but I’d been too distracted to see it. But my husband went one better: he returned to the kitchen to add both gin and tonic to his drink – he’d been so distracted by the Spanish question that he’d done nothing more than squeeze a wedge of lime over the ice in his glass! I couldn’t stop laughing for more than 10 minutes, and I’m laughing again as I write this.