An Event and an Achievement

Kathy pointed me in the right direction to Mr Toast's Blog and the 1st Annual Christmas Tea in Aspen Colorado.

I need to be there by 3pm local time, and it wraps up at 10pm so I figured that my fairy godmother would ensure that unlike Cinderalla that I would be back in time for work tomorrow and kit me out with something absolutely magical to wear and arrange the transportation too.

She came up trumps, the fairy godmother (FG), I have a black velvet gown and warm red velvet wrap which matches the shoes. Apparently I can get concorde direct to Aspen and arrive in time even leaving after work. FG has also arranged for hair and make-up to be done on the flight so I am going to look stunningly gorgeous. I love having a FG, and am looking forward to meeting up with some blogging friends.

I have always wanted to visit Colorado, it is just a shame that I won't have any time spare to look around and see the beauty. At least I will have a fun time meeting all the blogging faces I see are attending.

Yesterday saw the end of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month (all you had to do was write 50,000 words - simples), I had fun with this but it was incredibly hard work and not helped by me having a crisis of confidence a week in resulting in me starting again from the beginning (though I have kept my original 20,000+ words in case I want to revisit it. I tried to do as much as I could daily but even though the daily target was 1666 when it was hard to even think of 50 words to add to a story it was difficult enough. I took a week offline (except for blogging) to concentrate on what I had and my final tally stood at 56,211. I could have had more but I edited a lot of rubbish out in the end and felt it didn't matter as long as it was over the 50,000.

Time to put the writing tools away for a short while, think about other more pressing things..

Yesterday's Post and More Ideas

I got a few comments on the learning Cornish post of yesterday, some positive some less so and each valid for their reasons. My main reason is because it is relatively cheap, keeps me occupied and since I am moving to Cornwall is in keeping with where I am living.

If I moved to France, Italy or Germany I would do the same, try to integrate to be part of the community and the only difference is that Cornish like Welsh is a regional language and signs etc would be bilingual. Dickiebo quite rightfully pointed out that this is in many cases just a means of jobs for the boys which I agree with but I also believe that there are too many instances where English/British individuality is being erased by eurobureacracy and that we often give up things of value which we should hold onto; whether Cornish fits better into this category remains to be seen but I hope it does and that it grows.

So where is this post going? Well Hadriana came back from London having visited the Language Fair (how I wished I had known this was on) and was saying about learning Latin. My old University (can one say that about the Open University?) got some government money for putting up learning materials freely available to all, which I remembered included a basic Latin course and I posted the link to Hadriana the link is here if anyone else is interested, as well as Latin it has more modern languages, French, German and Spanish as well as other snippets of learning materials in History, Art, English etc and all of it absolutely free.

So if you have every fancied having a look, learning a new skill or just browsing for free materials then please follow the link.

If you know of any more links, please let me know.

....and on a sad note, exactly one calendar month today will be Christmas Day ... sigh