De har flera elefanter.

"They have several elephants" is not an obviously useful sentence for Sweden, though it is chock-full of delicious cognates. Lest anyone say the Scandinavian cultures are too hard to tell apart, friends using Duolingo for Norwegian say it gives them sentences like "I am drinking on the floor," which I think we can all agree is in every way less appealing than "She has a bear." It certainly suits the flavor of Norwegian I'm descended from, though.

After years of Spanish, an occasional dalliance with French, and shaking my head from afar at German's die/das/der, I am really appreciating Swedish's lack of linguistic "gender." At some point--I gather pretty recently, as these things go--condensed from having a masculine/feminine/neuter like German, into just having the indefinite articles ("a/an" in English) ett and en: ett äpple, en elefant. That dictates how you form definites ("the"): äpplet, elefanten. And the word "it": det, den. (I don't know which "it" you use when you don't already know what the object is, but I'm sure it's something.)

However it got there, det is actually pronounced sort of like "day," but of course that's the natural pronunciation of de. So instead, de is pronounced..."domm."

Maybe "m" wasn't pulling its weight and they had to give it some extra work to do.

everyone has their story.

I've spent an abnormal amount of time at the Apple Store this past six weeks or so, dealing with both my personal and work laptops. The personal machine needed a new battery, which in modern MacBooks is a single piece with the keyboard and trackpad; this was actually pretty awesome because four years of constant use left both the keyboard and trackpad pretty beat up. The work laptop is limping along, and I can use it, but I've warned IT I will probably end up begging them for a less haunted machine.

The guy who helped me with the haunted work laptop, though. Nice guy, in his 20s, who besides working at the Apple Store, is not just in a band, he's a drummer, and has done some sound engineering.

(I'm sometimes not good at not having conversations, and I opened this up by being startled when the idiots running the sound system dropped the microphone a few times with the volume about double what it should have been, in a space that is fundamentally a 2-story tall empty concrete box. I mentioned compressors and limiters and we were off to the races.)

He loves model trains, and he's far and away the youngest officer of his model train club (association? I don't remember) in many, many decades.

He makes and sells various train parts, using a 3-D printer. He'd like to build a business around it, but needs to buy injection molds, which are expensive.

His uncle knows a Japanese angel investor who loves model trains, and might be excited to provide the capital. If I were that investor, I would be very, very happy for the all-too-rare opportunities to kickstart model-train-related startups.

I live in a very strange place.

sköldpaddan dricker vatten.

I'm having fun with Swedish. Our next-door neighbors are a very nice Danish couple, so I decided to check out Danish on Duolingo as well. (I was about to write "as a lark," but that sort of represents everything I do with my spare time.) There's a certain level of mutual intelligibility among Swedish/Danish/Norwegian, so I thought I'd see for myself. It's interesting, of course: the words for "man" and "woman" are cognate (man/mand and kvinna/kvinde), but "boy" and "girl" are not (pojke/dreng and flicka/pigin).

(I had to stop both Danish and Norwegian: all the words are too close together for me to keep track, and I also don't trust Duolingo's pronunciation across the three.)

I bestirred myself to actually look up Swedish's indefinite articles (translated as English "a/an"), en and ett. One Swedish teacher writes that there used to be three, formerly labeled masculine/feminine/neuter, but then they simplified and now about 75% of things are en, and the remainder ett. These come in handy for forming the definite article form ("the"), so ett äpple becomes äpplet, and en björn becomes björnen.

The rules get more complicated with plurals and then definite plurals, depending on the final vowel (or occasionally consonant?) in the word. Duolingo doesn't help with this: it's fun, but it's best not to confuse it with learning a language, exactly, since it neither focuses on useful phrases, nor explains rules nor grammar. I mean, do I know more Swedish now than I ever expected to? Sure, and I love learning stuff. But, Duolingo clearly has algorithms driving much of its learning, and may have topped its previous best sentence:

Hon har en älg. / "She has a moose."

With a new contender:

Björnen tycker om vegetarianen. / "The bear likes the vegetarian."

Though once I get off the plane in Stockholm, I will definitely look for a chance to use either of those.

books books books

I came in just shy of finishing 100 books in 2018. It wasn't a goal, but I was surprised how much I did read, and some of it took a while, like The Tide, A Perfect Red, and perhaps the longest-running, "great for small increments at bedtime," Cuisine and Empire: Cooking In World History. So far, nothing compares to Moby-Dick for great literature to put me to sleep. (Robinson Crusoe might, but I couldn't get past the first couple paragraphs. Maybe 2019 sees me trying again.)

I started in on audiobooks a bit, for the times when I can't focus my eyes, or I'm doing something else (driving, dog-walking) and need something different than podcasts. The clear winners here were The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft, and various Conan the Barbarian writings by Robert E. Howard. Lovecraft, for all his reputation of writing in the vein of "O, but it is so cosmically horrible I cannot describe it," actually goes ahead and describes it, quite well. The Conan works are also pleasantly surprising, and once you adjust for the era and medium--he was writing in the 30s for pulps like Weird Tales and Oriental Stories, not angling for a Pulitzer--it's easy to see where Howard's avowed feminism shows up. I'm also revisiting Christopher Moore's work as audiobooks, starting with Practical Demonkeeping.

Reading in 2018 was a path for growth, but also an escape from anxiety, and work, and work-provoked anxiety. I've got a lot of stuff to do this year, internally and externally. We'll see what happens.

as one does.

It's Christmas Eve, so naturally we spent it, variously:

• Working at REI.
• Taking the dog to the groomer.
• Retrieving the dog from the groomer.
• Playing Cthulhu Wars.
• Bringing the home network back after a power blip.
• Making and eating empanadas.
• Watching Moana (or a big chunk of it).

