weather

I spent academic year 1992-1993 at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. For those who don't know, Winnipeg is pretty much due north of Minneapolis. When you see a weather map of the US with temperature contours, there's always a dip in the upper Midwest, and if you follow that dip across the Canadian border, it's centered on Winnipeg. Winnipeg has four seasons: four months of mild summer, six months of cold winter, and a month each of spring and fall. The year I was there, the temperature dropped below freezing some time in October or November, reached -40° (the point where Fahrenheit and Celsius agree) one night, and didn't get above freezing for an instant until March or April; there was still snow in the shadows of large trees when we danced the sun up on May Day. Which is sorta nice: there isn't the repeated thaw-and-freeze cycle that turns pavement to pot-holes in more-temperate places, and the snow was mostly still white in March. People adapt: the downtown shopping district is connected by underground tunnels so you can shop all day without stepping outdoors, and the University campus is likewise connected by underground tunnels so I could go to my office, the library, the cafeteria, and classes without putting on my coat. Many bus stops are enclosed and heated, and even in 1992 every bus stop had a phone number you could call telling you when the next bus in each direction would be there, so you could plan to get there a minute or two before.

On Jan. 23, the outside temperature in NYC was above freezing, but I don't think that has happened since. It snowed, about a foot, on Jan. 25, and that snow is still white (albeit crusty from a brief period of "wintry mix"). The temperature is forecast to edge up to freezing at mid-day for Candlemas and the next two days, then not again until at least Valentine's Day; we have single-digit-Fahrenheit lows most nights. Last night the bedtime dog-walk was at 5°F, which is -15° in civilized units. Although it wasn't windy, so it felt about the same as the breezier afternoon dog-walk. This sort of cold is not un-heard-of in NYC, but it's rare.

At my mother's home in Greenville, SC, they're getting several inches of snow today.

At my father's home in Louisville, KY, there's no snow falling but it's 10°F.

Languages

In second grade I had French classes, so I learned a smattering of French then, but never continued it.

In high school I was asked to choose a language to study (the options being French, German, and Spanish); I decided rationally that Spanish was spoken by the largest number of people in the world, so I went that way, taking two years of Spanish in high school and a third year at the local community college (I really didn't like my second-year Spanish teacher, so when I walked into third-year and saw her there, I dropped the class).

In college I was advised that I should have some reading knowledge of German if I wanted to go to grad school in mathematics, so I took a year's worth of German classes. I forget whether that was before or after I went to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria briefly as a tourist.

In grad school I was (as predicted) required to pass reading-comprehension exams in two of French, German, and Russian, on grounds that mathematics research papers have traditionally been written in those languages. I picked French and German because they use familiar alphabets, have lots of cognates, and I'd already studied both of them a little. The reading-comprehension exams amounted to "here's a chapter of an undergraduate math textbook in Language X; come back with an English translation of it in a few weeks," and I passed both of them.

Later in grad school my advisor got funding for me to attend a month-long workshop with him in Prague. The University didn't offer classes in Czech, but there were self-study materials at the library, so I spent a few months before the Prague trip studying Czech, and impressed my advisor on our first day there by walking into a convenience store and saying "Dvacet listeky, prosim" ["twenty mass-transit tickets, please"]. (One ticket cost 4 kroner, or about fifty cents, and would get you on the street-car; two would get you on the faster subway that only served a few places in the city.)

Around 2020 shalmestere installed DuoLingo on her phone and tried to learn some Irish, in honor of her Irish ancestry, but "it made her brain hurt"; she switched to Welsh (where she also has ancestry) and had a better time.

In summer 2022 we visited Wales, so a few months earlier I installed DuoLingo on my phone and we both tried to learn Welsh (not that one needs to speak Welsh to be a tourist there, but it's always cool to learn another language). I can still say things like "Ydy Bailey eisiau mynd am dro?" ["does Bailey want to go for a walk?"]

In Spring 2024 we visited Spain, so a few months earlier we both switched to studying Spanish in DuoLingo. My high school Spanish came back pretty well, and things mostly made sense to me. There are words that according to all the rules should be masculine but are actually feminine, or vice versa, but those are rare.

In Fall 2025 we visited France and Belgium, so a few months earlier we both switched to studying French in DuoLingo, and are still working on that. My grade-school French did not come back so well, though there are lots of helpful cognates, and I stumble over my tongue whenever there's a pronunciation exercise. And I'm reaching the conclusion that I Do Not Like French; it's almost as irrational and unpredictable as English. I'm still having trouble remembering which nouns are which gender (not an issue in English), and which adjectives go before the noun and which after it (not an issue in English, although we have weird rules about in what order to put multiple adjectives), but the real bugbear is pronunciation.

The words "souvent" and "savent" are spelled similarly, but one is pronounced as two syllables and the other as one. Can you guess which is which? Apparently the "ent" ending is silent in verbs, but not in prepositions, or something like that.

The words "aller", "allez", "allé", "allés", "allée", and "allées" are all forms of the verb "to be", which is somewhat irregular in most languages (including French and English), but irregularity isn't the problem here. All six of these words are spelled differently, any one would be grammatically incorrect if substituted for any of the others, and all six are pronounced identically. The phrases "Il court" and "Ils courent" ["he runs" and "they run"] are pronounced identically, as are the feminine equivalents "Elle court" and "Elles courent" (I got a listening exercise wrong in DuoLingo by guessing the wrong one).