not every day is bad

I felt bad leaving such a negative blog entry lingering at the top of this page for more than a few days. Dwelling on bad days and feeding off negative vibes don’t do anyone any good, especially in the middle of a cold winter. So I should point out the two major events that helped me get over my Friday the 13th from hell:

The first wonderfully coincidental occurrence happened on Sunday afternoon. Through a local friend who works with an adoption agency here in town, I met a middle-aged couple from Malaga, Spain. My friend doesn’t know much Spanish, and the adopting couple doesn’t speak much English and no Russian, so I was invited to help translate a conversation over lunch. Now, I’ve been extremely lucky to have a weekly Spanish class with local students. It helps me keep my “Me gusta bailar en la ducha” and “¿Dónde están mis pantelones rosados?” sharp while learning and speaking Russian, but as you can imagine, we don’t get much real conversation practice. I spent almost two hours translating and just chatting with this couple who live just an hour from where I studied abroad in 2005. Too cool. I loved their Andalusian accents, remembering how difficult it was to understand anything anyone was saying until the last month of being in Spain. They’ll be here for another couple weeks for a waiting period, during which we plan to go to some museums and cafés together. I’ve also invited them to my weekly Spanish lesson at the library. It was obviously more of a struggle for me to chat with them, having forgotten so much in a year of disuse, but I think they enjoyed being able to speak to someone in Spanish as much as I did.

The second day-brightening, cloud-lifting event was during my walk to school this morning. The street lights which have been on, lighting my pre-dawn morning commute for the last couple months of winter turned off while I made my way to work. It’s still cold, but the days are lengthening. That made me smile.