SSC

It's at time like these that it becomes obvious all the "progress" I've made at dealing with anxiety over the years consists almost solely of drastically reducing the number of things I actually give a shit about.

The big fridge

Believe it or not, I can actually think of a reason I'm almost relieved to see the mercury plunging with the arrival of this massive cold front that has nothing to do with snow. The other day I was examining crabapples on a tree in the park and I noticed that they were beginning to rot. The same was true of the haws. Normally, these ripen close enough to the onset of winter that the cold preserves them longer. I'm sure the wildlife appreciates the natural refrigeration effect as much as we appreciate having pretty red round fruits dangling from all the trees instead of brownish half-decayed ones. Also, I noticed one or two ornamentals being tricked by the milder temperatures into attempting a false spring blossoming. Here's hoping they have enough time to recuperate from their foolish optimism.

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Looking over my vocabulary lists for the past couple weeks, I notice the dearth of verbs. I think this is partly an artefact of the languages I'm dealing with, which have considerably more nominal roots than verbal ones. It just isn't that often that I come across an unfamiliar verb stem in German or Spanish. For whatever reason, both languages seem considerably more receptive to foreign nouns than foreign verbs.

Which I guess is just as well, since I seem to suck at learning new verbs. In Korean class, we had quite reasonable lists of common verb stems that I, for all my study, never fully mastered. A couple years ago, trying to regain my vocabulary, I challenged myself to write out as many verbal stems from memory as possible and only came up with around a hundred or less. With Turkish, which I've started on more recently and learned less of, I find I'm having trouble even recognising that many.