A New Post Just For Luke

Luke keeps bugging me to post something new. The fact is, nothing new is really happening, and I am too mushy-brained to think deep thoughts. Soooo . . . that leaves things a bit barren, as far as new post materials. I can say that overall things are going well. We're in a good homeschooling routine, and we're getting a lot done. We're in one of those nice periods where we don't have a newborn and I'm not pregnant, LOL. Since I was crazy busy with co-op responsibilities before the break, that means now I am a lot less busy, which is a huge relief. It's one of those things like the old Chinese story about the man whose house was too small. The wise man told him to keep adding more and more creatures into his house (while he kept complaining about how it was still too small). Then the wise man told him to put all the animals outside, and lo and behold, his house felt huge! So while I felt busy with all the co-ops before November, after all the extra stuff I now feel like it's all a breeze! Well, not really, but I'm definitely not as stressed or busy.

One thing we have learned recently is that Slovak and Polish share 75% of common vocabulary! Bob's mom is Polish, and his dad is Slovak. His mom bought Bob a life insurance policy through the "First Catholic Slovak Ladies Association" quite a while ago, although we never knew anything about it until this past summer, when she handed us a raft of papers about it. After we changed our address with the association, they strted sending us their little monthly magazine, which is quite interesting. In the back of one issue, there was a little blurb about the Slovak alphabet, along with some common phrases. Bob recognized a few of the words as Polish as well ("Dobre"="good"). Bob asked how something so long in English could be so short in Polish. For example, "What do you have?" is "Co mate" (there are lots of funny accent marks, which I can not hope to type!) I said it must be inflected, like Latin, where the pronoun and verb tense are included in one word. So of course we did some research on the internet and discovered that yes, in fact it is inflected, and in fact, as I found on this website Polish, like other Indo-European languages, shares some Latin grammar and vocabulary. There are 3 tenses (past, present, future), 2 numbers (singular and plural), and 3 genders (masculine, feminine, neuter). There are no articles but Polish, like Latin, is an inflectional language that distinguishes 7 cases, defining the noun usage in a sentence. This feature makes our mother tongue difficult to master and presents a lot of trouble to foreigners. So maybe Polish/Slovak will be our next language! Actually, there is a new family in our church, and the wife, Anja, is Polish (as in, born in a small Polish village, grew up there, went to university there, etc.). She is a lovely person, so maybe she could be our tutor. I'm not sure how I would do with the pronunciation though. The thing I like about Latin is that there are no Latins around to actually hear me speak it!

One new development is that we have a smell emanating from inside our dryer. A smelly smell, to be exact. I asked Bob if someone had dried a poopy diaper in there, because that is definitely the aroma. The dryer had a fairly long sojourn in the garage while the laundry room was being tiled. We also can definitely say that we had a mouse in the garage before we left for Ohio in December. The mouse has not been spotted recently, so one theory is that he climbed up in the dryer innards and got himself cooked. Or perhaps something climbed into the dryer via the dryer vent, especially since we had that terribly cold snap a little while ago. Anyhow, Bob is going to spend some time searching out the cause of the smell tomorrow. Fun!

Aaaaannndd, that's what's happening here, folks. I know, I know, you all envy me my glamorous and exciting life!