March Madness

March Madness usually refers to the end of season basketball games. My March Madness is studying French from a free, online, beginning French class that can be found on iTunes The FrenchPodClass (http://www.frenchpodclass.com/ ) .

It’s a delightful and fun way to learn French and allows one to choose the degree of seriousness that suits best. I download the weekly lessons which are short, varied and not dependent on previous lessons. My approach is quite haphazard. I listen to the audio lesson while I skim thru the pdf pages. I enjoy the music selections, especially the songs by Edith Piaf. I love the way she rolls the French ‘r’.

This week we had three sentences to translate. I submitted my translations, (guesses), of the following three sentences. Sebastian, the instructor, will show us the correct translation next week. Perhaps some of my readers already know what the sentences say.

Taille tôt, taille tard, toujours en mars.
Sème tes poi à la saint Patrice, tu en auras tout ton caprice.
Quand mars se déguise en été, avril prend ses habits fourres.

(update : The game is now over and the results can be found at : http://www.frenchpodclass.com/index.php?post_id=68661&comments=on )

I’ve also discovered ‘widgets’’. There is a small widget engine that’s free which is required for the widgets to work. The FrenchPodClass has a widget of quotes in both French and English which I downloaded to my computer desktop. The widget has a timer that you can adjust that controls the display frequency of the quotations and sayings. It’ll show the quotation for a while then fade away and reappear later with a new quotation. If you get impatient you can lick on the triangle icon and get another quotation right away. There are proverbs based on the calendar year in French and there are idioms with English-French translations. You can also select different color backgrounds like white and green and even a transparent background so your desktop theme shows through! You can learn all about widgets from Yahoo since they have a great number for people to enjoy. They explain what they are and how to use them and they will help you create one if you are in the mood to do so. You can even share your widget with others if you choose.

(To download the Yahoo! Widget Engine go here: http://widgets.yahoo.com/ and The FrenchPodClass_Quotations Widget can be found here: http://www.widgetgallery.com/view.php?widget=38958 )

I really don’t have an ear for languages. I was painfully aware of this in high school when I took Latin as a freshman. The only thing enjoyable in that class was a toga party. My attempt at learning other languages has yielded meager success at best. I have rarely gotten past ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’, along with an occasional phrase about cost, direction, food or weather.

Many years ago I listened to some German language records but never got past the question, “Where is the train station?” The mother of a friend once volunteered to teach me French but the only thing I learned was how to pronounce the word, ‘elephant’. When I studied Russian in college I learned how to say, ‘thank you’ and the first two words of the song, ‘Volga Boatmen’, (which is not an acceptable song since the communist revolution). The only thing in Spanish I know is, ‘My casa is your casa’.

All verbs in another language are irregular as far as I’m concerned. Word endings denoting masculine and feminine gender is beyond me. Pronunciation and writing French is proving difficult so I’m not spending a lot of time on that part of the course. The transcripts of the lessons have both French and English translations on the same page so I can fool myself into believing I’m truly learning the language!

À bientôt !

In Transition

I’m betwixt and between. I’ve temporarily re-located to Houston until my house in Orange is habitable and the damage caused by hurricane Rita, is repaired. Putting the house furnishings into a Houston storage unit was a major move and accomplished by family, friends and hired help.

My sister Esther, her daughter, Cindy and her husband, Arthur, came from Baton Rouge to help. Seeing them and getting hugs helped to assuage the anguish of down sizing. Selecting which things to keep was a challenge! I chose to give Esther many of my treasures since “The time has come to talk of other things…. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings….”

The move was made over a long four day weekend, Thursday thru Sunday. Motel rooms in Orange were at a premium, but with luck and perseverance rooms for 8 people were reserved for the four days. Renting a U-haul truck and hiring men to load it was even more difficult. The company finally located a truck in Beaumont that would be available on Saturday morning. They were unable to deliver it to Orange or provide helpers, so my son took Cindy with him to pick it up. She drove his car back to Orange while he drove the truck. As for helpers, a friend from Houston that planned to help from Friday night thru Sunday brought her son and a friend of his to do the heavy lifting.

The motel was undergoing extensive repairs. Although the usual amenities were lacking, all available rooms were booked by workmen. The front desk was inundated with requests for toilet paper, towels, missing pieces of coffee pots, coffee packets and shampoo. Serving a continental breakfast for tenants was out of the question. To get to and from our rooms, we traversed corridors filled with cement dust and sawed lumber. Long hoses and bundles of wiring snaked around corners while the echo of hammering and buzzing of saws reverberated throughout large open areas that used to be lobbies and dining areas.

Storage was unavailable in Orange. Deciding to rent a storage unit in Houston was an emotional decision, but one that I finally had to make. After weighing pros and cons as constructively as I could, I knew the time had come. The weather was warming and work on the house could be done before temperatures reached the famous ‘highs’ of Texas and before another hurricane season started.

My son did the organizing with suggestions coming long distance from my daughter. He said it was like herding cats, but he managed to keep the project schedules on track from beginning to end. Considering the conditions and situation, he did a masterful job!

We didn’t have electricity or water at the house but we had brought enough bottles of water, fruit and snacks for munching as we worked. Breakfast was at MacDonald’s, the only eating place open for business between 8 and 9 in the morning. Wendy’s, near Wal-Mart’s parking area, was our choice for coffee, lunch and bathroom breaks. At dusk when we quit work, we either ordered pizza delivered to our motel rooms or stopped at fast food places to get ‘take out’ for eating at the motel. We planned to relax after supper playing our favorite card game, Spite and Malice, but we were too tired to do anything but shower and go to sleep. The routines of each day and evening were a repetition of the day before.

Cindy had towed a trailer to Orange so she could get the furniture pieces she had stored at my house. The men loaded her trailer at the same time they loaded the U-haul truck. By the time we were all ready to get the show on the road to Baton Rouge and Houston, I felt like I had run an Iroquois gauntlet!!!



I’m now in the process of finding a general contractor who can work with metal roofs. I have high hopes since talking on the phone with two contractors working in the area and hope they send me bids. Thank heaven I’m beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel. My admiration of family members, who survived and adapted from untold crises more difficult than mine, increases daily. I marvel at the way they over came. I hope I can show the same spirit as I start a new facet of living in Texas!