Learning Spanish

Just back from my evening Spanish class. I've been taking an intermediate conversation class twice a week at Cornell since the first week of February. The instructor is a lively man who is fond of literature and music and has been using both extensively in the class. It's challenging. I'll have a bad class, but it's usually followed by a good one. A bad class is one when I can't understand the question the instructor is asking me in Spanish. Or I don't understand the story we have read well enough to answer coherently.

But it's good for me to take on the work. It will pay off on the next trip to Chile. Hopefully this coming northern hemisphere winter/southern hemisphere summer. Every once in a while I will understand a whole sentence. Triumph. More often it's a game of approximation. How much can I understand? My progress is slow but, still, progress. I expect to keep learning Spanish, off and on, indefinitely. I want to be fluent.

trees that smell like mushrooms

When I walked on campus tonight, I approached a long double line of ornamental plum trees in full bloom. Meanwhile I was looking around for the mushroom compost or mulch that I was smelling. It helped that I was listening to Radio Lab at the time and so was distracted from my usual perception of the environment. Then the light dawned--it was the tree blossoms that smelled like mushrooms. I had not connected the smell of those trees with the smell of mushrooms before.

the red flush of spring

The forest covering South Hill, the ridge we can see from our back porch, is covered in a subtle reddish blush. It's the red maples blooming. Acer rubrum thrives in the wet, thin soils that many trees don't like. There is a lot of ground water at or near the surface on that hill. Lower down the hill, the red is punctuated by the intense chartreuse of weeping willows, another lover of wet, poorly drained soils, whose leaves are just emerging.

Still recovering from watching Duke grind out a victory over Butler in the NCAA Division I national basketball championship game. Not fun to watch mostly--like sausage being made.

Warm weather upstate: part 1

630 AM EDT THU APR 01 2010

...RECORD MINIMUM MONTHLY SNOWFALL FOR ROCHESTER NY...

ONLY A TRACE OF SNOW WAS RECORDED FOR
THE ENTIRE MONTH OF MARCH 2010
IN ROCHESTER. THIS IS THE ONLY MARCH IN
THE 126 YEAR HISTORY WITHOUT
MEASURABLE SNOW. THIS ECLIPSES THE
OLD RECORD FOR MARCH OF 0.9 INCH SET IN 1946.

IN ADDITION...THE 2009-2010 WINTER SEASON
IS THE ONLY ONE ON RECORD
WITH NO MEASURABLE SNOWFALL IN BOTH NOVEMBER AND MARCH.
IT WOULD BE THE SHORTEST SNOW SEASON ON RECORD
IF NO FURTHER MEASURABLE SNOW OCCURS.

SNOWFALL RECORDS IN ROCHESTER GO BACK TO 1884.