Facing deadlines

Next Sunday my book club is discussing Robert Frost's collection, and next Wednesday the history group is discussing Ten Lost Years.  So I'm anxious to finish my complete Frost collection by Sunday, and Ten Lost Years in the next week.  To tell the truth, I work pretty well under pressure.  Reading Frost's poetry gives me a desire to write my own poems. (Please don't laugh!)

Saturday I went to a late-season barbecue Margo from Russia was hosting. (She warned us to wear jackets against the cold.) She lives a bit north of Bathurst & Steeles, and getting there was an adventure!  There were a dozen people there.  She got a game going where everyone had to name a fruit or vegetable with the same initial as his first name.  All I could think of was "juniper berry," though I don't know if that fruit is used for anything but flavouring gin.

Sunday afternoon I went to a "town hall" discussing electoral reform, hosted by MP Adam Vaughan in City Hall council chambers.  I left a printout of the post I uploaded here last October with my proposal for a mixed proportional representation scheme.  Here's a pet peeve:  When people sit in those plush benches for the spectators, you might think they'd go to the middle, but half of them just sit down next to the edges, so I have to step past them to get a seat!

At opera rehearsal, Beatrice added some makeshift taijiquan to our warmups!

Duolingo can be odd.  I was recently learning some romantic pickup lines in Portuguese, and one of them translates as "If I could see you nude, I'd die happy!" (Is that what Brazilian girls want to hear?) Another is, "I'm not a pirate, but I've found a treasure!" I also learned an expression that translates as "helpless as a blind man in a shootout," except that they translated it as "helpless as a nun on honeymoon"!  Just today I learned Portuguese sentences that translate as "She sleeps in an empty room," and "You don't exist!" I'm now officially 27% "fluent." To tell the truth, there seem to be a lot of Portuguese words that are easy to learn:  guess what "companhia" means?

Another thing that bugs me:  the Duolingo logo for the section teaching about the verb "to be" is a skull.  Sure, Hamlet does say "To be or not to be..." and hold a skull, but he does it in different scenes! (Very persnickety of me, I know...)