Wilma update

Well, fortunately I did turn out to be strong enough to push Wilma into the garage with David steering, but he did get out and help part of the time. So she spent a warm and cozy night in the garage, but Tuesday morning she still didn't start and David had to trudge to the train again.

After work, David bought a jumper box thingy for restarting the battery in the hopes it would do the trick. We charged it up all night, he tried it this morning, and after half-a-dozen tries, she finally started! So David got to drive to work today, hurrah! And she started again for the way home and seemed to be running amazingly well. Still, David picked up some more parts and tonight he replaced her spark plugs and distributor cap. I either didn't know, or forgot, that David knew his way around a car engine and was thoroughly impressed at his usefulness. And he cooks, too!

It's a good thing we have a garage to put the car in, because it is COLD. It will be in the 20s tonight and it sounds even colder in Celsius - 5 degrees below zero! (Naturally, I don't expect any sympathy from my Minnesotan readers on this one.) They said on the news that it's not actually unusual for this time of year, and it only feels unseasonably cold because we've had a mild autumn so far. Whatever, it's cold.

Oh, and I suppose I should briefly report on my German class yesterday - we mainly learned numbers and dates (including centuries, BC, AD, and such), which is quite helpful since I'm mainly trying to read history! I remember looking at labels in museums during our Germany trip last year and being frustrated that I hadn't taken the time to learn whether vor Christus or nach Christus meant A.D. (it's the second one).

We spent the last half hour of class upstairs in the Oxford Language Centre Library, learning about the resources available for us to use. It was pretty impressive - they have materials for 140 languages, and for the most common ones like French and German they have not just books but audio tapes, CD-ROM lessons, foreign movies on video, DVDs, current newspapers, magazines, and live satellite TV from several different countries.

We also learned from the librarian that our German teacher is pretty impressive - she has authored several major books on German grammar and has won an award from the German government for her language teaching!

Our assignment for next week is to learn 100 of the most commonly used German words (she gave us a list). I like the efficiency of that. They are mostly small words like "until, since, so, either, first, except," etc. Just in case you ever think a German person is swearing at you, it might be helpful to know that damit means "so that."