The Stars and the Cookie Jar

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They are extremely hilarious. And multicultural! Yup.

And I have to open tomorrow. Which bites, because I would like to stay up typing out the further adventures of Nicolas who is damned well trying to get to Darkest Greece to beg somebody (else)'s forgiveness.

Cows in the way, I suspect.

Okay, I had better explain the constant connection in my mind between cows -- oxen actually, I think -- and Greek. My attempt to learn Greek was from this bog-standard text, which invents a family and gives them a nice pastoral little life and is, in fact, cribbing heavily from Hesiod. I learnt from a brilliant and perfectionistic distant family relative who had spent, proportionately, more time in the last years talking to books than to people, and my pronunciation of Foreign is never good at the best of times (witness my French). And while I could get the writing down and the alphabet does not frighten me, I just could not pronounce, to her satisfaction, booi (oxen), one of the major words in the second or third chapter of the primer. My God, such strife over those oxen! And then weird things started happening anyway, and we ended up halfway to Bulgaria, and then.... Well, anyway, I think I still have a notebook in  very elementary-looking Greek hand, but learning it went by the roadside, mostly because I so exasperated my teacher.

So to my mind, or at least to my mental block, Greek is a very difficult language made insurmountable by cows.

('oxen' turned into 'cows' because the illustration on that page of the primer was of a grave-stela-thing of a farmer holding what was ever so definitely a heifer, you know, a cow. I know from cows!)

Ta dum.