Travel Gear

¡Hola! When I left off last week, I was near the end of Unit 2, which meant a lot of review work and another upcoming milestone. Would this milestone slay me as the first one had? Would I finally “get” the difference between morado (purple), marrón (brown), gris (gray), conoso (gray) and conosa (gray)?

¡Hola mis amigas! This week, I was greeted by an instructional video that started the minute I signed into TOTALe. It gave a great overview of what the different parts of the course entailed, and how to navigate the various sections…and I couldn’t help but wonder why it didn’t show the first time I started the program! Of course, the likely culprit is my slow satellite connection of doom; it is totally possible that the screen tried to show when I first started the program five lessons ago, but was reset in all of the screen refreshes. Ah, country living……

¡Hola Amigos! Even though I had the new Dan Brown book, The Missing Symbol, delivered wirelessly to my Kindle DX this week, and even though I have spent every spare moment I could trying to sneak in a few chapters, I still managed to get a good chunk of my TOTALe lesson done. Yay me! Now I can tell you that “Me llamo Judie,” which will probably not sound as elegant as Julia when pronounced properly, since the J’s in Spanish are essentially H’s. Hoolia verses Hoodie…guess which one wins? 😉

As you will recall, this week started with me being quite frustrated when I had miserably failed the Milestone at the end of Unit One. I was also concerned about the empty checkboxes that I was seeing on my Unit 1 progress bar, but I figured I would get things straightened out — eventually. Tuesday morning, I received quite a bit of encouragement from an unexpected source…

Oh this week was harrrrrrrd. Let’s see…when we last left off my goal was to get through four more lessons this week, and be up to number seven. Well guess what? There is no seven, and it basically took me all week to get through lesson four. Maybe I should have paid more attention to the way the TOTALe program is set up, but better late than never. Evidently the lessons are broken into Units, and Unit One (at least) is broken into four major sections, each composed of separate lessons. The sections start off easily enough, and I got…

Today marks one week since I began learning Spanish with the Rosetta Stone TOTALe program, and here comes the part that you all have been waiting for – where I smugly tell you that I am now completely fluent in all things Spanish, that I am totally confident in my foreign language speaking ability, and that I am ready to go to Mexico and take up with the locals…right? Okay, obviously I’m not. And it would be completely ridiculous for anyone to expect that. But I am three full lessons closer to being fluent than I was when I started.

I just recently got back from a business trip to Reston, VA.  Along with me I had meant to take the pillow I’m reviewing today, but for some reason it did not make it into my bag.  Fortunately for me, my flight wasn’t that long. When I go to Tennessee for my holiday in the Smokies, I fully intend to make sure that the TravelRest Pillow is in my bag. This is what the TravelRest Pillow looks like when it’s not in use.  Unlike most of those horseshoe shaped pillows, the TravelRest is inflatable.  When you’re not using it, the…