…warmth is coming. We usually catch it from Alaska and Alberta, here in Spokane…and we see spring when the wind shifts and skies clear: we’re now trending toward spring. Ice has melted, snow is in the last piles, which usually are totally gone by St. Paddy’s Day, and we have seen the koi beginning to seek the sun. Renji is always the first, the explorer: Kenpachi was with him. And now Ari, so badly wounded last year, is alive, has been out—the wound the eagle dealt hasn’t healed as much as I’d hope: she may always have it: but hey, she’s survived and is fat and looks as happy as a sleepy koi can look.
I offer this as hope for those of you on the East Coast…
by CJ | Feb 8, 2013 | Journal | 31 comments
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I always feel a little sad at the summer’s solstice because she, the sun, is going away. I call the winter’s solstice the Feast of Sunreturn.
Here in Portland the common knowledge is summer doesn’t start until July 5th. Yes, because the 4th’s fireworks are so often cloudy or even worse, foggy. After that the weather clears miraculously.
Spring is a touch late here on the Oregon coast, usually by this time the wild plums are in full bloom, but they haven’t started yet. I DID notice one of the wild azaleas is pushing a bloom and my bonsai have started to pop new growth, but no daffies yet. They usually start late January.
we are still on waves of snow/rain/sleet and 0C to 3 C temps here in the uk, but the song thrush was giving it a go this morning, and I have been working happily outside in the sun today, without a coat … we will get there eventually! 😀
Yay! Ari made it! I know you were worrying about her all winter. Yay!
This has been a mild but exasperating winter in N Texas. From the 30s to the 70s in 24 hrs or less. From the teens to the 80s in a single week. All you can do is wear layers and pack a coat in the trunk.
Daffodils and Jonquils are about 6 inches high, not budding yet, but the Live Oaks haven’t shed their leaves yet – the true harbinger of Spring here.
What county are you in? I’m in Lubbock County.
Believable…
http://www.gocomics.com/roseisrose/2013/02/08
(off-topic) Some personal progress and some fun.
Reminded by Hanneke’s post, I started reading “Moon Called” by Patricia Briggs last night. Got a good ways into it. Very good story! After looking at the Wiki page for her bibliography, I now have a better idea of what books belong to which series. I’d bought a few of her books last year, and it looks like I have the starts to most of her series that way.
My reading is still not back up to my usual habits, but YAY, I think I’m ~finally~ back to regular reading again. Still need to get back into study habits. So my pace should pick up, and there’s a chance it’ll get back to my usual reading habits. Oh, I’ve missed that. … And yet I guess I needed the break. I decided it was better not to puzzle out why my reading had gone so haphazard, even on books I really enjoy. … But it looks now like it may be sorting itself out.
Related or not, I printed out a bunch of draft material to see what might connect into what toward (ahem) actually completing something longer and identifying which are separate stories versus story-universes. — I discovered, hey, some of this stuff is actually pretty darn good, ego aside. (Others, well, not so much.) Also discovered some things are story-threads that really have been running around morphing in my head for years. Promising. — And discovered various data and formatting glitches which I can sort out. The .doc and HTML+CSS anyway. The old Freehand documents are still a pain in the posterior, however, for any way to convert them into something usable.
Some time to start reading EPUB3 Best Practices by Mark Garrish and Matt Gylling this weekend and dip my toes into a book, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.
All in all, *progress*! I’m really pleased.
We’ll be hanging out with Patricia (Patty) and Mike and Sparky this coming week—we’re good friends. So if you hear me absentmindedly mentioning Patty and Mike, that’s who. Real down-to-earth super-nice folk.
I won’t believe that spring is staying until I see that most useful of plants, the dandelion, in full bloom!
Lol—we’ve got some that survived the winter.
What I believe is when the last giant parking lot snow piles melt.
http://www.weather.com/sports-rec/ski/snow-left-in-season-20130205?pageno=2
You just can’t trust a whole long strip of I-90 and I-25 even past St. Paddy’s Day. It’s why they have all those highway gates that say ‘turn back to town if blinking.’ We got caught on the wrong side of one coming back from Texas once, (ie, I’m sure the gate behind us was shut, because the Patrol and the wreckers were pulling car after car out of ditches and drifts) and it was the stretch leading to Casper…a long, long drive if your top speed is 25-30.
