Monsoons

Yep, it's that time of year again - Monsoons rage! Half an hour later, the only evidence is drying pavement, a clean car, and a flash-flood warning :-)

Waiting... Waiting...

Waiting... Waiting... I'll never get out of Casablanca...

Well, it's not Exotic Casablanca, but I sure have been doing a lot of waiting this week!

Yesterday, I took the car in for some long-awaited repairs. As it is now our only vehicle, I was left on foot to walk a bit around the neighborhood - I toured the various seating areas (with coffee and Wi-Fi!) of one of the hospitals then strolled down Central to the Grove, a restaurant I have wanted to try (it was OK - noisy, friendly, interesting food choices, no Wi-Fi. It's all about priorities, right?). During my lunch, the amazing folks at The Shop* called - their safety check showed that one tire was unsafe to drive on (yeah, how long had that been going on?!?), so they put the spare on for me.

When I got back to the shop, we had a great discussion about what could have caused the rotors to warp (we always use the parking brake, and we don't brake hard, so it wasn't that; speed bumps and over-torquing lugnuts wouldn't do it; it's possible that our few trips when we towed a trailer might have contributed). His advice: watch for it happening again in the next year; if so, we would get brake pad credit, and we could spend some effort to track down the underlying cause. These guys are so practical, it's scary!

His other advice - go to Discount Tires (soon!). So, here we are this morning, waiting for two new tires (yep, the last one from my 2006 California-to-Iowa trip is going away). Folks here are friendly and efficient. But no Wi-Fi...

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*The Shop is a fantastic car repair business! I've had the car in a few times because I was concerned about this or that - they completely understand that the car is old, and not worth spending a lot on anything but important repairs. They fix what is urgent, tell me if something is not a safety issue, and advise me on reasonable measures to take.
AND! Besides the good and important car discussions, I always enjoy conversations with Kelsey - travel, funny things that happen in life, all sorts of things :-)
Oh, and they have Wi-Fi...

Greece in Albuquerque

If you can't go to Greece, get a taste by stopping by the Greek Orthodox church on High Street in Downtown Albuquerque!

Italian and...

Italian and...
Other Languages

According to Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States), "Approximately 430 languages are spoken or signed by the population" of the United States.

1) English-only is spoken at home by 80% of the USA population.
--- me: check!
2) Spanish is the primary language spoken at home by over 37 million people. Spanish-speaking communities in the world, ranked by size are: Mexico, Colombia, Spain,  Argentina, and the United States.
--- me: check!
3) All the Chinese languages combined puts this in third place
--- me: hmmm, that's a tall order...
4) French is the fourth most-common language spoken in the USA.
--- me: check!
12) So, Italian is pretty far down the list.
--- me: check it out! I started Italian on Duolingo 22 days ago!

Basically, I can recognize a lot of words. Can I generate much as needed? Hmmm. I can probably communicate somewhat in the present tense. Especially about eating, drinking, seeing, wanting - wanting to drink or eat what I see, right?

Va bene!

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Just for fun (and ya, 'cause Mom is from the UP, so a Yooper), did you know?
"There is a distinctive dialect of English to be found in the Upper Peninsula, known as Yooper. Yooper often has a Finnish cadence and uses Finnish sentence structure with modified English, German, Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish vocabulary. "
Read more about Yooper here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Peninsula_English

Next Summer?!?

Next Summer?!?

I think because it has been so hot lately, we started talking about what we could do, where we could go next Summer. And because we have planned a *lot* of flying on our upcoming trip to Italy, we immediately started with "where can we drive?"

Well, we let our imaginations loose, and plotted a route through the USA and Canadian Rockies, then back down along the Pacific coast - oh, that looked great! However... A quick run at an itinerary showed us we would be on the road for almost THREE months!

We quickly cut out the Western leg, and plotted a return through Denver. That dropped it to less than two months, but none of it had us stopping for even as much as a week. That didn't sound very relaxing... The kicker though was when I took a quick survey of places to stay in Yellowstone - the park is so huge, there is simply nowhere near enough to stay and make short day trips into the park. Everywhere I looked, lodgings were booked up even through next Summer (yes, over a year away). No, I'm not really surprised...

So, while we're still thinking about a way to visit Yellowstone, what we really feel we need is a trip that can be a little looser, and still include the Rockies. Since housing seemed to be an issue, I checked on hostels in Banff and Jasper - no problem! I could even have reserved a room for next week! This is more like it! Of course, this smaller, shorter jaunt will mean flying to Canada and renting a car, but even that will be less stressful than a meandering drive with a Yellowstone headache in the middle.

But, this one?

 Or this one?

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And, as Rick said - instead of one big vacation, this short trip means we can take another one somewhere else!

Head-up Displays and Tiny Houses

Head-up Displays and Tiny Houses...

Cleaning out even more old stuff - what a mish-mash!

Hand-outs from college job faires included these two pieces focused on the latest technology - 1984's aerospace head(s)-up displays. As a note, Kaiser Electronics (which became Rockwell-Collins*) was the last company I worked for, and is still a leader in HUDs - and people still argue over whether the "s" belongs. ;-)

A few days ago, I marathon-watched a tiny-houses series; it reminded me of one of my favorite childhood books, where a family moves into a trolley car - certainly one of the originals in the tiny house movement. And, voila! It turned up in the pile of "stuff to sort!"

I was either ahead of my time, or certain fields move quite slowly...

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*Check this R-C article here

Italian - How Fluent?

My friend that I practice French with is also learning Italian, and she recommended Duolingo. I've been using it at the "insane" level for less than a week - here's my feedback!

So, if all we have to talk about in Italy is animals drinking water and eating cheese, I'm set! :-D