“Most of the year we have a really very pleasant climate in Sydney”, I argued to a colleague earlier today. “Except for two weeks in winter when we all bang on about how cold and wet it is, and two weeks in summer, when we can’t stop complaining about how hot and humid it is”, I added. Except that this year, the round the complaints about the warm nights has been going on for much longer. It’s become quite the topic of discussion at work, and on social media, abut how difficult it has been to sleep at night. “You have air-con?”, people will say, before they tell you how they hardly slept last night, and how tired they are today.
The topic of discussion today was much different. When I woke this morning, it was already lightly raining. At about 5.30, I walked onto my balcony, wearing only underwear, and sat there, simply enjoying the sounds of the rainfall, and the sounds of birds, and the fact it wasn’t so hot and humid. There was a good forty five minutes before the traffic of nearby Cleveland Street began to be overheard. Praise the Lord!
By the time the evening rolled around, I was feeling quite chipper. A good night’s sleep last night, some pleasant sounds to start the day, and between leaving work and heading off to Swedish class, I had a little nap.
Yes, I’m back at Swedish class for the first time in probably two years. I took a break from class for mostly two reasons: time and tiredness. I found that by the time I’d finished work each day, I was so completely tired, that I didn’t feel inclined to do the homework. I also found that turning up to a class at 8pm on a Wednesday night was too much. As interesting as the class was, I was too exhausted from work to concentrate as much as I would have liked.
But my job has changed a fair bit in the last few years. Though I have a more senior role, I’m finding the hours are actually better. Either I’ve become better at delegation, or I’ve become better at doing my job. And so I decided a few weeks ago, I thought I could go back to class, or at least try for a while to see if I could balance things a little better. Hence, the early evening nap.
The class consists of people I’ve never met before. Many of them have Swedish relatives, including partners. One guy is doing it only because he thought it would be an interesting thing to do. He’s a bit of a “word nerd” by the sound of things. And me? So I can tune up my language skills ahead of this year’s trip to Stockholm, and so I can finally overcome my fear of words like adverb and pronoun. I was part of the transition generation between old style rote learning and current practice . Hence, aside from nouns and verbs, I never really learned grammar. And whilst that didn’t matter so much for my native English skills, it’s always been an issue for me in learning another language.
So yeah, I’m feeling re-freshed in that regard also.
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