After work

After a supper of an Amy's enchilada, black beans, and corn:

Drove south on Route 29 to Bally and the Longacre's Dairy that has been redesigned since the last visit, probably five years ago.  A roof has been built over what used to be several parking spaces.  The open lobby or waiting area has been closed, and now you place an order at a window where nothing was in 2016.  

I asked for two half-gallons of whole milk, a pint of French vanilla ice cream, and a CMP sundae.  (When I first moved here from Ohio, the only thing I knew CMP stood for was "catchup", mustard and pickle, because that's how I ordered my burgers from Wendy's.)  I ate the chocolate/marshmallow/peanut sundae on the 20-mile drive home while listening to Tyler Mahan Coe's Cocaine and Rhinestones, the Tammy Wynette episode.

The rest of the evening:

- another 15-20 minutes on DuoLingo Russian.  I just finished a New Yorker article on people who learn languages by the dozen, and how they do it.  How they do it, if the case study is any indication, is the same way you become an expert at anything else:  have a talent for something and then practice, practice, practice.  Everyone has to go through the same steps, but some enjoy the process of sight-reading and playing scales over and over again for hours. The more time on task, the sooner you get there.  

I have great gaps in my knowledge of French, because I didn't enjoy it enough to sit for hours memorizing grammar and conjugations.  I wanted to play piano, but I didn't want to learn to play piano.  On the other hand, I enjoyed typing and wanted to do things with spreadsheets, so I got better at typing and using Lotus 1-2-3.  

Piano?  That's not practical.  Typing and word processing will let me put words on paper much more easily, and I have words I want to put on paper.  At one time, it was for college assignments, and now, mostly pertaining to cats.

If I'd had it in me, I would have found a way and been a musician like my mother and father.  Instead, it's writing and photography and Excel, and where in the family tree did that come from?  But there is a practical use for them:  now I get to take photos of cats and edit them, and there's a place that can use them, so I am helping cats, which is all the reason I need. 

So DuoLingo, 15 minutes at a time, is all I want, and I recognize and accept that my vocabulary isn't ever going to be in the thousands of words.  

- The first 15 minutes of the LibriVox recording of The Story of Mary MacLane.   Talk about someone born too soon.  Her oversharing sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, and fit right in now, but it all took place in 1902.

- Read Ali Wong's Radical Raunch, and put Baby Cobra on the Netflix queue. 

- Learned of Love is a Crime and added it to the Google Podcast list.  They had me at "A Karina Longworth Podcast."