four years ago

We moved to madrid four years ago last night. WOW. We cannot believe how time flies and how far we have come yet so far we have to go. A couple of 2006 resolutions.

1. I am going to blog more. So watch out. Be ready and fill free to comment.

2. I am going to eat less. I always have to include this but this year I have grown fond of the spanish pastries.

As for todays blog. This afternoon since we do not have the luxury of watching American football this time of year and I cannot get got up in the bowl games. Never mind that my team was not good enough to even play in a bowl game. They were terrible this year but there enough blogs about U of Tennessee football so I will not join that club.

This afternoon I found a large stack of notecards. Now you must understand that notecards are foundational for language learners and when we arrived here in Madrid I really went to town on notecards. I wrote atleast 1000 cards. What does one do with notecards? Well, I stored them away for this day I think. We were having coffee with some of our spanish friends last night and we had some good conversation but I always come away thinking how dumb I am and how much I have to learn. and I do...

Well this afternoon I went though those notecards. It was great. I made two stacks. One stack for the ones I knew. The others for the ones I need to review. If I took more than a second I had to put them in the review stack. After this lengthy review session I had two stacks. One very BIG stack and the other very small. I was encouraged because four years ago I knew nothing in this language but now I have quite a stack of words in my memory. Pretty cool.
I proudly through the BIG stack away. I will review the others later. I have so much to learn but I realized though I have lots to learn that I have learned alot and sometimes we lose sight of that and we get caught up in what we cannot do or what we do know or what we cannot finish and we do not realize that we have actually accomplished quite a bit.

Just a thought as you start 2006. Don't understimate how much you can do little by little or a notecard at a time. As someone once said the way you eat an elephant is one bite at a time. I have never tried nor do I want to eat an elephante but I think I get the point.