It's May fourth, so may the force be with you...på svenska!

Strangely enough, it's almost become an unofficial holiday, May 4th as Star Wars Day.  I don't even know how long it's been a "thing," but I think I finally made the connection between May 4th and "May the force" sometime in the last couple of years. And since I'm not a big Star Wars fan, I just noticed references to it on this date and then moved on.

Today, however, I got an email from one of the websites where I get my daily Swedish vocabulary resources and guess what the topic was today!  Yes, Star Wars in Swedish!  And as I learned today, Star Wars is Stjärnornas Krig.

http://www.minhembio.com/bilder/bild/?pic_id=286387.jpg

And here are some other phrases that might sound familiar:

• Jag är din far. (Hint: Far is father.)
• Jediriddare - Jedi Knight
• Använd kraften! - Use the ______! (Points for filling in the blank.)

I'm still working with my Swedish lessons.  The people speaking on my recordings speak at a very natural pace (or so they say), but even with with all the words blending together into sentences, I'm beginning to understand them pretty well.  The challenge then is to reply in the same understandable way rather than saying each separate word as I think them through.  It's coming though and it's still fun.  Every once in a while there will be a phrase that I've heard before either from my parents or the times I was visiting in Sweden.  The phrase like that in today's lesson was "en gång till," which means again or one more time.  Very fun!

I have so many things I could post about tonight, but I think I'll close with a beautiful sunset picture from our ride down to the Lake tonight.

Our friend, Judy, is visiting us and when we were down at the lake we met our friends from town.  So we all enjoyed this sunset together.  That line of stuff running across the middle of the picture is still ice.  The fishing boats going out have to make their way through all of that to get out to the middle of the lake.  Maybe a few more days like this will make it go away.

One more thing - last night Astro Bob from Duluth, MN, said that the Northern Lights or aurora borealis would make an appearance.  I went out several times last night, even up until 2:30am, and only saw a bright glow to the norh.  No streaks up into the sky.  He had some great pictures on his website though.  Maybe tonight!

Mary's Motley Minutiae #3 - April 21, 2014

It's a beautiful Monday and I'm making it a catch-up day, not catsup or ketchup, but catch-up where I'm updating you on past topics.  And, I've actually had people ask about my yardstick out in the snow, so I'll start with that:

It's so shadowed here, but earlier this afternoon, it was at about 5 inches where the stick goes into the snow.  By the time I looked a while later, it was down to 4 inches.  I'll bet if I looked out now, it will have fallen over.  THEN I'll stick it into the bigger drift behind it which is still about two feet deep.

And our plants are growing...well, some are growing.  The coleus and the scarlet sage are going great and now I'll have to thin them out.  My level of faith when planting seeds isn't always "mustard seed" size, so I often have too many growing at a time or they don't grow at all, which is the case for our rosemary and basil.  Nothing yet for them!

And now that the snow has melted from our driveway and road, I'm back to walking and listening to Swedish lessons on my phone.  I had taken a little break so I thought I may have lost some Swedish momentum, but their method seems to work and it was pretty easy to get on my way again.  

There was lots of water running along the road and under the road through culverts, so the temps in the 60's was taking care of the snow.  Here's one of our neighbor's horse fields with a river running through it.  No horses yet but maybe when the fields dry up a little.

I just heard on the 5:00pm news where they were talking about the Wisconsin Fishing Opener which is scheduled to take place on Saturday, May 3rd.  (They always start a week earlier than Minnesota.) They are fearing a rerun of last May when Wisconsin couldn't have their fishing opener up here in northern Wisconsin because the lakes were still iced over.  In fact, down in Cable where the big Governor's Opener was supposed to be, they groomed cross-country ski trails instead.  And the governor couldn't fly in because of the snow and fog.  So I checked the ice cave camera, and even though we have open water here in Port Wing, there's still ice 20 miles east by the caves.

That's it for today!

En smörgås och en kopp kaffe, tack.

Today was Lesson 10 of my Swedish language journey, the last of my current set of lessons, so now I have to wait a couple days for them to send the next thirty.  

In today's lesson they added some foods, drinks, and more numbers, but not "7" yet because the initial sound for "7," spelled sju, is a difficult sound to make - it's kind of a whistling "u" sound.  "Sju" is also the start of the word "sick - sjuk," and hospital "sjukhus" (sick house), and so if you had a sentence talking about seventy-seven hospitals, a Swedish learner would have to put some thought into it!

Another word in today's lesson was "Ja visst!" or "Certainly!" And that gave me a chuckle because that was something I heard my parents and other older relatives say often.  My maternal grandmother, Hilda Swanson, also said "Uff da" on a regular basis, WAY back a long time ago before Scandinavian gift shops ever started selling plaques with "Uff da!" painted on them.  But I don't know where that expression came from - don't even know if it's really Swedish!

So today's blog post title translated means a sandwich and a cup of coffee, please/thank you.  And maybe not a sandwich as we in USA know sandwiches, more like an open-face sandwich.  Smör is butter, so bread with butter and something more added - cheese, meat, slices of some vegetable - peppers, cucumbers, etc.

And related to smörgås is smorgasbord, the one Swedish word everyone knows, but in Sweden smorgasbord is maybe more like a table of hors d'oeuvres than the huge spread of food we can sometimes experience.

But my biggest find today came when I started searching for computer or iPad apps that I could use to fill in until my next lessons arrive, and I found this:

It's a keyboard app for my iPad and it has the extra Swedish vowels on the top row.  I can type those vowels on my regular computer using various key combinations, but it was proving to be more difficult on the iPad...until now!

