Should have done this a week ago...

[hmpf]

cause I'm still busy, but not stressed anymore. Yay! Handed in the Paper From Hell, so no pollen analysis for me anymore! And did it ever feel good to return those books to the library, hopefully never to be seen again... Got a few other things sorted out, as well, and my To Do List is now, for the first time in as much as 15 months or so, of manageable dimensions. I feel good. My life's still not completely under control, but the degree of chaos present at the moment I can live with, just about.

Bigger update to come, but first I have to check everybody's LJ's! I've been out of the loop so long it's probably not feasible to *really* catch up with everybody's lives since I left LJ-land many months ago, but I'll try at least to browse the last couple of months...

Random list for November 20, 2005:

Things I Want to Learn More Of/About, in alphabetical order:

Anarchism
Astrophysics
Fandom and New Media Studies
French
Japanese
Latin
Spanish
Turkish

Anyone have a few lifetimes to spare? *g*

Hey. I know most of you probably aren't reading this anymore, but I love you guys. I'm sorry I've been absent. I've missed you.

See you around.

Comments

[beebee852001.livejournal.com]

Hello!!!!!!!

I'm glad you aren't as stressed :D I've got your books in a prominant position so I don't forget them :) I can't wait to see you *bounces*

Hey!

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

I can't wait, either! You'll be just in time for the *real* Frankfurt christmas market! :-)

Re: Hey!

[beebee852001.livejournal.com]

I know!! I've been looking forward to seeing it :D

[ommadon.livejournal.com]

We've missed you too :)

Not dead? ;-)

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

How ya doin'?

Re: Not dead? ;-)

[ommadon.livejournal.com]

Ah hello, sorry only just got the comment notification *g*

[nogias.livejournal.com]

Dear Gott woman.. How many languages are you fluent in?

Just English. And German, of course.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Used to be fairly fluent in French, but that's mostly gone - I've begun working on it again, though, so maybe I'll get fluent again. Know a little Spanish - enough to understand basic texts, not enough to actually speak or write it. Will hopefully get around to work on that again, too. I've got a book of Spanish short stories on my bedside table right now. *g* Latin and Turkish I both started learning once, then abandoned quickly, but would like to try again. Mostly I gave up on them because the learning arrangements I was in for them didn't work very well for me. I recently found a great book for studying Latin, though, so maybe I'll hire a student who knows Latin to teach me using that book, or something.

Japanese is entirely wishful thinking at the moment as there don't seem to be any affordable courses where I live.

BTW -

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Do I know you? Maybe from some forum, under another name?

Re: BTW -

[nogias.livejournal.com]

No, not really. I wanted to discuss politics with you because you hold a perspective that I lack in the heart of the midwest of America.

I am also learning to speak German and I will be going to Kiel this summer.

I'm a friend of darkladyothsith She alerted me to the existence of an open minded German speaker on LJ while I was struggling to find one.

Oh, yeah.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

I remember now. I'm sorry I didn't react at the time - you had the bad luck of catching me at a time in my life when I was incredibly stressed. I meant to at least explain why I couldn't reply but then it slipped my mind among all the other stuff that was going on at the time.

Re: Oh, yeah.

[nogias.livejournal.com]

Which language did you speak first? German or English?

German.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

I learned English in school, but unlike most people who proceed to forget the stuff they learned in school when they graduate, I kept at it and continued reading and writing English in the ten years since I left school, so by now I've been learning English for about 19 years, which, I imagine, would make anyone fairly proficient. I still make stupid errors occasionally, though, especially when I'm tired, and there's a thousand things I'm really uncertain of, as well. Some parts of grammar, prepositions, etc. *g*

Most of my English is self-taught. I read loads of English books even when I was still in school, and probably learned more from that than from my teachers. Also, I've been interacting with English speaking people on the internet for the past seven years. I also studied in Britain for a while.

[herdivineshadow]

I know about Latin!!! It has cool words like Polyspaston and Coquus and ...I should probably dig out my Latin dictionary.

This seems to be a great book for learning Latin:

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

http://www.lingua-latina.dk/

I'm thinking about buying it. It's a total immersion course, i.e. not a single word in the book is in another language than Latin. It looks like it would allow people to learn Latin pretty much intuitively.

Re: This seems to be a great book for learning Latin:

[herdivineshadow]

That book looks pretty cool. From the pages on the site, it starts off fairly easy and would let you work towards more complex stuff.

Re: This seems to be a great book for learning Latin:

[herdivineshadow]

http://www.cambridgescp.com/latin/clc/clc_home.html

This is the series of books that I used when I learnt latin at school. Although the books I used were about 20 years old or so.

Polyspaston looks Greek to me, btw.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Both because of the 'poly', which would be 'multi' in Latin, and because of the suffix 'on', which probably would be 'um' in Latin.

Re: Polyspaston looks Greek to me, btw.

[herdivineshadow]

According to my vague memory of latin lessons about 5 or 6 years ago, it means "Crane" like the kind used for construction, rather than the bird.

Probably a loan word, then.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Maybe they borrowed the word, along with the idea, from the Greeks.

[rossb.livejournal.com]

Hi.

I used to know quite a few links to decent articles on Anarchism unfortuneately I've gone and lost the links. However it does really depend on what sort of anarchism you mean as they can be quite varied.

Hey there.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't worry, I have loads of links already. I'm mostly lacking time, is all. ;-) Basically, I sort of got sick of being a pessimist and now I'm kind of looking for a utopia to believe in *g* and recent surveys and experiences seem to suggest anarchism, at least some varieties thereof, might be a good fit for my requirements. *g* I'm only half serious about this, though. Anyway, it seems to fit me better than other political ideologies.

Re: Hey there.

[rossb.livejournal.com]

Some of its quite interesting. It does tend to be pretty utopian. However some varients that aren't can be quite odd and scary.

[beccadg.livejournal.com]

Astrophysics? *Blinks.* Glad to see you around, (((((Hmpf))))).

[jazzymegster.livejournal.com]

I can help with the French and the Japanese, and possibly some aspects of Astrophysics (although please don't be surprised if it all descends into "Oooooh, pretty!") *g*