Aprendiendo español

Domingo 20 - Sábado 26 Octubre 

The beautiful delicate flowers have stopped  appearing daily on the passion fruit vine, but Dan is happy that some of his efforts at hand pollination were successful, as we have a half-dozen or so fruits now ripening on the trellis up on the terraza.  And, down on the front porch we seems to have a new orchid suddenly blooming every day or so.

Catwalks are narrow elevated walkways. When we first got here, Dan built a catwalk for our cats to use along the high ceiling in our living room. We also realize that we have a different kind of catwalk in our bedroom. It is along our mattress at the head of the bed, once our pillows are pulled down a bit from the headboard. This allows our cats to visit us both, without stepping on us.

Dan is still limping around a bit from his almost-fall on the hike a week ago. Carmen is proving that even after a blonde's hair turns gray, she can still be dizzy headed, most especially when raising or lowering her head from the bed. Dan found a new online Spanish course that Carmen actually finds easy to use and fun. The lessons and practice at DuoLingo are tailored for each user's level (you can take a quick test to place yourself above rank beginner), and the website tracks your progress thru the levels.  We have various CD-ROMS  of spanish courses we've tried.  Other methods we have found useful have been a set of 400 flashcards that came with a Think Spanish Level 1 course by Vis-Ed, loaned to us by Ania, and various of the online spanish flashcard "decks" provided at Anki. We use the physical cards every few days (bright days on the mirador are best), with Carmen responding to the questions posed and Dan correcting pronunciation and the like.  Dan's found that Amit's take at Always Spanish (reviews of learning spanish resources, and hints to make the process quick and painless) to be right on.  Dan made long verb, adjective and adverb lists for Carmen's vocab building, and he as he reads or listens to tv/radio he often looks up new words to amp up his vocabulary too.

We bought two adorable plants from our “plant man” who comes down to Fortin several times a week from his home in Ixhuatlan del Café, east of Coscomatepec. One is an “Easter eggplant” (Solanum ovigerum, around here called a ponedora (laying chicken) plant.. The egg hanging from it is white and will turn cream color when ripe. The other is a succulent with softish spines with some dark maroon blossoms, which proved to be a Huernia schneideriana (Red Dragon huernia). His prices are great, MX$25 each, or about US$2 – wonder what he will bring next from his little home vivero (plant nursery).

Ania and Frank came over for a pasta lunch and fresh-made garlic rolls. Carmen also used the limes we picked on our hike last weekend for a meringue pie. Though the texture was good, it was basically tasteless as these wild limes lack much of the acidity we like in this pie. We used our Wii set for the first time since we moved here, and the day before Dan set up a Mii (avatar) for each of our guests. Ania and Frank had never interacted with a Wii before. We chose to play bowling for four persons, and perhaps needless to say, Ania won. They brought along the three packages of Belgian chocolate truffles from Sam's Club that we asked them to pick up for us. Scrumptious smooth petite dark truffles rolled in toasted cacao powder. Can we stick to one per evening?

The construction across the street is progressing slowly. Still filling in the perimeter trenches with concrete and rock mampostería footings. We had a hard rain one day and the southern trench filled with water. The two workers used the rainwater, which does not drain out very fast, for their concrete mixture.