Balloons!

When I was out running yesterday morning, I heard a sound a bit like a big, heavy roller blind being raised. It wasn't that at all, it was a hot-air balloon being fired; I could see it between the trees, rising into the morning air. Going round a bit further I saw some more just going up.

Then, on the way back, I saw the last of them, a beautiful rainbow coloured one.

Words used too much

 There are words I don't like, and expressions as well. Maybe it's someting about age: people don't talk or write like they used to, or the way I understand to be correct. It's probably just a question of taste: I don't wholly subscribe to the old-fashioned prescriptive view that there is only one right way to express something. Language is a living organsim which evolves and develops with time.

Anyway, I want to gripe.

One of the words which I dislike is feisty. It's often used to refer to a young woman character in a work of fiction, boldly making her way in the world against male-dominated odds. 

If you use a word too often it loses power and becomes boring, uninteresting. No more feisty heroines, please.

Then there's iconic, Over-used by the press to mean emblematic, well-known, symbolic, recognisable.

I really dislike today's use of sibling. For me, the expression sibling rivalry, which I imagine counts as psychologists' terminology, is normal, but to say 'I have two siblings' is not. I have a brother and a sister. It's not that hard. As an English teacher I know that my students, who are Spanish-speakers are influenced by their native language. They can say 'somos tres hermanos, dos chicas y un chico' (there are three of us, two sisters and a brother). Well I don't like it,and I have noticed that sibling is being used more and more.

An expression my students all learn not to use because I tell them is 'from my point of view'. All too often learners say this when they are expressing an opinion. If you say from my point of view it's incomplete unless you express what that point is: as a student of English, as an expert on the subject.

These are words and expressions that annoy me. Any more suggestions?

Valencia

 Well, not just Valencia but also Manises, the surprisingly good pottery museum there

This was in a service station; showing the dangers of Google Translate

We spent a morning in the Science Museum.

Grammarlinks!

 http://sallygrammarlinks.blogspot.com/

It's been ages since I posted here; for one reason or another.....pandemic, work, not many excursions, other things too. 

I'm still here...sort of; because I've been working in Zaragoza during he week as I did before the pandemic. Teaching in a classroom, with masks.

Anyway, I hope to be able to resume Jaca in English posting, although I'll still be posting Grammarlinks.

Here's the link: http://sallygrammarlinks.blogspot.com/

Summertime

 It's summer, it's still Pandemic and I'm not  on holiday because I teach English on Zoom, from my house. 

The weather has been hot, and because Jaca is a great base, we've been able to do lots of excursions. The other day we did a tough one: La Raca in Astún. We didn't get to the top, but we weren't far off.

This was just a rest: we walked all the way!

There's a ski jump; I'd  seen it from afar before but never so close! Jumpers must be quite mad! It gives me vertigo just looking at it!

It was foggy in Astún when we started and a lot of the way. But higher up the distinctive peak of the Midi d'Ossau rose above the fog.

La Raca isn't like Candanchú for flowers, but I did find this lovely one though. It's yellow mountain saxifrage: saxifraga aizoides L

Lady orchid

 In our walks quite near our house we've recently found some lovely orchids.

They stand on their own, the nearest neighbour about a metre away on the rough verges of the outskirts of town. I put my photo in my lovely plant identifying app Plantnet and it came up with Lady orchid, Orchis purpurea. 

Virtually anything!

 At the moment, Jaca is closed. As of midnight last night, nobody is allowed in or out of the district without a good and official reason. This is because the rate of infections with Covid 19 have risen from none to double figures since the Easter holidays, today is May Day and next Friday is Jaca's festival, the First Friday, and it's not going to be celebrated in public. We've cancelled the church service. This is what we can see from afar:

Oh well, it's only nine days, and the state of alarm will be over and they'll have to find andother way of controlling infections until we are all vaccinated. It's coming along, but we're not there yet.

There are some things we've got used to, ways we compensate for our changed lives. One of them is virtual meetings of different kinds- meeting family, workouts. I've become a member of a group called Team Body Project. They have quite a lot of workouts published on Youtube which you can do in your home. They are challenging, encouraging and fun. I did them for several months before subscribing (paying) and then found access to programmes and lots of workouts , even new ones every week. So I do lots of exercise and am pretty fit even though we don't go out so much.

That's one of the virtuals.

The other is singing. I miss singing in a choir. I miss my friends. We can communicate on Whatsapp but it's not the same as rehearsing together. We started off well last year with a few projects but I think we got discouraged; you can't really rehearse together on Zoom because of the time lag. I took part in a large-scale project before Christmas to sing Haendel's Hallelujah chorus. We were given films and tracks to follow and we had to record audio and video with specific instructions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXFhkmyVRgM Follow the link and you'll see the finished product. You won't see me though! I've hunted through and although my name is in the credits, I'm not visible. It's a lovely piece of work but I was a bit disappointed. 

A couple of months ago, through a link in Facebook I started a project with the Stay At Home Choir. This was started during the first Lockdown in the UK by two young English musicians, Jamie Wright and Tori Langdon. They did many amazing projects over the year, presenting a piece of music, learning tracks to point people in the right direction and then organising Zoom sessions to train, rehearse and encourage the sing. The first project I did was an old pop song called Songbird, arranged and accompanied by the King's Singers, who took part in some rehearsals and even let us into their own rehearsals on the screen. In the end you have to record yourself-you listen to the guide track in one ear and send in the video to be blended into the others. I've just sent in the video for the second project, a new composition of Locus Iste, specially written and presented by Gareth Malone, who is a very well-known and popular choir leader in the UK. I thinke there were literally thousands of us.

This is just one page of a Zoom session. If you can't do the time, you can catch up on Youtube. It's not like a "real" rehearsal, but it's the best we can do at the moment. I learn a lot; even though I've been in choirs for 25 years or so; always in Spain. It's nice to do it in English for a change.