Merry Stressmas!

It's been a week.

I know the holidays are stressful, but I'm the only person I know who has anxiety dreams about waking up Christmas morning with no presents for anyone. In August. But in the end that's not much to have preying on your mind. So when the tachycardia hit, I freaked out about it for a day and then decided to ignore it. Because not knowing the cause of a cardiac anomaly is so much more relaxing than knowing.

Still I plan ahead. So even though it was a couple months back that my bank contacted me about refinancing, I put off speaking to our broker until a little over a week ago so that way his proposed closing date would be the evening before my trip down to St Louis. Because, of course, I'm anxious enough about travel that I have unhappy dreams about that a couple times a week, and this way I would have something to distract me. And even though I knew back then we needed to have a condo meeting--and not just any meeting, but our annual budget discussion--before the end of the year, I left the scheduling up to the other board members with the result that they picked this Monday.

About now, those of you with kids are sharing a chuckle with your spouses about this. But I'm so accustomed to the placid tidal rhythms of my DINK lifestyle that it doesn't take much to throw me. Which is how I found myself coming down with the flu while waiting for the appraiser to show up at our house. It was a lucky thing, because it gave me plenty more time to contemplate at leisure all of the above plus all the possible social offences I could cause with the overdue invitation that monshu and I were sending out.

That day I hit the jackpot, since that was when the Old Man had the worst day of his hell week at work, a finalist for worst day of work all year. So we did we do to console each other? We tried to sit down and review the papers from the broker together with the result that we had our first real argument in...over a year? Sitting in bed that night--alone--I remembered what my father likes to say about money being expensive and wondered if the couple thou we stood to save each year was going to prove worth it after all.

It ain't over yet, but today we turned the corner. I somehow made it through a day of work (topping it off with the classic borrow-a-pen-to-take-minutes-because-you-forgot-it-was-your-turn manoeuvre at my afternoon meeting). Yesterday afternoon, I dragged myself from my sickbed to run an errand or two and cook up a big pot of bigos. I ended up having to leave the meal in half-swoon and pull monshu away from fixing the computer (yes, again) to finish it, but it meant that tonight was as simple as heating up the leftovers so we could get down to the business of going over the numbers one last time and agreeing that this way forward made sense.

With any luck, one week from now I will reclining calmly in an Amtrak car with a clean bill of health and nothing important missing from my luggage. Our new loan will be finalised as well as the 2012 condo budget and I won't have sparked any unbridgeable riffs due to carelessness or callousness. My only thoughts will be of monshu enjoying his downtime doing something he wants to do for a change and looking forward to baking cookies, watching videos on YouTube, and playing board games with my sister's family. It's my dream and I'm going to see it happen.

Man divas gramātas

Despite all the distractions, I've still been learning Latvian--barely. Earlier this week, I began to hit the critical wait-they-really-expect-me-to-retain-the-vocabulary-in-the-lessons? point in my self study and moved on to other things. Then last night I got a surprise in the mail: Nuphy's classic copy of Teach Yourself Latvian.

This book has been a legend to me even among members of the Old School All Grammar All The Time TY books ever since Nuphy showed me the sentence "My brother has a sharp ax, but he does not work." (Manam brālim ir ass cirvis, bet viņš nestrādā.) For all fainic_thu_fein's worried about TY Irish "teaching [me] to speak like a 100 year old man from the bog", TY Latvian seems aimed at making you speak like a 100 year old farmhand from the pastoral idylls of Latgale.

By contrast, in all their eagerness to make Latvian fun and relevant, the authors of Colloquial Latvian seem to have forgotten to include the grammar. Okay, that's an exaggeration. I can see not wanting to chart-bomb the casual learner, but it's more than a little ridiculous to expect them to pick up a fundamental feature like definite adjective endings just from reading the dialogues. I thought Nuphy's book would more than make up for this lack and it has. And for all the talk about the quaintness of the scenarios in TY Latvian (so far I've learned more words for farm implements than for modes of transport), the current dialogue in Colloquial Latvian concerns EU agricultural subsidies ("mūsu kaimiņvalstu lauksaimniecība tiek subsidēta"). No wonder it's taken me three days to push through it!

So far I've twigged to only a few real divergences in grammar. TY talks of an "instrumental case" and actually justifies it with a handful of relic forms. It gives three different forms for the locative of demonstratives, albeit admitting that only one set of these "are used in a colloquial style". (How many do you think Colloquial gives? That's right--"Pick it up as you go along, wuss!") And it lists alternative imperative forms for ā-stem verbs whose absence from my other materials suggests are probably obsolete. But best of all it includes side notes on the kinds of linguistic idiosyncrasies which are the reason I got into the language business in the first place. Take this gem from page 53:

The verb 'klausīt' can have an object in the dative or the accusative: the acc. indicating habitual, frequent, or intensive action, the dative an occasional action. The same refers to some other verbs, e.g. 'lūgt (to beg), sist (to hit)', etc.

Ar you kidding me? I've seen various constructions for expressing habitual action, but this is not something I've ever seen expressed through the case of the direct object. Wacky!

But I have to say the chief reason that I've stuck with the language this long is that the words are freaking adorable. I mean these are real everyday sentences:

1. Mana mīļā māte ir mājās. "My dear mother is at home."
2. Pļavā ir zaļa zale "There is green grass in the meadow."
3. Laiks ir jauks. "The weather is fine."
4. Vai saule silda zemi. "The sun warms the earth."

How could you possibly say any of those sentences just once? Each one is a poem on my lips as I lie in bed waiting for sleep (or "Es guļu gultā gaidot miegu").