Month: February 2021

Neice or niece, one of them, we went to pick her up at the airport last night. We arrived during the rainstorm turning into the snowstorm that lasted until, well it is still going on. It is a great time for someone to arrive from Boston. We are spending lots of time masked up. Though we have added leaves to the table. It is long enough to take the masks off for meals. And ditto for the living room. OK, not ditto. We have two couches. She is on one and us on the other. Still a long ways apart. This is the longest someone has stayed with us for the duration of Covid.

And Hay! Three cheers for the USPS, we had mail delivery today. Which also means they picked up letters to deliver to people. I have kept it up so far. Letters out every day. We also have a mail pickup box down on the corner, next to Hapa which is making Ramen, to go of course. One day the mail delivery guy arrived a couple of hours early. Shit, my letters were not ready to go out. However, the pickup time on the box was 1:15, which gave me plenty of time to polish off the letters and take them down for posting. Hot diggity.

This is rambling. I am going to ramble on another piece of fascination, some language studies. More later,

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

I live in Spanish. Ha, yeah right. I like Spanish. A lot.

I am learning Spanish first with Duolingo and now with a gaggle of other applications. One of them, LingQ, believes in immersion. So it does it. You look up words that you don’t know, it marks it yellow (as a link) and works it into your quizzes later on. The repetition is the key. That spaced repetition is the key. And in truth, it is part of any language learning application I have seen. At first, it is very tough. I am also learning Esperanto of which I know nothing. The only words I “knew” were la, estas, and mi. All kinda like Spanish. But wow I have a bunch of words that I have been exposed to and they will be hammering along on them until I know them. But, BUT, this is the key, I will be reading complete paragraphs so I have a word, or a phrase, in context. That is pretty nice. But boy, the first entries into Esperanto, after a couple weeks in Duolingo were exhausting.

Onward, to much more learning. Now to find people to talk with.

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

With apologies to Austin Kleon.

We are in our month of February. It is our shortest month with 28 days. But gee, it shure is nice. The number of days line up with the weeks. Well, most of the time. We add a day every four years to keep our calendar in line with the sun cycles. (My nephew was born on February 29th, a little bit of “how many do you know?” trivia.) Wouldn’t it be great to have every month like February? It turns out, that we did not have the calendars like we have now. August was inserted into the calendar by … forget that. It was not an honorific for the Roman emperor. It was renamed after the emporer launched the Roman peace that persisted for 200 years. They liked him. Anyway, they kept mucking around with the calendars until … sometime around 300 years ago, 1752 to be precise. That is when the Julian users converted to the Gregorian calendar where we remain today.

But why? We have had this calendar by convection for centuries. We could have a saner calendar of 28 day months. Just add one month, 13, months be unlucky or not, and have a leap day every year and two of them every four years. 13 x 28 days equals 364 days. In the meantime we would have this arrangement of months with the same days falling on the same number, all Sundays would be on the 1st, 8th, etc. This idea was popular in the late 1920s with George Eastman, of Kodak, one of the largest proponents. Kodak used the calendar until 1989. It was a nice idea while it lasted,

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm 1948

Each night, as I type my One Typed Page right after dinner when I type one, my wife reads whatever I come up with. She will comment on it. “oh, that was nice”, or “you are typing like a stoner there”, or sometimes nothing. Sometimes there is nothing to be said about whatever I write. Her comments are pretty spot on. Last night she commented, “You do know that it is spelled Brazil, with a Z.” I replied that the woman I was writing to, in Sao Jose do Rio, of Brasil, had spelled it with an S. So what is correct? Is it BraSil or BraZil? It depends.

I did a quick check online, your ever-dependable source of information, and ended up at “AboutBrasil, your starting point in Brazil” (Look it up.) The site has a page devoted to the topic. Duh, of course. Oh go have a read, it is entertaining. I will give you one quote “Until then (1897) there was not an official definition on how to spell the country’s name. ‘Brasil’ as well as ‘Brazil’ were both used, even in official documents like banknotes.” Can you imagine having a pair of banknotes with different spelling of the country’s name? And, it was not until 1945 that it was agreed on to use “Brasil”. That is if you are a Brasilian or a Portuguese citizen. The rest of the world could do as they pleased. It is pointed out that ‘Brazil’ “may be used in Portuguese documents in an anti-American or anti-globalist contexts.” Tell them that. There is also a page with, well it is titled “‘Brasil’ in other languages” with 34 countries listed and their spellings. Lots of trying to decipher which countries are aligned with which countries, or languages with which languages.

# # # #

Thus ends the first week of InCoWriMo. My Mom is the first person to be written. Which is good because today, February 7, is her birthday. And her present is not yet here to be forwarded to her. I have gone on to send a letter to a person on each continent inhabited by humans, Antarctica being one, the one without permanent residents.

If you have not yet joined the group, I encourage you to do so. Ignore the handwriting part and type to them, People do like to hear from you. And, I will bet, they really appreciate being able to read, actually read, whatever you have to say. Especially if you surprise them. A letter will get to the person you addressed it to in two or three days. Such a deal.

