Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I'll write more later, but rysmiel's description of the past weekend will do for a start. Also, Dan Hoey, WINOLJ and seems to think I know more French than I do, supplies two more French words with y's in them, suitable for Scrabble: citoyen and voyeur. (Gentlebeings, emailing me in French is not the most efficient means of communication.)

I feel like I'm up too early. Or rather, that I got up too early--I've been awake for an hour, have made and drunk a mug of tea, and been online for a bit now. That's not just the calendar, I think--it's that I'm not used to being up this much before papersky. We did all go to bed early, but that should affect people equally. I suspect this is an effect of not being in my usual bed.

Yesterday was quiet quality time, a backrub, used books (I let rysmiel convince me that I needed to buy Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children), Cha Noir for tea and Scrabble, and dinner at the Peruvian where we noted that we're looking forward to Quebec giving rysmiel the birthday gift of making all restaurants smoke-free. Scrabble in English with the French letter distribution is amusing--there are too many u's, but the extra three e's didn't seem to be a problem. I woke up this morning thinking "lycee," after we'd been trying and failing to think of a native French word (i.e., not "yak") of more than one letter with a y in it. In French Scrabble, y and k are ten-point letters.

Last night, I arranged to meet L (WINOLJ) after my workout, for lunch and to accompany me to Astor Place Barber Shop while I investigated hair coloring.

I had a good workout, then went down to the Village. I got to Paul's Burgers well before she did, but after a while we were both quite well fed, because the servings there are always generous.

The hair place has given up their street-level space (there's a chain ice cream shop in their now) but is bustling down at basement level. I spent some time trying to get information about what would be involved in streaking my hair purple; despite the language barrier, I determined that yes, bleach would be necessary, but that they didn't think it would do much damage. One of the hairdressers advised me to get relatively small streaks, because I have fine hair. I did that, but wound up (from a different hairdresser, a woman named Elma) with, I think, more purple bits than the first woman had had in mind.

Bits of the process were uncomfortable: having the bits of hair that were to be dyed pulled (with something that resembled a crochet hook, I think) through a plastic cap, and some fumes from the bleach. Mostly, it was just somewhat time-consuming. Most of the time, I spent chatting with L about cats and other deep and meaningful subjects. Once the bleaching was done, the hairdresser took me to a different area, washed the bleach out, and then applied the purple. I sat there for a bit, not doing much. Near the end of the dyeing, another woman came over and tugged bits of the hair further out--I went "ouch!" and she explained that she needed to make sure that the roots got colored. Then Elma added more purple. Someone came over and said "Que linda color!" I uttered an automatic "Gracias" and Elma, sounding surprised, asked "You speak Spanish?" I admitted to a little— had I been fluent, the whole thing would have been simpler. Despite those last-minute tugs, the dye in the front very visibly doesn't go all the way to the roots, which is disappointing.

Another wash, and back to Elma's station, where L was disappointed that she'd missed the actual application of the dye. Elma blow-dryed my hair, brushed it out, and attempted for about the fifth time to get me to have her cut it. I declined, because I wasn't sure I had enough Spanish, or she enough English, for me to get across that I want only the absolute minimum trimmed off the bottom.

From there, L and I wandered to and through Washington Square Park, which is greening very nicely. We poked our heads into a new tea shop called Tea Spot, at Third and MacDougal, but I concluded it was noisier than I wanted to deal with, so we had our tea at La Lanterna. Eventually, we headed for our respective homes, via Porto Rico (for coffee beans). On the A train, there was a woman who was loud, somewhat randomly aggressive, and I suspect mentally ill—but rather than shouting anything rude or threatening toward me, she just remarked two or three times "She has purple hair!" There are worse things than being conspicuously but non-threateningly weird.

On my way to the drugstore, I passed rosefox, who called "Looks good, Vicki" as she and sinboy walked north on Broadway.

I want a new purple-hair userpic, but the purple/gym one will do for this entry.

( gym details )

One of the ongoing alt.polyamory food threads wandered from rutabagas (a.k.a. swedes) to someone wondering, given that we call turkeys (Melleagris gallopavo) after Turkey, and the French and Russians call them after India, what the Turks and Indians call them.

Google is my friend. The Turkish for M. gallopavo is "hindi." No luck on finding the Hindi--of the first four English-Hindi dictionaries I found, one didn't have it, one gave me an error message, and two happily displayed answers in a character set I don't know. I did, however, learn that "turko" is a Hindi word for crescent.

After putting together the toy in my Kinder Egg, using instructions entirely in pictograms, I found that I had something whose purpose is to fall off the edge of the table: and it isn't even very good at it.

However, we had fun identifying the languages on the warning label: having gone effortlessly from English through español and Polska, and been briefly sidetracked by Hungarian on the way to Hrvatska*, I faltered at MK (in Cyrillic) (Macedonian, maybe?) before coming up triumphantly at Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

Then I noticed the real oddity: not the inclusion of Romanian and Russian, but the absence of French, Italian, German, and all the Scandinavian languages. Do they sell no kinder eggs in Scandinavia? How many are they selling in Bulgaria?

Still, it's a lot better than the alleged toys that come in Cracker Jacks these days.

*Croatian

I took a nice walk up in Inwood Hill Park just now. I had to backtrack a few times, because some of the paths are still unnavigably icy. In particular, one steep way up into the hills ("The Clove" on the Parks Department maps) looked difficult to get up, and dangerous to try coming down again; fortunately, the other path that goes up from that spot near the soccer field was fine.

