Caernarfon, Seattle, and Kansas

I am compeltely obsessed with Welsh. During the last few weeks I have checked out pretty much everything on the BBC Learn Welsh website, so I've learned a lot of the same things over and over again. I've finally found my favorite "course" (it's called The Big Welsh Challenge), but they've only got 4 lessons up so far, and I'm more than ready to move on ... but I expect it will be a while. So, in the meantime, I'll keep playing with Colin & Cumberland and eavesdropping on the Lloyd family -- my next favorite "courses."

I have also decided two things that I want to do with my life.

First, I want to go to Wales and take a Welsh course there. I've decided Caernarfon sounds nice. It's in the North-West, which has the highest percentage of Welsh-speakers in Wales, it's next to the sea, and it's got a nice, cheap little youth hostel. Oh, and a castle -- those are always fun. I've been working on pronouncing the sentence "Dw i'n byw yng Nghaernarfon" -- "I live in Caernarfon." (It's got this nasty nasal mutation, but I'm getting it worked out.)

Second, I've decided that I really want to be -- not a college professor or even a stylistician -- but a language-instruction assessor. You know, like a secret shopper, only for language instruction courses. I would go around and sit in on all these language classes and learn new languages and then assess the course and instructor(s). How fun would that be? It would give me a great excuse to move to Wales and take a Welsh course, not to mention courses in Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Egyptian heiroglyphs, Laotian, Maori, Czech ... the list goes on and on. Now I just need to find someone who actually offers a job doing that kind of thing ...

Meanwhile, it looks like I will be in Washington state for about two weeks this summer. I will be going out to help one of the linguistics professors here at UNT, who is starting her own business offering English-language-instruction summer vacation tours. This year they'll be in Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula, and I'll go along to provide more native English input for the Japanese and Chinese speakers and to offer some language instruction along the way. I'm pretty excited for it. It will be a paid position, I will get to see Washington, and I'll have something pretty nifty to put on my resume and CV.

And, much closer to home, I'm going to Kansas next weekend to visit Margo. I am very excited for it. It's the beginning of Spring Break out here, and Margo and I are planning to watch some movies (see today's quote), hang out, sing a musical number for her singles branch, and shoot some guns. (Perhaps -- I'm not sure what else we decided after the musical number, so I don't remember whether or not guns ended up in the final plans.) After that, I'm flying out to Utah for the rest of the week to see my family. I'm planning to help my sister paint and take my Dad out to a movie for his birthday. Oddly enough, I love the painting, but taking Dad out is a Herculean task. I really want him to see Amazing Grace, though -- I think he'd love it, and he needs to learn to spend time with his family.

A la batterie!! (101 points)

Oh yes, the last quote was from The Great Muppet Caper. I Netflixed it a while ago, and it's still here -- I love enough that I keep wanting to invite people over to watch it with me. Charles Grodin is wonderful in that movie. I'm always impressed with his ability to play passionate love scenes against a pig made of styrofoam.