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Zero Gravity Café; General Chat Thread
Topic Started: Dec 12 2006, 08:52 AM (5,603 Views)
Intrepid
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Fleet Captain
So I was watching the Weather Channel and it looks like bad weather in your part of town TribbleMom. We just recovered from some icy roads and it looks like we're getting more of that sleet/rain/ice mix.

Give me some of that fluffy snow. The kind that piles up. The kind you can make snowmen with.

I just got home from watching my niece play basketball. The little pipsqueak.
Didn't think I'd get into it but before you knew it, I was taunting the other team.
"DEFENSE".... "GO GET HER"......"WHOA... THAT WAS FOUL! WHEN DID YOU GRADUATE FROM REFEREE SCHOOL?"....."GO PITT"........ "YOU GOT MUD ON YO FACE, YOU BIG DISGRACE, KICKIN' YOUR CAN ALL OVER THE PLACE. WE WILL WE WILL ROCK YOU".... *clap* *clap* *stomp*

Then some evil 5'7" moose roughed up my sweet little 5'2" niece. I almost charged the court.

OMG :blush: I gotta stop getting emotionally involved in these games. :lol:

Gotta go to bed, I'm exhausted. :lol:
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Sirus Ramsey
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Rock on Intrepid! It's so easy to get drawn into it isn't it? Especially if you're blood related to the players. The rain came back on Saturday here, and I was getting all bummed out again because it seemed like it was going to last for days, but Sunday it was clear, although a bit chilly, so I hit the trail again. I'm working on getting some morning kindergarten hours now so I can get back into Chinese classes. Spring is just around the corner!!
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Intrepid
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^^^

Hi Sirus. How's your Chinese coming along? I'll bet you're as fluent as the native themselves by now. Do you find yourself speaking Chinese with an American accent? ;) I've heard such claims before from some friends of mine who can speak Chinese.. struck me as odd at one time but that's just what I hear.

Would it be rainy season in that part of the world now? Or no? I forget.

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Sirus Ramsey
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How have you been Intrepid? We have to get some chat time in again soon. The Chinese is better now than it ever has been, but it's going to be a little longer before I'm fluent. I took a break from school around Christmas and will be going back again in a month or so. Since then, I've been doing a lot of self study. My reading is getting a lot better, but I'm afraid I don't have much practice speaking. That will change though once I get back in school and hanging out with classmates again. I have been told that I don't have an accent, but often people are just being polite, so it's hard to tell. I have heard some bad accents though. It takes some time to really get some of the pronunciations just right because we don't have an equivalent in English. For example the Q at the beginning of a word is somewhere between a "ch" and a "ts" as in "cheese" and "tsunami" although the exact pronunciation changes depending where you are. As English pronunciation changes between England, America, and Austrailia. It is indeed the rainy season. Although it is rarely not the rainy season in Taipei. Taipei gets more rain than anywhere I have ever been. Even San Francisco. It's raining right now. It rained yesterday. It's going to rain tomorrow. Oops, sorry. A bit of the English lesson found its way in the post. Getting tired. Must sleep. Talk to you cats later.

:chickendance:
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24thcenstfan
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^^

Bug is going to China this summer on a missionary trip and has been taking Chinese language lessons too. :yes: Here's a post of hers that you might find interest in. LINK
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TribbleMom
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Intrepid
Feb 24 2008, 05:20 PM
So I was watching the Weather Channel and it looks like bad weather in your part of town TribbleMom.

Yeah, the mountains just a hour's drive to the west are really getting pounded. Fortunately on my side of town it isn't amounting to much accumulation. It's snowing tonight, and supposed to stop around 7:00AM ... just to make the morning commute that much more fun.

Sirus was talking about foreign languages and accents. That made me remember a French course I took in college with a gal who had a really thick, deep Southern drawl. Nothing can slaughter French like a Southern drawl. :blink: Par-lay voo Frawn-say? :covereyes:
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Sirus Ramsey
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That's it!!!

The worst accent I ever heard with Chinese was American Southern. I just remembered now that you said that Tribble!
:lol:

It was on my flight back to visit my family last summer. The pilot, bless him was trying to say "thank you" in Chinese "Xie xie" pronouned see-ay see-ay roughly. There's kind of a half "sh" with the "s" sound but he said it "shay shay" with a southern accent. I had an instant :rolleyes:

Foreign languages are hard, especially if you've never seriously studied one before. It's a lot of information that you have to memorize, and it's even worse with Chinese because of the writing system.
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TribbleMom
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^^^
And aren't there a tremendous number of dialects as well?
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24thcenstfan
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Hey, quit making fun of us Southerners! :lol:
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Sirus Ramsey
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There's a dialect for about every providence in China. The ones I know of are Guangdonghua (Cantonese), Wu, Fujianhua (also known as Taiwanese) and of course Mandarin but there are at least a couple dozen more. :o
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24thcenstfan
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Who you lookin' at? :alien2:



:lol:
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24thcenstfan
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Btw, Subaru turned out to be an automated spam bot/harvester. So no need to welcome him if he shows back up. ;)

I deleted the account.
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TribbleMom
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24thcenstfan
Feb 26 2008, 05:58 AM
Hey, quit making fun of us Southerners! :lol:

No insult intended, 24. I happen to be quite fond of the Southern drawl ... in English; it just sounds very odd in foreign languages. My partner is originally from Mississippi, and there's a lot to be said for Southern charm.

