Hello Lazy Busy Summer

It has been a while since I’ve written here and I will endeavor to justify my silence.

Let us just start with the fact that it has been an irresistible kitten season for several of my friends:

Obviously, I have inveigled myself wherever possible into their presence:

Even to the point of kitten-napping!  But just for a night to give an earlier arrival a break:

The second distraction from sitting on my tush writing the Great American Novel, has been the reclamation of our balconies!  After months, no, years of de- and reconstruction, we can make use of our outdoor spaces again.  Woo hoo! We are vigorously trying to catch up on hospitality owed.  Also, in related news, we have 2 ~count ’em 2~ functional bathrooms and they even look pretty nice at this point.

After pouring the last of our Raki down the throats of visiting Turks on Saturday night, we had a tourist day ourselves meeting up with friends in Genova for lunch.  While it was great fun to see them and catch up and all that, oh Shanghai Market have I missed you:

But in case it seems I’ve gone completely visceral, this (not your average Summer Reading) is what is fascinating my mind right now.  Does the language we think in affect how we think?  Another piece in the multi-cultural communication puzzle.  Now I want to know more about the 1st languages of the people I know.  Do I sound accusative because English is agentive or does she know she sounds evasive because Spanish is not?  And what does gender in language say about a culture’s attitude towards human gender?  Intrigued, aren’t you?  I thought you would be.

There: pictures of kittens, a little 3rd rate food porn, and a bit of linguistic relativity.  The interwebs in a nutshell, just for you.