~~ MichaelRpdx :: rkmm 1948

I sent out a letter today. To a friend of many years. At the top of the page was a new to him, well in the form of a personal letter, heading.

It read:

2021-02-04 Portland, Oregon Royal KMM

Because yesterday I did not write to the OTP place. I started and then paused and never returned to it. Today there was a letter to be written and quickly also – the postman was soon to be here gathering up the things to pass along. A postcard to a niece in Boston, a letter to a woman learning English in Brasil, a man with varied interests in Perth Australia. (She lives in Brasil and is learning English, not that she went there to learn English…) I dived in and told him a few things of no great consequence. The important part was writing.

Writing in the USA allows you to keep in touch with someone for 55¢ And don’t you love it? There is not much you can buy for 55¢ I actually quite like typing it, 55¢ such economy of expression. But that and an envelope or cleverly folded paper and it will be taken away from your house and delivered to your friend. Delivered in two days of working time. Well, that was what it was like before Covid and the last people running the show under the prior “leadership” Yeah, two days to someone down the road in Oregon or across the mountains in Colorado or deep into Arkansas.

If the person you wrote to was diligent or a writer you might receive a reply into your mailbox by the end of the week. Or you can be a procrastinating laggard like me and they would not receive a reply for a couple of months. Because the reply is just that – a response from whoever you had written to and what it took time for them to write you back.

Of course, it is not like nowadays with computers and internet connection that allows you to ask a question and get a reply in a few minutes. Or even the One Typed Page group, where we have some kinds of conversation going on here, you can receive a reply in a day or two. But ahem, we are doing these One Typed Pages to slow down our writing and return to this method. (What am I thinking? Think about that and say something
that fits.)

Until I think again. Well, wait.

How long does it take you to write something to someone? I think it takes me a half-hour for a not too well thought out page of text. I know that it takes me about 12 to 16 minutes to fill a composition book page. Those are “keep writing, keep the pen moving” kind of writing Were people faster back in the days when those were the most advanced ways of filling a page? Then again, did they think while typing or transcribe something they had already written in pencil? Can’t waste those valuable pages of typing now, can we?

More thought required,

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

Oh, Frances, you made me laugh. 66 years old and still getting the e-i and i-e mixed up? Have you looked at my spelling letly? Layely? Go whenever you are feeling down about it go review my typing. Not only the stuff that gets through but if you look closely you will see those things that I erased and corrected. And, AND I qualified as an English major in college. Can you imagine? Really, it is not too weird to get the spelling mixed up. You are aware of the issue. That counts for a whole lot.

I had mentioned Italo Calvino. But not just any, the If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler. That Italo Calvino. Yay! for Palm Springs Noir. Something to look forward to. I just need to practice my reading skills. (Apologies to any of you that that also mentioned Italo Calvino.)

There was a person I owed a letter to. Meaning I had received a letter from that person. It was not a bill. It was not a reminder to have my car serviced. It was not a credit card offer. It was a chatty letter. One from a person to a person. There were questions to be answered.

So I went looking for my notes on it. It was so deserving that I made notes about what to include in my response. I kept flipping backward through my sketch journal. And I kept going backward. I was sure it was in my current edition (is that what you call a book in a series of journals? All in the same type of composition I use for these.) As I was nearing that start that would compel me to start over and looking again I found it. Dated 2020-11-21, I date everything so I know when I did things. November 21? Holy cow.

I had put off the response to work on my handwriting. The letter to me was in handwriting. So must be the response. I found a wonderful woman on YouTube that teaches calligraphy, no, casino, no it is called cursive writing. (She teaches calligraphy also) I did part one. Then I delayed doing parts two and beyond. I procrastinated. I have plenty of paper. I have plenty of ink, oh boy do I have plenty of ink. And pens to put them into. So I found the notes on the letter and wrote a response. After more than two months.

Now here is the thing, while I was looking for the original letter to clarify one of my notes I did not find it. It is here somewhere. Just no place that I had looked for it. What I did find was a printed out article “How To Overcome Procrastination Based On Ancient Philosophy” It was printed out for me to read and learn from. Because Procrastination, Yep. I have it here to read. It seems that I found this article on November 22, 2020,

Procrastination can be your friend. Once in a few things. Not in this case. Not by a long case in this one.

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm 1988

Remember “Groundhog Day”? 1993 movie with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowall about where you hope you do not wake up tomorrow. We watched it today. It held up well. Well, with a Spanish soundtrack and English subtitles. It was a good time.

InCoWriMo, International Correspondence Writing Month (or something like that) is off to a great start. I have collected about 150 addresses of people not in the USA. There are people in every continent except for Antarctica. Obviously, you can write to people in your own country.

It is just called International to encourage people to expand their horizons. I have, so far, sent a letter to a person in the US and a person across the seas, or beyond the borders. Gotta count the people in Mexico and Canada.

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We brought plants in from the outdoors. These are potted plants. They are not hardy enough to be out in the cold of winter. One of them bloomed and fruited. One of them we had for so long my wife had forgotten what it was. There were several small fruits. The first fruits ever. We’re sure they are tangerines. Now for them to deepen in color so we can taste them. Excitement!