Actually, my favorite writer is from the South (Virginia). I just love Rita Mae Brown's books and the colorful, descriptive phrases that seem to flow so naturally from Southern writers.

Hey, Intrepid, the weather report I saw last night looked like you were getting a good deal of snow. How bad was the storm?
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24thcenstfan
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TribbleMom
Mar 1 2008, 09:40 AM
24thcenstfan
Feb 26 2008, 05:58 AM
Hey, quit making fun of us Southerners! :lol:

No insult intended, 24. I happen to be quite fond of the Southern drawl ... in English; it just sounds very odd in foreign languages. My partner is originally from Mississippi, and there's a lot to be said for Southern charm.


I didn't take offense. I was just joshing you. :goof:

There are some accents that even I can't understand and I grew up here. :lol:

Quote:
 
Actually, my favorite writer is from the South (Virginia).  I just love Rita Mae Brown's books and the colorful, descriptive phrases that seem to flow so naturally from Southern writers.

Don't think I have read anything by her. Is there a particular piece that you would recommend?

I'm soon going to read, "Beam Me Up, Scotty".
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TribbleMom
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24thcenstfan
Mar 1 2008, 10:08 AM
Quote:
 
Actually, my favorite writer is from the South (Virginia).  I just love Rita Mae Brown's books and the colorful, descriptive phrases that seem to flow so naturally from Southern writers.

Don't think I have read anything by her. Is there a particular piece that you would recommend?

My favorite book of hers is one of her 1999 books called "Six of One." (Comes from the phrase "six of one, half a dozen of the other," meaning that they're really the same). It follows 2 sisters from childhood to becoming grandmothers by looking at snippets of their lives through the times of Prohibition and WWII and so on. They're really vibrant characters who are strongly based on her own mother and aunt. It was followed by 2 sequel book called "Bingo" and "Loose Lips," which I found enjoyable, but not quite as much as the first. I find that every few years I want to pull "Six of One" off my bookshelf and re-read it.

Another book that I enjoyed was titled "Southern Discomfort," one of her earliest novels from 1983.

And then she started writing a mystery series in which pets play a large part in helping their humans solve the murders. You get to hear the pets' thoughts and see things from their viewpoint, as well as from the humans'. Those are listed under the "Mrs. Murphy Books" (for the main cat character), and I would strongly recommend reading them in order of publication (which is kindly listed on the website) because, although each story stands on its own, there are continuing characters throughout, and it helps to know the character's backstory as the books progress. The first, "Wish You Were Here," was published in 1990, and I believe there are 16 in that series now.

Rita Mae participates in the sport of foxhunting, so she branched into mysteries that involve a group of people who are foxhunters. Those are the "Sister Jane Foxhunting" books. As an animal lover, many of her books contain animal characters, or people who are strongly connected to animals.

Here's a link to Rita Mae's wbesite:
http://www.ritamaebrown.com/content/index.asp

This following bit of her biography gives a good example of her writing style:

If you are reading this, it means you too managed to be born. How we come into this world affects our experience of the world, and I hasten to add that none of us asked for the adventure. However, once here on earth, it is often delightful and occasionally destructive.

My entrance occurred on November 28, 1944, and the cats, hounds and horses of the world rejoiced. The humans didn’t give a d@mn. What do they know?

Born almost on the Mason-Dixon Line, three miles north in Hanover, Pennsylvania, I have had to live down this three-mile error all my life. Nonetheless, Hanover is home to Hanover Shoe Farm, what I think is 4,000 acres and 1,000 Standardbreds. If not, it should be. I arrived at the right place even if it is Yankee territory. Technically, therefore, I am a Yankee. I’ve been called worse.

(Rita Mae makes her home near Charlottesville, Virginia, with numerous cats, dogs, horses, and a variety of other animals).
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24thcenstfan
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TribbleMom
Mar 2 2008, 10:25 AM
24thcenstfan
Mar 1 2008, 10:08 AM
Quote:
 
Actually, my favorite writer is from the South (Virginia).  I just love Rita Mae Brown's books and the colorful, descriptive phrases that seem to flow so naturally from Southern writers.

Don't think I have read anything by her. Is there a particular piece that you would recommend?

