Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Oh Noooooooo!

All that stuff I said before about my latin coming back to me? Well forget I said that! I got 19 pages into the text, yes 19, and became completely and totally lost. I could not rember any of the vocabulary, none of the declensions and could not rember what the dative case was used for. I had to scrap everything and start over from scratch. This time, I have taken things a little slower and I am actually writing (yuck) stuff down to help me remember. The keyboard sure is quicker, but the information does not travel from the keys to my brain the same way information travels from the pen to my brain.

It would be interesting to see if anyone has done a study about that. Is there a difference in the retention of information that is hand written versus typed? If there is one, I bet you would find a big age difference between "computer babies" and "pre-computer babies". That is people who had/use computers at a very early age would probably retain information better that they type in versus us "older" folks that didn't really use computers until college or late high school. Since computers were just entering the high schools when I was a junior/senior, I am probably about the last generation that had to take notes completely by hand. Heck, we still had typing class! With typewriters!!!!! We were such philistines.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Salve!

I started working on another of my things to do, learn latin. I found this interesting site, http://www.textkit.com/ that is dedicated to helping people learn latin and greek (ancient not modern or biblical). Its a seems a pretty good site or at least it has a lot of resources posted. I will see how good the site actually is as I go through my lessons. To be honest I feel more than slightly geeky when I go that website. However, there are about 1300 people that have listed learning latin as one of the things they want to do, so I have at least some company. I also have to be honest, I am cheating slightly. I had 2 years of latin in HS. However, that was a LOOONG time ago. (or at least it seems like an eternity now) It is funny how things actually do start comming back after looking through the lessons. Unfortunately, my memory likes to get things all bass-ackwards from time to time. Its a little strange having something pop into my mind and thinking my memory is really better than I thought, only to realize that my synapses short-circuited and I have things all jumbled together.



If you hadn't guessed by now, I am taking a break from my "studies". Maybe my synapses just need a beer. I'll talk to ya'll later.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Carpe Diem

OK folks, here I go. I can officially cross the first item off my 43 things to do before I die list. Although I haven't actually MADE the list yet, so I am not sure I can cross this off. Well, once I make my list, one of the things that will be on it is to start a blog.



I am not real sure where all of this is actually going to lead. A good friend of mine has been blogging for some time now. One of the links from her blog goes to 43things.com. Now, I have seen that link for probably over a year now and we have discussed it off and on. I actually went to the site for the first time the other day. After perusing the site for awhile, I thought I should give it a try. So here I am, whether you are ready or not. You will hear about my trials and tribulations as I try to whittle away at my list, as well as some commentary on current events that make me go "Hmmmmm".

Time to go and make my list..