And below are four deer from our feeder tonight.  Notice number five is coming down the hill behind on the left.  We went out on our drive to see deer tonight, but we had more in our yard than anywhere else.  We did see a skunk though, which we hurried by when he lifted his tail!

                            

Mardi Gras Northern Wisconsin-Style

Fair warning - this maybe won't resemble Mardi Gras celebrations as they happen in other parts of the country or world, but this is how we celebrated here in town.

First, it just so happened that we served our breakfast guests oatmeal pecan pancakes on a day that is observed by some as Shrove Tuesday.  As I just learned, Shrove comes from the word "shrive" which means to confess.  I also just learned that pancakes are a traditional food for Shrove Tuesday because they use up rich foods such as eggs, milk and sugar. So we were right with the season this morning.

And then this evening we attended a Mardi Gras Wisconsin-Style event at our First Lutheran Church.  The meal served was pretty typical Wisconsin - brats & hot dogs, potato salad, pickles & condiments, bars and cookies. And it was all very tasty.

The room was all decorated with bows and beads and lots of color, but the main reason for the gathering happened after the meal.  It was time for the "Pampered Chef" party and here's the reason why.  Last summer our church took on the challenge of re-shingling the roof.  It's a big roof so it was a big project.  I thought I had a picture from when the guys were working on it last August in all the 95˚ heat and humidity, but I don't so here's how it looked before the project started.

So someone had the idea to have a winter gathering to bring us all together for Mardi Gras, to make us all feel warm and...to have a fundraiser to clear off the books on the roof project.  If you don't know, Pampered Chef parties are kind of like Tupperware parties but for cookware and all kinds of related things.  I had only ever been to one PC party before but I really liked what I bought back then, so with credit cards in hand, we went down and checked it out.   LOTS of cars in the parking lot, LOTS of people buying things, so hopefully it was successful.  

And...I won a prize...something I was going to buy anyway!  Let's flip more pancakes!

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More Swedish - I forgot to mention learning thank you and excuse me yesterday.  And today we added some adverbs - rather, very, quite, a couple important conjunctions - and, but, and a couple good verbs - I think and I speak.

And, even more fun, it was warm enough to take my lessons out on my walk today!  Older Daughter says I'm lucky I have country roads to walk and talk (to myself) on, something not as easily done on busy city streets where she lives!  And all was going good today until my iPod battery died.  Try again tomorrow!

Lake Superior is on the move!

Yesterday we made a quick trip to Duluth and noticed something new near the lakeshore.  The ice is starting to pile up on itself and revealing a beautiful blue, aquamarine color.

I know people visiting the ice caves have seen blue ice in places along the rocky lakeshore, but I don't know if I've ever noticed it just out in the lake like this.  People who know these things say that the ice caves should be good and safe to walk to the caves until the end of March.  Seeing open water out there - I think that dark like out there is open water - tells us that underneath all that ice, the lake currents are very active and we'll have some interesting sights when ALL of the ice starts breaking up.

The media specialist in me had to do a Google search on "blue lake ice" to find out why it looks blue.  And it has to do with the color spectrum and which colors are able to penetrate through the ice crystals.  And I'm NOT a scientist AT ALL so here's one of my sources: http://www.sciences360.com/index.php/blue-ice-12085/

And just because you never know what's going to turn up on a Google search, something I often experienced with unpleasant results as a media specialist with students, one of my queries returned websites showing Lupita Nyong'o's dress from the Academy Awards ceremony last night.  Evidently the color was icy blue!

So, the chairs are waiting.  Come on up.  The weather's fine!
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Swedish update - I can now ask and answer questions regarding whether I can or can't understand Swedish or English.  And I can ask how you are and tell you that I'm just fine or not too bad.  And I can say hello and goodbye.

So for now, heydå!

March-ing on in Swedish!

In the interest of full B&B food disclosure, we had an epic fail at breakfast this morning.  The pecan caramel rolls, which we have made DOZENS of times, were so bad we don't know if even the crows will eat them...and they eat everything!  But, we had enough other items for our guests to eat, and they were very understanding.  We did a little troubleshooting and maybe have figured out where it all went bad.  Now we just need to get back up on the horse, or bicycle, choose your challenge, and try it again sometime.

And there are NO pictures to remind us!

So instead of focusing on the bad, here is my new winter challenge fun that came in the mailbox yesterday - Pimsleur Swedish!

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Doing all of this genealogy and translation work has definitely inspired me.  And now I am connected again to my cousin, originally from Sweden, so there is more inspiration.  I learned about the "Pimsleur Approach" to learning languages from Older Daughter who is currently learning Spanish.  She was impressed with how they teach it and so I thought I would try it.  I was a German teacher for a few years before I became a school media specialist, and it is definitely a different way to teach languages.  But at the end of 30 minutes, the little conversation that was unintelligible at the beginning of the lesson, sounds like old hat at the end!

I was a little apprehensive because with this method you only hear the words spoken on the DVDs without seeing them until well beyond the first 10 lessons that I'm starting with.  I'm very much a visual learner, and I remember back in 5th grade in Bannockburn School when Madame Ivy was trying to teach French to our class.  It wasn't until I could see the words that it all started to make sense to me.  But now along with learning some phrases in the 30 minute session every day, I also have Ingabritt's blog postings to learn how all the words go together and how people talk in everyday situations.

And pretty soon, when/if the weather gets warm, I can connect up my iPod and practice my Swedish out on my walks!

Too fun!