My favorite book of hers is one of her 1999 books called "Six of One." (Comes from the phrase "six of one, half a dozen of the other," meaning that they're really the same). It follows 2 sisters from childhood to becoming grandmothers by looking at snippets of their lives through the times of Prohibition and WWII and so on. They're really vibrant characters who are strongly based on her own mother and aunt. It was followed by 2 sequel book called "Bingo" and "Loose Lips," which I found enjoyable, but not quite as much as the first. I find that every few years I want to pull "Six of One" off my bookshelf and re-read it.

Another book that I enjoyed was titled "Southern Discomfort," one of her earliest novels from 1983.

And then she started writing a mystery series in which pets play a large part in helping their humans solve the murders. You get to hear the pets' thoughts and see things from their viewpoint, as well as from the humans'. Those are listed under the "Mrs. Murphy Books" (for the main cat character), and I would strongly recommend reading them in order of publication (which is kindly listed on the website) because, although each story stands on its own, there are continuing characters throughout, and it helps to know the character's backstory as the books progress. The first, "Wish You Were Here," was published in 1990, and I believe there are 16 in that series now.

Rita Mae participates in the sport of foxhunting, so she branched into mysteries that involve a group of people who are foxhunters. Those are the "Sister Jane Foxhunting" books. As an animal lover, many of her books contain animal characters, or people who are strongly connected to animals.

Here's a link to Rita Mae's wbesite:
http://www.ritamaebrown.com/content/index.asp

This following bit of her biography gives a good example of her writing style:

If you are reading this, it means you too managed to be born. How we come into this world affects our experience of the world, and I hasten to add that none of us asked for the adventure. However, once here on earth, it is often delightful and occasionally destructive.

My entrance occurred on November 28, 1944, and the cats, hounds and horses of the world rejoiced. The humans didn’t give a d@mn. What do they know?

Born almost on the Mason-Dixon Line, three miles north in Hanover, Pennsylvania, I have had to live down this three-mile error all my life. Nonetheless, Hanover is home to Hanover Shoe Farm, what I think is 4,000 acres and 1,000 Standardbreds. If not, it should be. I arrived at the right place even if it is Yankee territory. Technically, therefore, I am a Yankee. I’ve been called worse.

(Rita Mae makes her home near Charlottesville, Virginia, with numerous cats, dogs, horses, and a variety of other animals).

Quote:
 
And then she started writing a mystery series in which pets play a large part in helping their humans solve the murders.

I have read a lot of mysteries over the years. I'm pretty sure I checked out one or some of those books and just decided not to read them for one reason or another. The name didn't register with me though.

I'll check her out again sometime.

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24thcenstfan
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We are getting lots of :raining: today. Its raining :cat: and :dog: right now.

I think I just saw a :dancingcow: fly by too. ;)
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Intrepid
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Fleet Captain
:lol: That cow was me in my superhero uniform. SuperCow!

It's raining up here too. It was pretty bad this weekend with the ice/snow/ rain combination.

Looks like they're calling for it again.
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Sirus Ramsey
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Well, the sun finally came out the last few days, although the forcast is for rain this weekend. Unfotunately, I'm still a bit sniffly so no biking, but I feel 50 times better than I did yesterday and 100 better than Monday. I think I'm pretty tough until I come down with a cold. :lol: Then I'm all "I wish someone would make me soup." :dramaqueen:

Listening to some Muddy Waters right now, getting ready for the afteroon/evening classes. I just started teaching this morning class last week. It's a very good thing trust me. I'm really lucky to be here with my cousin, but I've had quite the fight with myself over the last few months with drinking. My cousin John is a great guy, but he's a souse. I don't think I've seen him go a day without a drink in the last year and a half. (Don't tell him I said that!) ;)

I gave it up last summer, and kind of slipped back in around wintertime. Mostly because I was sad missing Tina, and my boss has been short on money for the last few months, so the pay has been slow and it's still behind now. Hence the new job. He says it will all be coming very soon, but it's been a long couple of months let me tell you. Not knowing how much money you will have and when really changes your spending habits. He is a good friend though as well, and I trust him. I know he's not the kind of guy to rip off someone who stuck with him through the storm. He has lost a couple teachers because of this already.

I have to say the stress of it is getting to me though. Got taxes coming up, student loan payments, and plane tickets for the trip home this summer.

Speaking of which, who's up for a KOT convention in the Hilton in Vegas? I tried to get this ball rolling before, I know, but I think I can wrangle at least Intrepid, Tribble and 24 into making the trip. Who's in? :bluebanana:
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TribbleMom
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Sirus Ramsey
Mar 4 2008, 10:33 PM
Speaking of which, who's up for a KOT convention in the Hilton in Vegas? I tried to get this ball rolling before, I know, but I think I can wrangle at least Intrepid, Tribble and 24 into making the trip. Who's in? :bluebanana:

I could make it, but probably for only one night. Sometimes I still need to limit my "fun" spending.

Looks like Sirus is about the only one enjoying sun right now (and well-deserved after all that rain). We're getting more snow today, but it shouldn't amount to a lot. However, the forecasters are starting to say that next week could develop one of our infamous March snowstorms of a foot or more.
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