Distractions

I started construction on a little uke for my daughter. This picture excites me. It's a bit of a vision of the future. All I've got left is all the finicky stuff... Neck block, finish shaping the neck, assembling EVERYTHING, & making it work like a guitar.

That's not the only distraction, either. Under that uke mockup is a pile of plywood chunks that still need fairing on one curve and then they can grow into a wa'apa. IE a 16' sailing outrigger. Very excited to get this done and not have to rent time under sail anymore.

That is all.
M.

Skippers are serious. They DON'T tell jokes.

Ce soir, ma copine et moi avons fait de la voile.

Nous avons loué un catamaran. Vent parfait. Pas trop fort. Juste parfait, avec des petites rafales.


J'ai commencé à faire de la voile recémment et par conséquent à ignorer mon français. Évidemment.  



LES PHOTOS !!!

Quelle grande vitesse ! :)

Ma barbe fou...

Paresser au tramp

Le vent. L'eau. Le bonheur.

Les photos par Megan.

The problem with this interest in sailing is that it takes serious attention away from the energy I was giving over to French. I've recently decided to start devoting time and energy back to French. As a result I've been searching out sailing/boat construction/etc blogs français.

Which is cool as there seems to be a fair bit to read in French about sailing. The problem I have with it is that I've already had to learn (or at least learn to recognize) nautical English- which is basically it's own language. So now, I have to keep learning nautical English, French, and now I add nautical French to the list.

Eh bien.

Au moins, je m'amuse.

Toodledeedoo.
Mark, the Dark Lord of All.

apprendre en pratiquant

^ that's what I should be doing...

this last month and a half has been bad for my frenching. and blogging. but I've abandoned my facebook to float aimlessly in the cyberseas without me at the helm. so I won't be wasting time with that bullshit any more.

Being someone who appreciates a touch of irony, I made sure to post about my dissatisfaction of the whole "facebook scene" on fb. It wasn't whiny. I went with tongue-in-cheek, instead. Because I don't feel particularly whiny about it. But I do feel rather tongue-in-cheek about it.

I'm using my phone, with swype, to write this entry. i typed "tongue-in-cheek" and the phone changed it to "tongue-in-cheryl." Naughty naughty, phone.

Je suis dehors, maintenant. Quelqu'on chante l'hymne national. Elle embellit - exagère, même - cette chanson. Mais je suppose qu'elle s'amuse. Au moins, elle est assez bonne chanteuse.

Cette entrée est fini. Je n'ai rien de plus à dire. Quand j'ai commencé à l'écrire, je n'ai rien eu à dire...

J'y vais donc.

I'm a bit out of practice, so I hope that's all correct... Especially the English. Because that would be really embarrassing...

DONE.
MARK.

super duper htlal challenge

just to prove to the world that I'm actually doing something for this challenge... I'm writing about what I'm doing.

yeah. I watched a movie called La Fille Sur La Pont yesterday. I liked it. caught a fair bit of the dialogue in French,  though not nearly enough to have watched it sans subtitles. the fact that I use the word "sans" quite a bit in English totally screws up the pronunciation of «sans» in French for me. Annoying.

Also, while my daughter was watching "beauty and the beast" my sister and i got to talking about some unanswered questions in the movie. "where are the prince's parents?" etc etc. so I looked it up and discovered «la belle et la bête.» I haven't started reading that one yet, but I found it in a collection on gutenberg. so I read a couple stories from the collection.

red riding hood ended differently than I remember... namely: "what big teeth you have." "the better to eat you with." then he ate her. the end.

finished.
M

ps. sorry about the lack of capitalization... I'm extraordinarily lazy when I type on my phone and for some reason, the auto-capitalization has been turned off... I'll fix that one of these days...

Random question from my profile...

So... The question was "The children are waiting! Tell them the story of the bald frog with the wig."

As it turns out, I was supposed to keep it under 400 characters... my answer was way too long, but it made me giggle. Especially because I typed it all up on my phone. I'm rather proud of how quickly and ridiculously it spewed out. So I went into GIMP and whipped up a couple shitty illustrations to add to it. And now it is here, presented in its entirety:

The Bald Frog

Once upon a time there was a frog who realized he had no hair. He looked at all his froggy friends and saw that none of them had any hair either. He looked at the people that fished at his pond, the deer and bunnies that drank at his pond, and saw that they all had hair. He began to grow jealous, thinking that the people and deer and bunnies thought frogs to be lesser, balder creatures.

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He fashioned a wig from the nearby vegetation. But the other frogs mocked him viciously.Removing the wig, he silently vowed to obliterate all haired life.

For if everyone's bald, no one is.

The frog sequestered himself inside his lilypad laboratory and began work on the weapon which would destroy all hair on earth.

He worked and worked.

He skipped meals and sleep. So much so, that he became emaciated, skeletal, with only the baleful fire behind his eyes to propel him forward through his dark task. And finally, one day, it was complete.

He had his weapon.

A virus that would target only haired creatures and subject them to a horrible, but quick death. The frog released the virus and then slept. The frog slept for three days, oblivious to the fact that his virus, his creation, had mutated. It was now killing all life indiscriminately.

When the frog finally awoke, unaffected by the plague, he was alone. His terrible victory was far more complete than he'd dreamt.

At long last, unable to cope with the boredom, the loneliness, and the rotting carcasses of insects he was forced to subsist on, the frog fashioned a rope from some dead grass and, looking out at the barren wasteland, hung himself from the dead branch of a plague-felled tree.

As he closed his eyes against the pressure stealing his breath and kicked his legs for the last time, all life passed forever from this world.

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i should write a french blog entry

but not right now.

I lol'd

I was just looking at the list of gadgets here and saw a "twilight breaking dawn" quotes gadget. Now, I saw that movie, and granted, it was the rifftrax version, but still... There were, like, three lines of dialogue in that whole movie. Fucking nothing happened.  And no one said anything. It was just a lot of standing around looking miserable.

It could have been edited down to a 15 minute short and you'd have missed literally nothing.

Quotes??