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What skill would you like to pick up or improve in the next few years?
Wait -- first, I am in Lake Geneva, for my pretty much annual visit. I have been being extraordinarily more lazy than usual, even, partly due to the sweltering heat and humidity -- though it was just grey and cool when I got here, so that wasn't my excuse then.
It is green and lush and beautiful here, as I always find it. I want to do silly tourist things like take a trip on the Walworth II, the mail boat, with my father and stepmother, and go to a fish fry on Friday night, and take a ride on the last electric train in the state, in East Troy (and incidentally go to an AWESOME fake old ice cream shoppe in East Troy, which scooped up all these pharmacies-going-out-of-business fixtures and set them up wonderfully... the décor, which includes Red Scare admonitions, is equalled by the very excellent ice cream creations, like the chocolate peanut butter shake, mmm.)
My father drove me past the "old Quinn farm" where his great-grandfather, Micheal Quinn [sic], who was born in 1825 and emigrated to the US in 1853, married a widow and obtained an excellent farm. The woman -- Polly Enos Quinn -- had twelve kids, all of whom made it to adulthood, five from her first husband and seven with Micheal Quinn. And her great-great grandfather fought in both the American Revolution (Captain Abel Dinsmore) and Shay's Rebellion. Yeah, being in LG is a lot about history and genealogy for me. I am helping my dad with the photographs and some small amount of research assistance for the (self-published) collection he is going to put out of his local history columns from the Lake Geneva Regional News. They're cute, except for their terrible titles.
Here, the 1873 Geneva Township Plat, a detail showing the two Quinn Farms, one bought by William and Rose Quinn, and one, as I say, married into by Micheal Quinn, formerly belonging to Polly Enos Quinn.
Anyway, I have to leave to go check whether the door the body shop found for my poor, battered Mazda Protegé is the right kind... I stupidly, STUPIDLY, scraped it along a tree... a small tree, even... in Columbia, MO, reversing down a dreadful driveway. Everything in the door is functional, except a slightly dragging electric window... and the repair estimate is $872, UGH. If this door doesn't fit, I think I might cancel the bodywork. I mean, fuck it. I can suck up the ugliness and endless embarrassment, right?
And after that, I have to go pick up my mother at the Kenosha Metra station; she's coming up to stay for tonight and Thursday night, and then I'll drive her over to see my uncle in Milwaukee. It is such a pleasure for me that my mom and dad get along.
Oh. What skill? I would like to ACTUALLY MAKE SOME PROGRESS LEARNING HINDI. I have made some, in fact, though a lot of it is just things I've spent time learning in the past settling into my brain. I'd like to devote some time in the rest of this summer (and those weeks are dwindling, sigh) to working on it, though, and then NOT JUST PUT IT AWAY once school starts. I'm working my way through Rupert Snell's Beginning Hindi book right now, much more carefully, and it's helpful. Partly the quality and size of the print is so terrible (small! blurry!) that I am just rewriting absolutely everything that is in Devanagari, and leaving out the transliterations. That's better for me, though I am still slow at sounding it out, god.
Wait -- first, I am in Lake Geneva, for my pretty much annual visit. I have been being extraordinarily more lazy than usual, even, partly due to the sweltering heat and humidity -- though it was just grey and cool when I got here, so that wasn't my excuse then.
It is green and lush and beautiful here, as I always find it. I want to do silly tourist things like take a trip on the Walworth II, the mail boat, with my father and stepmother, and go to a fish fry on Friday night, and take a ride on the last electric train in the state, in East Troy (and incidentally go to an AWESOME fake old ice cream shoppe in East Troy, which scooped up all these pharmacies-going-out-of-business fixtures and set them up wonderfully... the décor, which includes Red Scare admonitions, is equalled by the very excellent ice cream creations, like the chocolate peanut butter shake, mmm.)
My father drove me past the "old Quinn farm" where his great-grandfather, Micheal Quinn [sic], who was born in 1825 and emigrated to the US in 1853, married a widow and obtained an excellent farm. The woman -- Polly Enos Quinn -- had twelve kids, all of whom made it to adulthood, five from her first husband and seven with Micheal Quinn. And her great-great grandfather fought in both the American Revolution (Captain Abel Dinsmore) and Shay's Rebellion. Yeah, being in LG is a lot about history and genealogy for me. I am helping my dad with the photographs and some small amount of research assistance for the (self-published) collection he is going to put out of his local history columns from the Lake Geneva Regional News. They're cute, except for their terrible titles.
Here, the 1873 Geneva Township Plat, a detail showing the two Quinn Farms, one bought by William and Rose Quinn, and one, as I say, married into by Micheal Quinn, formerly belonging to Polly Enos Quinn.
Anyway, I have to leave to go check whether the door the body shop found for my poor, battered Mazda Protegé is the right kind... I stupidly, STUPIDLY, scraped it along a tree... a small tree, even... in Columbia, MO, reversing down a dreadful driveway. Everything in the door is functional, except a slightly dragging electric window... and the repair estimate is $872, UGH. If this door doesn't fit, I think I might cancel the bodywork. I mean, fuck it. I can suck up the ugliness and endless embarrassment, right?
And after that, I have to go pick up my mother at the Kenosha Metra station; she's coming up to stay for tonight and Thursday night, and then I'll drive her over to see my uncle in Milwaukee. It is such a pleasure for me that my mom and dad get along.
Oh. What skill? I would like to ACTUALLY MAKE SOME PROGRESS LEARNING HINDI. I have made some, in fact, though a lot of it is just things I've spent time learning in the past settling into my brain. I'd like to devote some time in the rest of this summer (and those weeks are dwindling, sigh) to working on it, though, and then NOT JUST PUT IT AWAY once school starts. I'm working my way through Rupert Snell's Beginning Hindi book right now, much more carefully, and it's helpful. Partly the quality and size of the print is so terrible (small! blurry!) that I am just rewriting absolutely everything that is in Devanagari, and leaving out the transliterations. That's better for me, though I am still slow at sounding it out, god.