Well, even though I said I wouldn’t be posting today due to work constraints, little did I know that I would be so constrained that I can’t even sneak a peek at all that’s going on in Bloglandia. It seems our Internet connection is down, so I have no outside contact at all (except through our e-mail). Which will make for a very long day—even when I’m working hard and not posting, I still check the news and a couple of different blogs every hour or so just to see what’s going on.

Being suddenly cut off like this is pretty torturous (gosh, where’s Amnesty when you need ‘em), so the next best thing is to write about it, e-mail it to myself, then run to the library during lunch, sign in for a computer, pick up the e-mail I sent myself (along with the huge amounts of Possumblog fan mail), copy this part out of my e-mail, then run over to Blogger and paste it in, find all the required hyperlinks and paste them in, post it, then check the counter stats and see if anyone else has stumbled on Possumblog by mistake. (Two interesting hits from yesterday were folks Googling male palestinian hunks [not sure if this refers to handsome guys, or the remainders of a homicide-bomber], and pinewood derby nude [for which I have absolutely no clue]). Anyway, after reading those, I will scurry quickly around the links listed above and see what the smart people have to say, then log out and go back to work. Yech.

The biggest reason for posting today is that Little Boy now has a pen pal. I mentioned last week that we had three of the men from our church going over to visit a sister congregation in Russia, and that the kids had written letters to the Russian kids.

Two of the guys are back now and last night at Bible study they passed out a few letters, and one of them was to Jonathan. He was tickled to death to get it, and the little boy had included a picture of himself which looked startlingly like Jonathan! Weird. The Russian boy’s name is Daniel, and he’s eight years old, too. His dad is a business man, his mom is a history teacher, and he has a thirteen year old sister and a younger sister. They live in Kamyshin, a city along the Volga (and according to the linked Pravda article, the best organized town in Russia). The picture he sent is of him on a ferryboat on the Volga, and he wrote that likes to play soccer. He allowed that his mother and sister helped him write the note for him, since his English is not very good. Of course, their English is as good as ours, and far better than our (my) Russian, which consists of spasiba, tovarich, da, nyet, perestroika, vodka, huligan, a couple of rather foul words used to compare a person to various parts of the anatomy, Lada, Moskovitch, and ZIL.

Little Boy is interested in figuring out Cyrillic; it’s one thing to hear foreign languages like French or Spanish, but they use the Latin alphabet and you can more or less sound them out by looking at the letters, but stuff like Greek and Russian add one more layer to the puzzle, and are therefore even more fun to try to decipher. Or, at least they are to me.

I do remember (with glee) the frustration expressed by the fraternity-boy lummox who accompanied some friends and me to Greece at the end of our three-month Study Abroad program back when I was in school. We got off the boat from Bari at Patras and boarded a train for Athens. He was trying to figure out all that funny writing stuff and complaining under his breath about why they didn’t have something in English. “Hey dipwad, you’re in a FRATERNITY!” Blank look. “Yeah, so?” “Greek letters not mean anything to you?” “Well, yeah, a-hole, I know they’re Greek, but I can’t read them!” Sometimes being a GDI is so sweet. We spent the next hour—“Okay, that’s a kappa, it sounds like…. ‘K’….right!; that’s omicron and it sounds like… ‘O’…very good, Mongo!; and that’s rho and it makes an….‘R’…sound, right, very nice—here’s a cookie; iota, nu, theta, omicron, sigma—Korinthos, Corinth.”

It also reminds me of a website I found one time (and can’t find now) about learning Cyrillic, written by an American who travels to Russia a lot on business. He talked about one time traveling with a group of other business-types and finally got tired of trying to get them to sound out the various words. When one of the other guys asked “Hey, what’s a “pectopah”?” he just told him it was Russian for restaurant—of course, he felt guilty when he thought about this guy thinking he could say “pectopah” and that a Russian person would know that he meant “restoran.”

Anyway, I don’t know who’s more excited about this, Jonathan or me—one of the things I have enjoyed the most about having a blog is corresponding with people outside the U.S.—and I keep suggesting things Boy could write back to him about or send Daniel but I’m a bit afraid that he’ll get tired of all my coaching and not want to keep it up. But, it’s interesting to him now, and even if he doesn’t keep up with it, maybe Mom and Dad have some new pen pals.

And in a startling development, I just now checked and see that they plugged in the Internet cord again and I am once again among the non-bored. Which means that you need to forget the first few paragraphs about running to the library, and I will go ahead and plug in my links and post this…

NOW!
posted by Terry at 10:30:00 AM