This sounds much smoother than it was, since the boy was pretty broken today, lots of moods and crabbiness and melodrama. It's been a rough school year for him, with a pretty much non-stop headache of varying intensity and migraine-ness; though he may also just have been hungry.

The power blip was weird. It was in that sweet spot where it was long enough to make equipment stop working, but not quite long enough for it to power down all the way, leaving it in some weird half-on state. A couple years ago I got fed up enough to put some money into Ubiquiti UniFi gear for the house--a good investment considering we use the Internet more or less every waking hour--and its display showed one of the wireless access points (WAP or AP) as disconnected, which was weird since it was on. I power-cycled it, but noticed some other wireless devices still weren't working. It turned out I had to power-cycle the network switch first, then the AP. The switch's only active data is a Major Arcanum called the Address Resolution Protocol, which mostly Just Works™, but if it's corrupted somehow, nothing works, and it will not-work in irritating, obscure ways.

J was being a jerk while I was trying to fix it, but I was reflecting later how impossible it is for him to fathom the gap between his technical knowledge and mine. Some of it is the decades of experience; some of it is that biodad is more likely to get angry at things than learn how to fix them. It's just that there's no catalog of the stuff I know, and if there were, it would be SO, SO BORING. So why shouldn't he say "have you tried turning the Chromebook off and on again?" while I'm telling him the Chromebook and Chromecast need to be on the same wireless network? The Chromecast says "maybe your wireless router is messed up! maybe you should power-cycle it?" and it was more than he could do just then to listen when I said I did that already.

Work is closed until January 3rd, so I decided to spend some of the time learning more fiddle tunes, feeling like I can learn them now without making my technique too much worse. It's a lot of Irish/Scottish/(bluegrass/old-time/Canadian) tunes, which all sound very similar and take a lot of repetition to differentiate, though it's easier to remember them when learning them to play them:

• Whiskey Before Breakfast
• The Red-Haired Boy
• Drowsy Maggie (not sure yet if I'm up to this one)
• The Humours of Glendart
• The Kid On The Mountain
• Polska efter Pelle Fors (which I couldn't play 3 months ago! go, me!)

Scandinavian music is (a) harder, and (b) mostly named descriptive things like "Wedding Polska" and it's just hard to get a handle on. As regards (a), my favorite is a Swedish fiddler saying "Yes, that dance is in 3/4, but the second beat comes faster."

The dog is really soft now, though.

easier than it used to be.

I had a go at the first 4 bars of Bach's Cello Suite #1, and while my teacher was very kind, suggested that I save it for later on down the road.

Duolingo has been fun for Swedish, so I decided to start in on French as well--only half-jokingly as prep for our eventual emigration to Canada. I'm developing a theory that if you've got a knack for languages, they get easier to learn as you know more of them. Anna, for example, studied Arabic and can often make some sense out of Hebrew (both Semitic languages, though not every speaker is ready to hear that). She's an absurdly gifted language learner--she can have conversations in Arabic, Russian, and Turkish, and describes Arabic as "not that hard"--but even the rest of us can learn to see and hear the connections.

In high school it took a single French class to decide that with my solid Spanish, I would find French classes boring for the first long while. After "Enchantée" I figured I could just learn it whenever I needed it. And indeed French is not wildly different from Spanish, as these things go.

(Growing up, I learned that "the Romance languages" were Spanish, French, Italian, and then Romanian. There are dozens! They're not even all defunct, by a long shot.)

Swedish is getting real now. The thing to know about Duolingo is that there's a lot of different kinds of repetition, and also it is partly auto-generated, leading to some not-quite-sensible sentences. I unlocked Duolingo's Animals vocabulary section, which gave me:

• Det är en älg. - "It is a moose."
• Hon har en björn. - "She has a bear."

Both of which pretty much made my day.

"Älg" is pronounced suspiciously like "elk," which was a fun project:

• Why is it translated as "moose"?
• Are there even moose in Europe?
• What do they call the thing that I call an "elk"?

It's a pretty straightforward case of early Europeans going "hey, that looks vaguely like something I know, I'll just call it that." (Moose: established on every sub-Arctic continent. Elk/wapiti: North America and...Northeast Asia?)

Unlike when I was on a boat tour in Chile and the guide said there was a coipú swimming nearby. My dictionary was no help, but I watched it and thought "pretty sure that's a nutria." The Spanish borrowed the native Mapuche word, because... nutria in Spanish already meant "otter."

Shit like this is why Latin scientific names were immediately so important.

there's an idea.

Yo-Yo Ma did this great NPR Tiny Desk Concert where he plays the first movement of Bach's Cello Suites, and explains that was the first thing he learned on the cello.

"Well," I think. "That's interesting."

I've been learning Swedish using the Duolingo iPhone app.

(Why Swedish, when I'm a quarter Norwegian? It was a Swedish neo-folk song that sent me off learning the violin. Norwegian music has too much accordion. Also, the food is better.)

It's goofy to learn a language without practicing conversation, but for what it is, it seems to be decent. It has you translate stuff back and forth in different ways, and ramps up to listening and vocabulary-building. It's an incremental process. I guess I'll start in on French, to help us emigrate to Canada when the time comes.

(Swedish is awesome, by the way. It helps that I know enough about languages to understand what I'm looking at: instead of a definite article, like English "the" or Spanish la, the noun inflects, so en kvinna is "a woman," but kvinnan is "the woman." Old hat to you poor sods who took Latin, of course, which does this in spades.)

It got me thinking, though, that if 4-year old Yo-Yo Ma could learn Cello Suite #1 a measure at a time, maybe I could too. Bach has always been a favorite of transcriptionists everywhere, and it's not like transposing across the violin family is at all difficult. And those first few lines, if you take some deep breaths, aren't super hard.

One measure at a time.