The days are long and the years are short

We have the day off from school, due to a planned teacher-work day.

I'm planning to get a bunch of paperwork done for PTA. I have two children in the house and they are watching TV, specifically Avatar: The Last Airbender TV show.

I missed the deadline for the DELE exam in November. The next time it is offered will be May. So I will have plenty of time to prepare. I still need to make contact with the correct person at the Embassy of Spain to make sure it will be offered in Washington DC. If it won't be offered here, the next closest location is NYC.

I seem not to get on LJ as much. Concentrating on Facebook, it seems, and working my little tail off. And an invitation-only board, and another one just for co-workers, and Rosetta Stone.

Rosetta Stone is lots of fun. I'm still way back at the beginning but progressing rapidly. The progress monitoring isn't designed to make starting in the middle intuitive, and I want to be sure that my pronunciation keeps up with my other skills, so I am using the first lessons for practice with that.

My Beetle and I were involved in an accident. Low-speed, so I was fine, but my Beetle is going to have to undergo surgery. Right now, it is a pirate Beetle, because the left front headlight is on the back seat. I have gotten two written opinions from doctors that specialize in this sort of surgery and have a start time at the Beetle hospital of my choice. The hospital is very convenient, and I should be able to see the recovery area from nearby.

My work for the PTA is going apace. I have one thing to do for it today, and I really should stop procrastinating about it.

But maybe soon.

I have several hats on my head with regards to PTA. One is membership. I am the one who collects all the forms and issues all the cards. National PTA has a database to make that easy (supposably). Right now I am still digging through last year's papers to get the secret codes to make the database work for me. I also have emails into the former holders of my position.

mrmoosie is trying desperately to balance the checkbook. He has a large discrepancy from at least two registers back. But he can't resolve it until/unless we find the register three registers back.

Some one has touched my foreign language hat and I will not be calm until his/her situation is settled. I hope that he/she is a fluent English-speaker.

My memorization project with Mnemosyne is getting better and better. My Spanish is improving by the truckloads.

I need to read the sentences out loud on a regular basis. In fact, in general, I need to read more Spanish out loud.

I downloaded a cultural magazine that the Spanish embassy puts out on a quarterly basis. That might be interesting reading today.

Well, one of my PTA roles is high-visibility, literally. I help direct traffic in the morning.

While shopping in the grocery store today, the florist area manager came up to me and said that I seemed familiar. Sure enough, she has a child at my daughter's school. So the topic of International Night (Saturday, OMG, I'm doomed) came up.

The other topic that comes up is that the parents would like their children to get some instruction in Spanish. Or, like this woman, feel that they are capable of teaching children (more than just their own child) formal Spanish. I simply have to get the children and the parents together in a club or another venue.

So I'd better get some things done today.

I have over 100 cards to do today in my Mnemosyne deck. That's because I put in a ton of vocabulary from the GRE recently. Most of it I know by heart, so I just have to enter 5s for a while and it will become scheduled for really long times. Some of the first batch of vocabulary are already scheduled with times of 66 days to 86 days. Very few of my Spanish examples are scheduled for times over 20 days. Those few are ones I understand very well.

Emily's Girl Scout Cookie sales have gone very well indeed. She now has 66 boxes sold.

It's a nice day today with highs up to 53°F. It will get colder as the week goes on. I believe I am seeing tiny buds on some of the trees. That could be wishful thinking however.

But not falling behind either. I folded directories at school today. I reviewed maybe 17 cards out of my Mnemosyne deck. Mostly Spanish-to-English translations with a very few obscure English words thrown in there. i haven't added cards to the deck for a few days, but I have reviewed cards every day.

Part of my Amazon order came today.

I am planning to use Mnemosyne as a Spaced Repetition System for now (or, I like to think of it as Structured Review System). I have 10 Spanish sentences in there now.

I lost my Spanish book today. I was reading it while my tire was being fixed. I got in the car, and realized that I didn't have it half-way to Emily's school. After I picked her up, I went back, but it wasn't there.

Whaaahhhhh. I would lose my head if it wasn't attached.

The same one that we had before. At first, we didn't understand him at all. Then he slowed down and we got used to his accent, his word choices and his mannerisms.

He was a little confused that we have two women named Deborah in the same class of five students. It is a little amusing.

We talked about the Spanish Civil War and the terrorist group ETA. His ancestry on one side is Basque, and he did try to tell us something about the Basque country. I think I am spelling that slightly wrong in English.