Christmas is Coming!

It's somewhat chilly...I'm sitting here at the PC in sweats and slippers...and Christmas music playing from a Christian radio station...O.K., to be truthful, I've been listening to Christmas music since, oh, mid-October or so...and I just know that Christmas is coming!

No, there is no snow, and the temperature is not below O (as a matter of fact, the only number that the temperature is below might be the number of the temperature in Phoenix or some such place, but I'll be thankful for what I've got)...there are not very many colored leaves, either on the trees or blowing on the ground...but hey, it's a lovely southern California autumn day! So, how about the Christmas decorations coming out pretty soon? O.K., maybe I'll wait until the first of December. It's not very far away, after all. And it will give some time for the temperature to cool down some more.

I thought I'd give y'all an update on how sign language is coming for me. Our class at the community college is nearly finished. We are midway through Unit 6 of 6; our final test is the 5th of December, if I remember right. We will have to do a two-partner dialogue (videotaped -- aaagh!) on the 10th, so my partner and I will stay after class tomorrow to write out our dialogue. It must be 3-5 minutes long, and include such elements as vocabulary, proper sentence structure, fingerspelling, and numbers. We have a few possible ideas, but we will get together to write our script tomorrow.

Yesterday we did our second Deaf Event. My partner, Cassandra, a 20- or 21-year-old (I don't remember -- sorry, Cassandra!) Christian lady, and I, and another classmate, Alex, who is also a Christian (I believe -- I have not asked him outright yet, but from what I have seen, and what he has said, I think he is...plus he works at a huge, well-known megachurch nearby), got together for our second Deaf Event. Our assignment was to go somewhere public, where we would be seen (and stared at!), and talk completely in sign, with no voices. At first we tried doing it there on campus, but we were sort of out of the way of everyone else and nobody saw us. We walked over by the bus stop, where a lot of people were gathered, but as we walked close a bus came along and everyone got in it. So we ended up hitching a ride with my mom and going over to a nearby mall, where we walked around, visiting a few stores, and talking sign. Mostly we just used the words 'nice/clean/pure' and 'beautiful', but we also found occasion to use several other words, such as 'want', 'hungry', 'thirsty', 'really/truth/sure', 'bad', 'alcohol' (don't think wrong things here, folks -- we saw a bottle of wine in a display), 'child', 'kid', 'play', and many others.

So that's a bit of an update on my life :-)