It's Oh, So Quiet...

...except obviously, it isn't. At all. Which is why I haven't had the time post. Well, you can't say I didn't warn you...

It's busy busy busy here. As I remarked to a friend a couple of days back, I never thought it would be possible to have so much to do and not actually be paid for any of it.

I need to blog, though. I need to write stuff down. Because if I don't, all those memories, all those moments, will be lost. How do I know this? Well, it was brought home to me yesterday in my Russian lesson that the storage system in my head is perilously close to overflowing, if not already over-capacity. It appears that each new piece of information I absorb right now automatically requires the deletion of a file that was already in there.

Basically, yesterday's Russian lesson was torture. I found myself unable to remember very much at all. I experienced a kind of 'word blindness' as Mila (my long-suffering Russian teacher) was talking to me; taking each word that she said on a separate basis, I understood them. Put them together in a sentence though? Forget it. It might as well have been Dutch. Come to think of it, since I understand Dutch reasonably well, it was far worse. Mandarin, then. Or Finnish. (God knows how NotesfromLapland does that language, by the way).

This was quite upsetting (I think - god help me - that I may even have teared up a little), as up until now I have felt that - given the fact I do no homework - it's been going OK. So what's changed?

Two weeks ago I took the decision to start picking up the pieces of my erstwhile career in marketing. I've been getting pretty excited about it, actually. There are definitely opportunities for me here (if I can identify them and manage to make them fit with my somewhat unrealistic hope to remain nanny-less most of the time), and I've been having lots of fascinating meetings with people who speak a language - marketing - that, unlike Russian, I actually do understand.

Admittedly, it took a couple of false starts and rabbits in the headlights moments for my brain to start accessing the right parts of my memories, but before I knew it the terminology was flooding back as the right neural pathways in my brain fired up the right synapses and, bob's your uncle, I was spouting marketing bollocks like I'd never taken a break for 4 or 5 years...

However, it appears that my brain operates on a strictly 'one in, one out' basis right now. So; in comes the Marketing-speak, (better stop calling it Marketing bollocks as I suppose potential employers/clients might take a dim view of my referring to it in that somewhat derogatory way), and out goes what little Russian I had.

Let's hope it's just temporary. Either that, or I that I can at least learn how to say 'the computer says no'* in more than one language.

*Thanks by the way to Nicola at Some Mothers Do Ave Em for reminding me of that lovely catch-phrase...