Can anyone explain why...

...I made a note to myself that reads:

Make notes fr next tme that shew what how # 6 & 7 vill be answ--d

It's in my handwriting in my notebook here at work, and I think it was from a meeting last week, but for the life of me I can't figure out what it refers to. So thus I tell the internet.

Italian books

OK, got two books from the bookstore and three from the stacks. The course's textbook is Italian in 10 minutes a day, which is printed in that big font used for easy-reading books, where the r's and a's and y's have little balls on the ends of the sticky-out bits which just DRIVES me INSANE. I can't really explain my loathing for this font. I mean, I hated it as a kid and I hate it now. The book itself is written in language that's probably a 4th-grade reading level, and it's got colorful pictures and stickers that you can stick on things around your casa.* But it came in handy during our three-hour network outage this afternoon, when there was literally nothing else I could do but play around with vocabulary because everything on my to-do list required a network connection.

Uno due tre quattro cinque sei sette otto nove dieci undici dodici tredici quattordici quindici sedici diecissette dieciotto diecinnove venti.

Vorremo due tazze di tè. I can order between two and twenty-nine cups of tea, but I cannot order one.**

The library haul includes Basic Converstional Italian (the misspelling is on the book's spine, when it was re-bound), which is a more traditional textbook full of fascinating conversations about the weather and everyone's health, starring Laura, a coquettish American student in Italy and Giacomo, her suave Italian friend.***

Then I have the enthralling 201 Italian verbs fully conjugated in all the tenses and an Italian reader with excerpts from various works of and about Italian culture and history.

The other book I got from the bookstore is Better reading Italian, which is a reader that includes excerpts from not only essays and stories and poems, but websites (useful!), and has questions about the passage, extra vocabulary, and short lessons. It's really way above my reading level, but I did manage to translate most of the first line of the first poem. Which has five words in it.

Sotto i portici di Torino - Under the something-or-other of Turin. I think that portici might refer to the city gates - portico means, well, 'portico', and the poem seems to talk about Turin in general.


* It does point out that sticking a sticker onto il gatto might be a bit challenging, and encourages you to be creative.

** David Sedaris has an essay where he talks about how, when he moved to Paris with his boyfriend and started learning French, he bought two of everything because he didn't know how to ask for one. I totally understand.

*** I am guessing at their personalities. The only conversation I've read is when Laura called Giacomo's house to see if he was home and his uncle, Signore Fini, answered the phone, said he was fine, and that Giacomo was at his English lesson. Laura said it was too bad and promised to call back later. I'll keep you up to date as the situation develops.