Happy birthday Stacia! What a great gift! Wish I'd been there; sounds like a rollicking party!

A free and good-quality option is Foreign Service Institute (FSI) language materials, available from multiple sites. It's old but good; 40+ languages; public domain because paid for by our tax money. Great Girl learned good German conversational skills from it; it's helping Middle Girl greatly with her French. https://www.livelingua.com/fsi-language-courses.php

Enjoying The Prime Minister, the fifth of Trollope's Palliser series. He has a satisfyingly readable prose style that renders abstruse Victorian political infighting most entertaining.

:) I spent my twenties deliberately seeking out a life of order and stability diametrically opposed to the heroine's. The ending didn't feel like a surprise at all as the true nature of her friends seemed inevitable to me; the only part of the novel I found intolerably weak was the Deus ex machina that extricated her unscathed from the very bad place she had worked throughout the story at getting herself into. The Loved One is a little like Greene's Our Man in Havana, isn't it? - in its winning lightness from an author capable of much heavier writing. I keep meaning to read the Sword of Honor trilogy, too, but end up re-reading Brideshead instead.

Why thank you! While HAL was finishing off the astronauts, I finished The Dud Avocado, which continued strong all the way through. Groucho Marx gave it an endorsement even. Back to Trollope, but I have moved another Elaine Dundy novel, The Old Man and Me, closer to the business end of my TBR shelf.

Yes I was thinking, Where's my GIF? :) And there it is! I will see what I can do about a photo. Big State U. started classes today so all the techliterate people are gone.

Now I remember: Breaker 19 was shoved onto the market as an attempt to cash in on the Trucker craze in the wake of the dreadful song "Convoy"; soon followed by the unfortunate tv series "BJ and the Bear." Oh how we all miss the Seventies.

We had Breaker 19. It was dull.

:D For my birthday they are all going to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in our fancy big-screen theater, while I stay home and read my book & don't prep lessons.

Literary gift! For Borges' birthday, Middle Girl gave me a hand-lettered, hand-illuminated parchment of the first sentence of Chaucer's General Prologue, which we've been studying. She made the ink in the medieval fashion, from ground oak galls and gum arabic. It's beautiful and must be promptly framed.

Thanks for the update on Abby, Angela. Hope the infection passes quickly. Just mentionng that today is the birthday of Jorge Luis Borges, in 1899. Read somethng weird today in hs honor!

Another vote of appreciation for Our Man in Havana. Light, fun Greene. Happy anniversary Robin!

I've been making this recommendation for years: Word Wealth Jr. A search of previous threads should produce Mrs. Twain's and my shameless flogging of this old classic and its sequel, Word Wealth. $6 on Bookfinder.com, I notice. ETA: It might be a little early for WWJ, which seems to be middle school-ish.

On their website??? You're kidding, right? And where is this "signed agreement"? I didn't sign any such agreement when I purchased my Rosetta Stone. A direct question: are you employed by Rosetta Stone? Forgive my suspicion, but "entering Rosetta Stone learning" is salespeak.

Robin, thank you so much for this color challenge, because I was simply not getting around to reading The Dud Avocado, and now I'm so glad I am. It's light and fun, and Dundy's writing is a pleasure. Here's a bit from her narrator's experience as an American living in Paris:

I liked Johnny Depp in the animated, underrated children's movie Rango, where he plays an anthropomorphic chameleon living in the California desert amidst Raoul Duke's other LSD hallucinations. (In case viewers miss the multiple references, the entire opening scene is lifted straight from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.)

More color-title books: Crane, The Red Badge of Courage Balzac, The Black Sheep Stendhal, The Red and the Black J. Frank Dobie, Apache Gold & Yaqui Silver James, The Golden Bowl And since it turns out I had a color title on my TBR shelf, I set Trollope aside for a moment to read Elaine Dundy's 1958 novel The Dud Avocado.

This week I finished Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, which I have to confess was disappointing. Part of that is only that I happen not to enjoy romances so much, but am rather interested in labor issues: the novel could definitely have used less mooning and more industrial action. But I found the writing monotonous and the pacing dreadful. A little Wikipedia research indicates that Dickens, her editor, shared that view, finding the novel "dreary"; and that some of the pacing problem came from Gaskell's difficulties in writing for a serial format. After passing on the book, I asked myself: Violet, for your fifty-second book of the year, what is on your TBR shelf that is utterly unlike both a Victorian social-problem romance and a sixteenth-century Italian spiritual treatise? And so I read Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thompson's classic certainly doesn't have any pacing problems, moving as it does at a hundred miles per hour on acid through the California desert. And it frankly explains a lot about my parents, which comment I will now leave alone. Recommended for those with a high tolerance for profanity and lurid descriptions of drug use. I thought I might quote the famous "wave" speech, Thompson's favorite excerpt; but instead, the opening paragraphs, which give a very good idea of the book and Thompson's "gonzo journalism" prose. Now back to the Palliser novels, with The Prime Minister next up. I figure a series of six 700+ page novels should count for the Epic bingo square. Edit: Italian, not Spanish.

I rather like hearing my Samsung play Schubert's Die Forelle at the end of each load....

I must try this channeling Abigail thing. Re: Don Camillo: Putting in a plug for my favorite, Don Camillo and the Flower Children. Stacia--that book looks perfect for dh for his upcoming birthday. Thanks!

Very late checking in, due to confluence of four-day retreat, post-camp kickoff of homeschooling year, and dh fleeing the country (not as a consequence of the first two items; or so he says). I did manage to finish Dom Lorenzo Scupoli's Counter-Reformation classic The Spiritual Combat, which is useful and worth a re-read some time but much less exciting than the title makes one think, being more about attentiveness to the heart and not so much about Joss Whedony things.* Currently reading Gaskell's North and South, never having read any Gaskell before. And continuing to enjoy reading aloud Treasure Island. I might just read Kidnapped on my own after we finish, which I haven't yet read. *I mention only because some who saw me reading it in the parish hall got completely the wrong idea about the sort of thing I must be interested in.

The first two statements, in the context of the Roman Empire in the first century, are demonstrably incorrect. The third is dubious: certainly the Institutes of Justinian describe slavery as "contra Natura."

Aren't most of the really smart and virtuous people? :D

And for those of us who are very dominantly lefties, an electric opener that pushes down from the top like this one http://www.walmart.com/ip/Hamilton-Beach-Smooth-Touch-Can-Opener/5924593 allows us to open cans without begging a child for help.