B E B E R E

My birthday's still a couple weeks away, but Arija wanted to give her gift to me when we exchanged our belated Christmas presents this past weekend. Among other things, she'd given me two strings of chunky, rough-looking, butterscotch colored amber. This pleased me to no end, as my other necklace, a lovely string of reddish brown round beads met a sad ending in a ravine in Toronto a couple years ago.

I'm told that my new necklaces look like a lei around my neck. I love how lightweight they are. I also love that, if I rub them against my sweater, they'll spark a bit. I'm always wanting to put them into my mouth, as they look so tasty. So far, I've managed to refrain from doing so.

Tall and blonde as I am, I tend to get mistaken for Latvian by other Latvians. There's a considerable number of them here, too, I'm finding out (all the better for me to get some conversational practice in, as Hal doesn't appreciate the novelty of the language he grew up with). In Toronto, for the songfest, I'd have people just come up to me and start talking at me. I'd get what they were talking about maybe like 20% of the time, and I'd not be able to respond. I wonder if they have the same stereotypes of the 'dumb blonde,' as I certainly felt like one. Perhaps I'll get it together enough so that by next songfest (in Cleveland), I'll not be such a dolt.
We're going west to visit Arija sometime in February, I think. She says that when we come, she'll make a klingeris to fête the visit and my (at that point) belated birthday. What an inducement!