Saturday, February 28, 2015

when the cat's away...

The Excellent Wife is away for two weeks at a Polish-language immersion experience at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. (Just finding that link was nearly impossible for your monolingual correspondent!*) She had not even left the house before I had turned the dining room into a wheelbuilding shop.


By next week, I expect to have the bikestand in there. I promise to put down a dropcloth.

===

*Back in the 90's, when I was working at Muhlenberg Medical Center in Plainfield (back when there WAS a Muhlenberg Medical Center in Plainfield), one of the psychiatry techs told me the following joke, which has more than a nickel's worth of truth in it: he said, "A person who speaks two languages is called bilingual, and a person who speaks many languages is called a polyglot, but a person who speaks only one language is called an American."

3 comments:

  1. Oh man I wish I had the time and tools to have a go a that! Actually when you think of it, how is lacing a wheel so much different than sitting in the living room knitting a jumper? I think there's a bit of domestic discrimination going on when we get a hard time for fixing our bikes inside.

    In Australia the answer to that joke would definitely be "An Australian" But actually it's wrong. Maybe it's part of the ethnocentric thinking but actually many, many Australians are at least bilingual, Yolngu people I work with know and speak multiple languages... It's possible that it's mostly only Anglo Australians who are monolingual.

    ReplyDelete
  2. David - When I'm sitting in the living room knitting, there's no possibility that I'm going to spill wheel assembly oil into the carpet, or lose a bunch of nipples that my wife will find with her bare feet when she's half asleep.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True, my wife doesn't even knit and can smell oil from 3 meters away. Buts it's just the dang injustice of it. :) enjoy your space and may yor timber floors remain unblemished

      Delete