Summertime

So after my very brief slacking off time (last Wednesday afternoon through this Monday, inclusive), I have begun the summer semester. I am only taking one class and, as we will not be learning how to say at any point, es ist für Babys. I really did not mean to sign up for German for Reading Knowledge, as the idea of only learning one aspect of a language strikes me as stupid and wrong. Speaking, listening, reading, writing - these are the tasks involved in learning a language. We are only learning ONE of these. What a waste of time! I don't have any burning wish to go to Germany to talk to anybody but my Tante Claudia and her family, but still. Plus it's a language-learning style that's completely alien to me. Normally when I learn a language, I memorize hundreds of vocabulary words and a few verb conjugations, then automatically pick up a sense of the grammatical structures and sentence patterns. This is what I've been doing since high school, when I learned how to learn Spanish. But all we're doing in this class is learning to recognize grammar structures and translating text. This is not how I roll. And I do not like to roll in ways other than the ways to which I am accustomed. I am not flexible that way.

On Monday I am having a dinner party. This was sort of unexpected - I had promised my beau that I'd roast him a chicken to celebrate the end of exams, and it got put off for awhile, and then he asked if we could invite this couple we sometimes socialize with, Amity and Tawrin (Amity's the one who has the splendid dinner parties) and then I suggested we make a thing of it and invite Kari and the Werewolf, too. The trouble is that my beau is the world's fussiest eater, and apart from the chicken he might not eat anything I would make. He balked at roasted potatoes, for instance, and suggested that he make mashed potatoes using his mother's recipe, instead. I feel that this is a very heavy dinner for this time of year. He also wants to make No-Bake Cookies for dessert, and I am hoping I can convince him that these are not a proper dessert for a dinner party and I will make a pie as well, or pots de creme, or something. Then he can have No-Bake Cookies and the rest of us can have something else. Feel free to chime in with suggestions!

(He also said in the invitation that there would be "drinking, maybe some smoking, maybe some games" at the party, and now I will have to tell the guests that no, there is no smoking in the apartment, please. Also that the only games we have are chess and Set - not even a deck of cards or a game of Scruples.)

Krista's mother and father and elder sister and younger brother are all here for a visit. Tomorrow they're going to go down to Chicago for the youngest sister's graduation. In the meantime I feel very out-of-place in my apartment - I've been keeping out of the way, but other people's families are so insular and take up so much space, literal and figurative. I will miss Krista over the summer but it will be exciting to have the apartment all to myself.

Upcoming plans include a Futurama marathon at someone's house tomorrow, farmer's market on Saturday, dinner party on Monday, IU's last home baseball game on Tuesday (peanuts, a flask of bourbon, and possibly necking under the bleachers - maybe I can compromise on the No-Bake Cookies), and a soup kitchen shift on Wednesday. Plus I've been to the gym every day this week! Summer is off to a good start.