The hills still say winter, though the periwinkle leaves are whispering a dark glossy "Spring." I saw no interesting birds, and almost no people. A few squirrels, and two dead mice on one bit of path. At the first, I thought "We're not asked to report dead mice"; the second, a minute later, was "That's two" and I started looking for patterns, or more dead mice, but found neither. Okay, one pattern, but not about mice: the higher spots are mostly clear of snow, while the area between the two ridges is still very white when viewed from above. Not surprising: that pair of hills combine to block several hours of direct sunlight every day.

I also had a nice chat with a woman I met next to the water; she pointed out the swan to her daughter as "ganso" and I thanked her for the word, and gave her the English when she asked. She said she knew "a little English," and I admitted to knowing a little Spanish. She said something in Spanish, and when I said "Por supuesto, lo estudie en el colegio" ["Of course, I studied it in high school"] we were in Spanish for the rest of our chat. She told me her name, and her daughter's; I told her mine; we discussed feeding the ducks. A pleasant chat, and while I remembered "ganso" long enough to write it here--in part by making simple sentences about the swan on my way home, things like "el ganso es grande" and "el ganso nada en el rio"--I've already forgotten her name.

One goal of the walk was to make my menstrual cramps go away. It worked: for as long as I was walking. They've already come back, a little, now that I'm inside and sitting down. Even if I wanted to, I can't walk sixteen hours a day; I guess I'll have to fall back on ibuprofen.

• Papersky and Rysmiel took me out to a Peruvian restaurant, where I had excellent onion soup (filling, as onion soup with proper cheese broiled on top always is) and grilled shrimp, and everyone else had other more-or-less Peruvian food, after we sorted out what things were by comparing the Spanish and French parts of the menu. It was easier to say "Solamente agua por favor" than to ask for a glass of water in French (the staff spoke no English). So there I was, in a bilingual nation, communicating in a third language. Ordering in Spanish wasn't weird--I do that at home sometimes--but it turned out that my Spanish was the best common language between any of us and anyone who worked there. So Papersky asked me to tell the waitress that the bathroom light was out. I took a moment, figured out how, and walked over and did so. The problem was that this left me in Spanish as a second language mode. Later in the meal, I was in the bathroom, someone knocked, and I answered in Spanish. Then I had to put my brain back into English mode, since none of the people I was dining with speak any Spanish: that's why I'd been translating in the first place.

• It took me three days to get comfortable enough on the Metro to slip into my native guide mode. I noticed this when I counted stations to our destination, Rysmiel looked vaguely confused about where we were, and I automatically said how far we had to go. Right. Rysmiel lives and works there, and takes the Metro to work, and I got to town three days ago. The Montreal Metro is nice and simple--four lines, standardized announcement format for the next station ("Station prochaine <station name>"), and they display bus and suburban rail connections on the sides of the car as you approach the station. Well, simple if you can get along in a sort of verbless rudimentary French, as I can.

If I had, I might have guessed that the miniature calendar I bought (for about $4 Canadian including tax) was in French. I was lured by the pictures, and didn't notice that it says "Le charme des Fleurs Sauvages" and "Calendrier de 2003 édition spéciale de 16 mois" and absolutely nothing else on the front. The months and moon phases are the same as on any calendar I'd buy, of course, and so are most of the holidays--except that it has "féte national du Québec" for 24 June and doesn't have US Independence Day. We'll be buying a larger calendar anyhow, to hang where we normally hang calendars, and I'll have pretty pictures of flowers as soon as I figure out a non-destructive way to pin this one to my desk.

(The fine print is on the back: WP Fleurs sauvage - Imprimé au Canada...6,99 $ Canada - 4,99 $ États-Unis)

I don't exactly need a day off to recover from my vacation, or even from the trip home (although the train's heat failed somewhere in upstate New York, and never got fixed, even when we sat in Albany to change engines). But Rafiq has our project on hold, and while I emailed Robert to ask if he has any immediate work, it's the middle of the night in Tokyo, so I haven't heard back from him. It's gray and chilly out, the sort of weather you can go out in but isn't any fun, and it's easier to sit here and listen to London Calling and do cryptic puzzles than work on the novel or clean my desk.

I can get by in French, at least on the "rosbif avec fromage, si vous plait" and "tirez/poussez" level, but it's nice to be back where I can read the signs and know enough verbs to get by in the two commonest languages. Still, as I told papersky, I'd be happy to shop in French if I could buy pastries as nice as she can get in easy walking distance at the patisserie on Sherbrooke. But cattitude volunteered that he's not moving to Montreal while I was burbling last night and hadn't even suggested the idea, so I guess I'm buying Jewish rye bread and fancy sourdoughs in English, and pointing and smiling at the dim sum carts. It's good to be home. I just wish more of my friends lived closer.

Looking at a description of a weekend immersion language course, I found a pointer to a self-test at parlo.com. I took it and was advised to enroll in their "Interactive French 2", with the comment that I had probably taken some French courses before, and was ready to add more advanced structures to my knowledge.

The problem is, I was guessing on some, and extrapolating from similarities of grammatical structure on others. I got the "right" answer, in terms of grammar, when filling in blanks in sentences I didn't understand.