Victor Should Write a Book

Even me?

wow - 2 foriegn languages? Not here! i just finished my 4 semester foreign language requirement at SCSU with Spanish 4. At CCSU, they only require 2 semesters!

The college I work at has no language requirements. Apparently, it is one of the key reasons students pick the college. And the president is a French literature scholar.

I took French and Swahilli. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.

I'm pretty fluent in Spanglish, and getting better as time goes on.

I'm not fluent in any language except maybe four letter words that I hear my neighbors shouting at each other. I just shouted out the door and told them to shut up, it's 6:00 in the morning!! First time I've reacted to the situation - we are tired of listening to them. All of my neighbors are wonderful except these two and they are not even married - don't know why he sticks around. They are getting much worse and I hope nothing violent ever happens. There are young chiildren in the neighborhood also who have to hear what comes out of their mouths!! TG that they are not next door but across the street. Eleanor

Sorry about your loud neighbors Eleanor.
I work in homecare, and we have a lot of Russian patients. One of our nurses took a class, and does rather well communicating with them, although they say she's just so so at the language.
She wrote out some words for us with phonetic pronunciations, and the only word I remember is good - horror show.

Gloria - my sister (who happens to live in Alabama now too) studied Russian in college as well even though she was a math and physics major. She thought it would "stretch" her brain, and I think it did. She went on to map a part of the moon for NASA for the moon landing in 1969.

DonnieBrook: The Russian that I took was technical russian at Michigan College of Mining and Technology, Houghton Michigan. the name has been changed now. But, it was designed for chemical and electrical engineers. It was actually easy to learn after mastering the cyrillic alphabet because the technical words are the same in Russian as they are in English.

I later worked at Vandenberg AFB on technical projects, but mostly because I could read and type chemical formulas, not because I had Russian. I don't know if Russian expanded my brain cells or not. Ive never been afraid to tackle just about anything I needed to learn. Probably the most technical thing Ive ever read was Rudolf Carnap's Logical Syntax of a Language which is entirely written in logical symbols.

I have an old quantum mechanics book you can borrow for some light reading, Gloria.

I probably read it already, Victor. I wrote an M.A. thesis on Quantum Mechanics and its impact on The Philosophy of Science once.

Anyhow, this sounds like Im bragging about all Ive learned. Well, you can learn a lot in 100 years. But my point really is once you learn how to learn you never have to stop and you don't need a formal education to do it either.

I used to take my car to a quantum mechanic, but whenever I looked, he wasn't there.

Ouch!

He was leaping, Victor.

But, Victor, the question being, did you ever get the car back?

Yes - back to the future.

anyone else remember Quantum Leap? with Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell?

JD, We thought Columbus made sense, just had no idea he was gonna turn out so mean. I think hangin with the Spaniards at that time made him more "inquisitive".
I'm amazed that the Galileo vs the Pope thing has been resurrected.

huh..?

That car was running by the principle of uncertainty.

I loved Quantum Leap!

I used to like it too Yank, haven't seen it in along time! I also used to watch McGuiver with DS, he loved how he could get out of anything with simple everyday objects.

Gloria - you are so right......The key is learning how to learn well! But I had a mental block against numbers.....except for geometry. I liked it because you could draw shapes. That part was ok. Trigonometry though....was like Russian to me! Generally, languages were my thing - but Russian wasn't an option.....

Me, too. A block against numbers. Logic, geometry, calculus o.k. but numbers no. Ive met mathemeticians and their thinking seems so strange to me.

To me one of the most interesting experiences I had was trying to learn
furniture making. I was making a copy of an old piece that had been built in the 1850s. It was a small oval table with a tapered octagonal base. Hmmmm. I realized in making the cuts that I was doing and thinking the same processes that the original maker of the piece had thought through.

You know its interesting to read something that somebody say, in the 14th century has written.

But, following the actions of an old furniture maker who may even have been illiterate almost gave me chills. And, if you don't do it exactly the way he did it, the finished piece will not work.

Isn't that the truth! What a fascinating experience you had in making the table! Our old farmhouse (1763) has a lot of really old tools and kitchen things in the barn that we resurrected and use. It also gives me chills when I pick up some old implement to use for something in a pinch and then realize exactly what it was used for in the 18th Century. Literacy was uncommon among the women settlers. On the first deed to our house, our first settler's wife marked it with an X........amazing considering that not many women even signed deeds back then. I did a title search all the way back to the land grant involving the Proprietors and King George the III - actually got to touch and see the original paper......very, very cool!

To me the best part history is conecting with ordinary people, not necessarily those who were famous. And, of course its interesting to learn ordinary things about famous people.

Agree totally!

It was interesting checking the old deeds for the historic house where I worked here. The deeds were almost always signed by women. Apparently there was some kind of legal advantage to have property in the wife's name rather than the husband. But these were very well educated women. The first lady was the sister of the surpreme court chief justice of North Carolina. She also knew the law. In fact at the end of the civil war, she sued the U.S. Government for confiscation of her cotton crop. The theft of her crop meant that she couldn't pay the slaves who stayed on to help her get the crop harvested.

The second woman of the house was her neice, daughter of the chief justice. She taught at the Female School which was quite famous here in the 1860-70s. Her own 6 children were home schooled, and all had college educations, including 3 daughters.

The books belonging to both of these women and also to the rest of the family are still on the shelves in their house. Of course, I read them every chance I had. (!) I wanted to see what they were thinking about.

I would have done the same thing! Before we retired, my DH and I used to come up to our farmhouse on a weekend, light a fire and read aloud to each other from the history book of the town that talked about the family that was living in our house. It would give me chills to sit in the very room where they lived and read all the names of their children. Good chills.....happy ghosts!

I would love to see/ feel a ghost - of course a happy one...

The last owner of the historic house here was quite a character in her own right. Of all the ghosts that probably were there - I felt her presence the strongest, and I found my self thinking: Ms. Margaret would not like this, Or, Ms Margaret would approve of this. She died in 1978. She was 98 or 99.

When the rooms were being repainted or fabrics selected, we always took something she had picked out to make sure the colors were what she would have wanted.

My weird post was in response to JD's post. It wasn't funny enough to go back & figure it out but it came from not having spoken Latin in centuries.

Wow, Gloria!

Cool story and history, Gloria!

Hey! You guys in the NE Forum are pretty cool yourselves.

In my humble opinion.

gloria

I'm with Deb - I would not mind seeing / experiencing one myself.

A female, Victor?

Preferably.

Think about the math involved in making quilts - a tradition women's art form.

Well quilts are geometry, not numbers.