Yogurt, Bread, Italian, Books, & How the teacher in me lives on

Since I have been feeling slightly better and able to accomplish a little more during the day, I have these kicks.... sooo, I've always had them, but now I'll be sharing them with people other than Andy.  Maybe sharing my thoughts, plans, and desires (aka kicks) will inspire me to follow through with them; if not inspire, at least keep me on track so that I don't feel embarrassed when people ask about the progress of the project.

Several of you already know about my homemaking kick.  I have learned to make yogurt and Greek yogurt from scratch.  I am able to add jelly to it, and it is like the store bought yogurt.  Andy really likes it, and I feel good about making and providing for my family.  The most recent success has been homemade artisan bread.  We'll see if the dough works when we try to make homemade pizza.

For several months, I've been thinking and talking about maybe learning Italian.  Everyone we've talked with has recommended Rosetta Stone.  However, it costs about $200-250 per level; if you buy all of the levels at once, it is about $500.  Well, I didn't really learn Spanish very well when I took three years of it in high school.  So, this seems like an exorbitant amount of money to spend on a program.  I mean I would love to be hopeful and say that I am going to become fluent, meaning I'll need all three levels, but who wants to spend that much money on a hope like that.  I was thrilled when I came across a BBC website (the one in our list of websites) that allows you to learn the basics of German, French, Italian, etc. for free.  There are 12 week courses for the languages, but you can work at your own speed.  So, now Andy and I are working through the Italian course in hopes of feeling better about the cost if we decide to invest in the Rosetta Stone course.

So, now that we've decided to try to learn some of the basics of Italian from the free website, I started a whiteboard with our vocabulary words...hehehe....as I said, the teacher in me lives on....it is even multi-colored.

More recently, I've also become interested in reading books that show up on those "Best 100 Books of all time" lists.  So, I went to Half Price Books the other day and picked up several of those books.  Currently, I am reading The Prince by Machiavelli - appropriate while learning Italian!  I can promise that we won't be learning Greek when I start reading The Iliad and The Odyssey!!!  We'll leave that language to my sister, Meg, and her family.