I was messing around with exposure and depth-of-field while photographing flowers this afternoon,and the first photo ended up looking like the flowers are in a fish tank.

We went to the men’s breakfast this morning and listened to Velia Silva and David Fischman talk about PEP (Partners Envisioning Progress), a program for mentoring incarcerated youth.  Laurie thinks I should mentor a troubled youth since I’m a native New Mexican, dropped out of high school and went on to get a master’s degree, and have a wide-range of interests, experiences and skills.  I’m thinking about it. They really need men to volunteer, and I can see how getting men involved can be very difficult, since I’m not really chomping at the bit to do it.

I studied French most of the after afternoon. I signed up for the on-line French Lab for French 101. The listening exercises are especially difficult. They sound like French to me, and that’s about as far as I get.  Then there’s spelling. I’ve never been very good at spelling, I even have trouble with Spanish that’s totally phonetic, and now this French Lab expects me to spell French correctly. Like right! Many words have far too many letters which they don’t pronounce, and they have accents going both directions plus they use a hat (ˆ), a cédille (ç), and an umlaut (¨), called a tréma in French, on some of the vowels, which seem to make no difference whatsoever in the pronunciation — at least I can’t hear the differences,  which doesn’t really count for a whole lot since I have very poor hearing to begin with.

We also have an assignment to write ten sentences about one of the topics on a French culture website. Writing in French is almost as bad as understanding it when I listen. Sentence structure is often turned around from English, and verbs don’t usually fall in the same places. I always want to put down thoughts that are way beyond my French vocabulary, which is basically phrases like “chat noir”, “c’est la vie”, “les choses sont contre nous”, “comment on dit… …en Francais”, “salute”, “ça va” and a few other words and phrases which don’t usually fit with the assignments.

I’m going to write about “Lincoln”, a comic book character who is a cowboy with no purpose in life. The first book is titled “Lincoln: Crâne de bois” or “Lincoln: Skull of wood”, first published in 2004.  The fact that Lincoln is a cowboy reminds me of Lucky Luke, another French comic book character first published in 1946; but not knowing enough about Lincoln yet, I can’t say he’s anything like Lucky Luke who shoots faster than his shadow, and sees mirages of bars when crawling through the desert in dire need of water (a couple of things I remember from reading Lucky Luke in Spanish when we lived in Spain). Maybe by the time I get enough info to write a few sentences on Lincoln, he’ll be interesting enough for me to think about ordering the first book.