Deutsch 101

Yep. I am learning German.  I must say I wished I would have payed more attention to English Grammer in high school (or maybe I did pay attention but it was so long ago and I am so old I can't remember).  Now I am not only learning German, but relearning English Grammer at the same time.  My head is reeling from all the new terms: predicate noun, direct and indirect objects, prepositional phrases.  The only ones I am really sure of are nouns and verbs.  Of course add to all the English grammer I am learning the many German words like eigentlich which means actually and hoffentlich which means hopefully.  And to make it even more complicated the German language has all these cognates and false cognates (words which look like English words but may or may not have same meaning).  For example, der after which one would think means the same as the English after...but it doesn't... it means anus.

I wonder at this point if I will ever be able to speak German -- let alone English (God only knows how I made it this far without knowing when and where to use a predicate noun).  I am enjoying myself, and in spite of my now very obvious difficulties with English, I can make out some of what I hear in German and alot of what I read.  I would call that progress.  

So onward we go into Kapitel Zwei (Chapter two) where I am learning proper placement of predicate nouns, objects, pronouns and prepositional phrases in German Sentences. Good luck to me....

The Little Blue Composter Who Is No More

Our composter ended up working out for us very well -- with a minor caveat which I will address very shortly.  But first let me say one does not realize how much one throws away until you have a composter.  In our case we used the compost for our organic waste from meals (stalks from lettuce, egg shells, etc...).  Unfortunately, we had more waste than we could throw into the composter because it was quite small.  After three months roughly we had produced about 1/2 of the drum (25 gallons) of compost and we used it in our raised garden beds. 

We probably would have had more compost except for that caveat I mentioned earlier.  Our composter started to smell like a sewer thanks to the sweltering temperatures of Arizona!  There appeared to be armies of flies amassing at the entrance holes and maggots growing by the hour in our once fertile blue barrel.  Unfortunately, this smell, the flies and maggots was not going over well here in suburbia so the little blue composter went into the big black trash bucket and is no more.  We really miss him and wish him the best.