Svenska

I'm so tremendously excited this morning. Magnus finally caught his parents at home and is talking to them. I've been in the bathroom (just next to the computer room) fixing my hair and trying to eavesdrop.. and I understand a LOT more of what's being said than ever before! He's been talking about buying a house and how the interest rates are very low now, and that we've talked about buying one between Morehead and Lexington. There was a couple of other things that I understood, but I don't remember what they were now. He's talking about credit cards now, and explaining how credit doesn't work the same way here as in Sweden. :)

It's just extremely cool. It seems that I've hit another little.. learning skills increase. I remember doing a similar thing in high school with my French between my second and third year, and it's not like I'd been studying! But one of the first things we did was translate a kid's story into French. Anyway, when she returned the papers, she had written "Great job!" all over it. It had a bunch of errors, of course, but seemingly not as bad as the others, and she kept talking about the improvement over what I had done before, at least. At the end of the year, I took a test and got six hours of college credit for it, which was better than anyone in the class (one other person got three hours), and completely unexpected, since I was a B student (I wasn't good at studying.. it was the first thing I really had to study for.) for the first two years, and the others in the third year class (it wasn't required.. there were only about seven of us) were really diligent about studying and made excellent grades. It's like my brain works on it while I'm busy with other things. *giggle*

Anyway, I noticed it last night. We went grocery shopping, and as we walked in, I suggested that we speak Swedish.. we used to do that a lot, but it was kind of agonizing, and it ended up with us not buying all the groceries we need because I couldn't think of the words for them or I'd get so busy thinking of how to say something that I would forget that we need flour, or whatever. Anyway, we tried it again last night and it worked. I mean.. I didn't understand everything, and sometimes I'd make him repeat it and explain a word, but for the most part, I knew what he was talking about, and he was speaking much faster than ever before. Both in French (which is almost completely gone, by now) and Swedish, listening has been the hardest part for me.. I'm not an auditory kind of person. Actually, in English too. I'm much better at expressing myself in writing than speaking.

Hopefully, now that I can pick things out of a conversation more and more, the learning will come faster, too. I've often had trouble keeping motivated, or forcing myself to study or think about it, since we're here in the US surrounded by English everywhere. I really think that this increase has been sponsored by my recent streaming radio programs. Definitely going to have to continue to work that into my day!

Sunday night

I've made such progress with the Bjorn site. I'm expecting it to be finished in the next day or two. The design is completely done. All I need to finish now is content. (And making the forum pretty.) I hate content. Oh well, I'm not expecting to have a lot of it when the site goes live. I'd just like to have the basics there.

I mentioned that we went grocery shopping last night. I did not mention, however, the somewhat embarrassing part. We went through line with seven jars of alfredo pasta sauce, two jars of spaghetti sauce, four boxes of spaghetti and one box of penne. I could just feel the cashier's eyes on me, wondering what sort of people eats that much pasta. Heck, I wonder what sort of people eats that much pasta! We do like it very much, but the main thing was that there was some sort of big sale, and I could buy my favorite sauce again. I prefer one brand, but I refuse to buy it at full price, and that's what tipped the scales into an Extreme Pasta Purchase.

I've been sitting here for ten minutes now, writing stuff and then and erasing it, which is a clear sign that I'm too sleepy to be writing anything at all. G'night. :)