Thu 12 Jun 2008
Here’s the video I said I was putting together. Beyond the fact that I have to be careful when I chew (as to not get food in the large holes I have in my gums :P), that I have to rinse with salt water, and I’m just a tad bit sore when opening my mouth all of the way, I feel like I’m just about done with this wisdom tooth thing. My gum on the left side is a little “flappy” where they cut. It’s not totally loose, I can just see where they cut and there’s a flap at the end that wobbles around.
There is absolutely nothing graphic about the video, and there is no footage about the surgery. Just me rambling before and after. There is shot of me on percocet though, and it’s interesting to me to see the contrast between the shot before the percocet and about an hour after I had taken it. Basically it’s Bonnie all drugged up and very happy 
You can also see the cool map I have on my wall now instead of the quilt 
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I’ve been made the unofficial book lady at the secondhand store I volunteer at. That’s GREAT, because in organizing and putting all the donated books on the shelf I get too look at all of the books that come in. Although the books were getting put on the shelf just fine before I started helping, there wasn’t a whole lot of organization outside of a few specified shelves. Novels and how-tos were right next to each other, classics were mixed in with silly novels, etc., etc. So I have it semi-organized now, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep that up or how much more I will be able to organize. It’s fun anyway.
Here are some of my latest finds:
- A few readers from a history class at a college around here. These are so nice! They’re old, but they’re works from Bede and Gregory of Tours, and that sort of thing. There is one on Rome, two on the Dark Ages, and one on The Peloponnesian War. They’re such easy reading, I guess they must have been meant for beginners at history. In any case, I’m enjoying them.
- A Russian Phrasebook. I don’t really want to learn Russian, but I told myself I’d just keep it around “in case.” That’s what I said about the German dictionary, too
- A book of Russian short stories. So far these have been very good. I hate going through a modern short story book and getting half way (or not even that far) through a story and discovering I really am not getting anything out of it, and quitting. Or making it all the way to the end just to say “What a waste of time!”
- Various books on language and linguistics. These mostly haven’t been gone through yet, because I know it’s going to take brain power to appreciate them. The phonetics as described in Invitation to Linguistics (Mario Pei) have been very interesting! It’s amazing to hear the way we make vowels described, and how consonants are classed and what characteristics they have. As I’m reading through this chapter I’m constantly testing out what it says and am surprisingly delighted when what is written proves to be just what my mouth is doing. Do you know where your tongue is when you say “father,” (your tongue is low) as opposed to “deed” (high). There are also different places that the tongue arches, and there are tiny variations in the placement of the tongue that make huge differences in how the sound comes out. But I’m going to stop here because I don’t really know much about it and explaining will only reveal my lack of expertise
Thank God for this wonderful opportunity to find good books. If you know of a Salvation Army or thrift store with a rough looking book section, maybe you would like to volunteer to straighten them out (the books, that is). In the meantime, you’ll end up making a thorough search through them all.
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I’ve downloaded sermons from sermonindex.com and sermonaudio.com in Spanish and in German. I even found Ray Comfort’s Hell’s Best Kept Secret in a variety of languages. (Be forewarned, some of them are not complete). I put them on my mp3 player and I have been trying to listen to them whenever I get a chance. I don’t know exactly what they’re saying, but I think it’ll help to have my ear accustomed to hearing them. Now an interesting question would be is if you don’t understand a language but you are exposed to it enough to ingrain some in your subconscious, will you remember any of it as meaningful after you are fluent in the language? If you memorized Scripture in Spanish, for instance, in the abstract without knowing what a single word meant, and then you studied Spanish for a while without reviewing the verses you had memorized, would they just pop into your head as meaningful? If I listen to sermons that are really not biblical could I be influenced by them by ingraining them into my subconscious without currently knowing what they mean? I’m finding the question hard to explain, but hopefully you will understand anyway.
Posted by Bonnie under books, english, languages, learning, recipe
