My oldest son is getting married on September 16th. I’m thrilled but stilll in shock — my *baby* is getting married. I still remember him crawling around on the kitchen floor and stacking up boxes while we waited in line at the store.
Oh, and I just had a birthday — but I’ve reached the point where I don’t have to advertise my age to the world.
Coming on September 18th: an interview with author Amy Guth, author of “Three Fallen Women.” Stay tuned.
Check out:
Rhyme and Reason
Modern Formal Poetry
http://www.durham.net/~neilmac/rhymeandreason.htm
which has my poem “Insomniac’s Lament”
The Winter, 2006 of writing edge magazine www.writingedgemagazine.com has three of my poems in it. Check it out.
I was intrigued by Rosetta Stone the language learning product, and a recent evening excursion to the mall provided me with the opportunity. While my sweetie was doing some shopping, I wandered over to the Rosetta Stone kiosk. It was quiet, so the helpful young man (”John”, not his real name ) had time to give me a demo.
Rosetta Stone, for those of you who don’t know, is a language learning method that is supposed to teach you a foreign language without translating by using a CD that shows you pictures with the words in the foreign language under them.
And so on to the demo of the Spanish version. I was OK with the first set of pictures: man, woman, horse, dog, cat, and witht he second set: the man and the woman, etc, but I knew those words. In the third set they lost me: a picture of a woman on a horse.
“What’s that?” I asked.
I didn’t get “under” either. “John” told me that he saw the pictures and figured it out right away. Probably my 19 year old, the one who told me he learned right from left from the flashing sign with the arrows pointed towards the exits on the right and the left, would too.
Not me. I can hear a tune and play it by ear but I was hopeless with the pictures. If I want to learn Spanish, I’ll need to get a book or a tape.
I work in Waltham, which is outside of Boston. I recently was lucky enough to spend the night in Boston with my sweetie. Since it was a Monday night, I decided to park my car at the Riverside MBTA station and take the T into town. This was generally a good decision, but I had neglected to factor in the (long!) time needed to park my car at Riverside at 5:30 PM.
Me and the rest of the world! Maybe it was the Red Sox playing at Fenway Park that had the line to get into the parking lot be a half hour long. The only way I’ll know for sure would be to try it again. However, even the trip back, when all I had to do was walk down the stairs of the Arlington Street MBTA station, took me almost an hour and fifteen minutes door-to-door, and the total cost of the round trip was almost $12.
Driving into town is no picnic either, so I think I’ll just add it to my list of times when I wish my car could sprout Helicopter blades from the roof and fly.