It’s blown like 60 all day and the sky is all hazy with dust — March never comes in or goes out like a lamb here. This is cattle country. I’ve read and greatly enjoyed Brigg’s Sianim books, I’ve just gotten the Hurog ebooks and Hob’s Choice, and look forward to starting the Mercy Thompson series as time and budget allows. So many books, so little time!
I’ve recently rearranged my office so I now have a reading nook with good lighting, a comfortable chair, a chair-side table for beverage and nosh of choice, and one of those little rolling laptop tables for my Kindle. I’ve got a backlog of books to read on the Kindle. . .
Hurrah for the office revision!
It was a rather long, drawn-out process: http://theowlunderground.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/whew-thats-the-office-done/
But it needed to be done. It’s good feng shui to start the (Chinese) new year with a clean house, which is what I spent the last two weeks of January doing. I also did some rearranging in the living room. It was a lot of work, butI now have a clean house and lost 7 lbs into the bargain.
Spring? We just got a couple feet of snow here in the Boston area (hard to tell just how much with the blowing and drifting) and have done several stints of digging with a few more this afternoon. A town plower said they need to send a bucket loader over to get where we are on a dead-end street so we aren’t too hyper about digging out from our car to the street itself yet as the street is unplowed by us.
We had no problems with the storm (and I got to go home at noon from work on Friday, which was nice) but am mildly worried about SmartCat. Most of Rhode Island where she is is without power. From comments she’s made in the past, I believe they have a wood stove. Hope so.
Raesean, I am just north of you in NH…
Totally off topic, but interesting after discussions of children reared in other languages:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deb-roy/the-birth-of-a-word_b_2639625.html?utm_hp_ref=tedweekends&ir=TED%20Weekends&ncid=webmail28
That’s a really cool lecture. I think I will snag some of the footage (well, audi-age) for my linguistics class of, likely, next week where we will be talking abut how children learn language. MIT’s Media Lab, where the research is taking place, really has a lot of astounding tech resources.
Tommie, hope you’re doing well with the snow up in NH. I spoke with my mom in Barrington yesterday morning and she was fine and prepping to go dig (in stages) from porch to car. She was surprised (as was I) that her power didn’t go out at all. Normally in a storm like this her power would be out for a couple of days.
Hope all our friends are dug out ASAP, and that they DO have means of heat.
I swear to you I just heard Canada Geese somewhere nearby. Wonder if they’re coming north?
They’re not our geese. Ours are still here. Our city channels rain runoff from storm drains into a series of playa lakes they’ve built in parks throughout the city. Every park in town that has a playa lake is all over geese. I live under the final approach to a park with a particularly large playa lake. Such a treat to go outside just before sunset and watch skeins of them come honking overhead heading to the lake. They spend the day flying out to the surrounding farmlands to feed and when the sun is going down, they return to the park lakes to spend the night where, when it’s too dark for them to see to fly safely, they can escape danger by taking to the water. I’m beginning to think that it is impossible for them to fly without honking.
🙂 🙂 🙂
I just caught that first line over in the left column of recent postings, and, having heard what a flock of geese can do to a lawn, was reminded of the “That’s not my dog” joke.
I hope SmartCat’s fine. — Tommie, thanks for the link. I’m about to watch/listen. Always interested in language.
Per Sharon Lee’s LJ page, they got around 24 inches in Winslow, Maine, and they did not lose power. Elizabeth Bear posted pictures on her Tumblr blog of her shoveling the good little bit of snow they got where she lives in Massachusetts (http://matociquala.tumblr.com/post/42682304662/we-got-some-snow). The drift behind her in the one picture is head high, and where she is shoveling is waist deep — and Bear is a tall lady.
Awesome lecture. I heard something in the bit about learning the word “water”:
1. “ga-ga” or “ga-guh” — 2 syllables; 1st syllable stressed; very simple and common baby utterance; is there a correlation that “water” has 2 syllables? or do all polysyllabic words get approximated as two syllables? is there a correlation that “ga-ga” and “water” have “ah” or “aw” as the central, crucial vowel? very long period where “ga-ga” is echoed to mean, or associated with, “water”; concrete versus associated or abstract meanings, both linked into the concept of “water”? that is, links from noun “water” to verb “drink”, adj. “thirsty”, noun “beverage”, adj. wet, and so on? (it seems natural) ;
2. “ga-guh” –> “wa-guh” “gwa-guh” or an intermediate consonant between g and w; *breakthrough*; the baby uses the “w” or “gw” or “g~w” sounds for the first time, though he still also says “ga-guh”;
3. “wa-wa” — this is often heard by babies acquiring the word “water”; but in the clips, no “wa-wa” is included; anomaly or missing data item?
4. “wa-” … “wa-TTER” — the baby has learned “wa” is the key syllable, but seems unsure of the second syllable; he gives a very emphatic t! sound and gets the -er correct too; he stresses the “TTER” syllable, as though mimicking and testing out what he’s hearing from speakers who are probably emphasizing the word as “wa-TTER” so he learns the formal word; success! he gets it;
5. “water” — success and final stage; the baby learns to say “water”, the fully correct way; 1st syllable stressed, “wa-” with the d-like t in “-ter” for the American English dialect he’s learning, and all sounds are right for the dialect;
An additional note for thought: The baby is in an Indian-American home/family, with standard American English and Indian English dialects both heard. It’s also possible he (the baby) is hearing Hindi or one or more other Indian languages from his parents, nanny, and relatives.
This is mentioned because there would be expected effects on language acquisition. The primary language is English. So the baby might hear occasional other words and think of them as data glitches, things he didn’t understand. Or if there is another language heard often enough, he’d either identify the other word as familiar but not learned, belonging to another language. Or if the family or environment are sufficiently bilingual, the baby might learn both the English and the Hindi/other words. (However, this wasn’t shown in the data presented.) In an environment with more than one frequent standard language, the baby would be expected to have a period where he tries both words and has to learn that two separate words (sound clusters) both mean water, and the grammatical concept involved, that these are separate languages instead of separate grammatical forms of a word (such as water, waters, water’s, waters’ or more varied forms in other languages). I’d be curious what the (formal, grownup) word for water is in Hindi or other Indian languages, since there would be baby-talk forms and the “grownup” word.
It would be really useful to apply the study techniques demonstrated in the lecture to a bilingual or multilingual environment or home to see how babies learn both / several languages and how they learn that one or more are their language while others are foreign, unlearned languages, words they hear but don’t understand, languages that are other people’s but not theirs.
That also might be applied to adults and youth learners, regarding either additional language acquisition (secondary, non-native, near native, consciously learned) — such as school classes or immigration and acculturation — or for people exposed to other languages in their environment, some of whom then learn to some degree, while others only know they are hearing another language (and usually which language) but they don’t learn the word meaning or how to use the language.
Case in point:
A male cousin is American and married a Colombian woman who speaks English with a Colombian Spanish accent. She was already an American citizen, IIRC, at least college in the US, they met at college. She and her family are (of course) fluent in Colombian Spanish, with varying degrees of English fluency among relatives who’ve immigrated here.
English is the primary language at home, but their two children (and the kids’ cousins) also grew up hearing Spanish often. The kids then have had at least some Spanish classes in middle and high school. I’m unclear if they’re truly fluent or if it’s partial fluency. Whether they acquire full fluency as adults, with any further formal study or only personal and media sources, remains to be seen. (The daughter is nearing college age, the son just entered high school.)
Their dad, my male cousin, still doesn’t know Spanish. He hasn’t tried to learn it. He hears it and I’m sure he understands a little, but that’s as far as it goes.
And that is very typical for either mixed-language or second generation immigrant families, for some part of the family to be English-only, another part to be Other-Language only, and then a range between, tending to diminish to English-only over the years / generations.
His dad and an uncle once visited here and were fascinated (to the point of overdoing their notice of it) to hear and see a conversation in active, fluent Spanish, some years ago before my cousin married. I, uh, asked my relatives (great-uncles) to please cool it. 😉 They were beginning to make the Spanish speaking table nervous. 😉 — And I was used to hearing Spanish, of course, both from classes and from my city and state.
So there’s a spectrum of language learning that might benefit from the analysis model outlined in the lecture.
Apropos of your cousin:
Did you ever consider the cantina scene of Star Wars? Everybody speaks their native tongue, emphasis on “tongue” as in the kinds of sounds they can make, and interprets it for himself.
It almost doesn’t feel like we actually got winter here in the Denver area. It’s been very warm with little snow. It makes me worry for another fire season like last year. :/