Fun with mum

My mum and brother came over for Mother's Day yesterday. She'd brought her German homework to discuss with me (since I'd said it would be fun to practise it again, which it is), making me very glad cameronm was home to talk in English with my brother.

My brother: So, is German like Spanish with all the different cases?
Me: Oh yes, though I never got the hang of most of them. There's one for ownership, where you say "The dog of my father" and you change the "the", the "dog" the "my" and the "Father."
Mum: What?
Me: It's like, you have "der Hund", "mein Vater" but then it turns into "Des Hundes meines Vaters" (this is probably wrong btw, I am very rusty)
Mum (who has only recently encountered the concept of German having more than one "the"): D:
Me: Ha, yeah, don't worry, all you need to know right now is "der" for masculine, "die" for feminine, "das" for neuter and "die" for plural.
Mum: There's a different one for plural??
Me: Soooooo...who wants tea?

And then several hours after she'd left I got an sms when she realised her Mother's Day card was in German and she couldn't understand it :D (It was fairly simple (if possibly rather dodgy) German, and kids these days have Google Translate *mutters about how in my day we had to use dictionaries...*)

And today my sister is visiting, yay visitors!

Doing my family's homework

Heh. So it turned out my sister wanted me to help with her homework too, namely doing an interview about privilege for her Gender and Society (I think that's the title) course. So I spent some time figuring out how to record with GarageBand and then basically ranted for 20 minutes and then spent some time figuring out how to save it as an mp3, it was fun :D

It's nice discussing social justice stuff with my sister, since we have EXACTLY the same background and a similar outlook we don't waste time in misunderstandings and false assumptions etc, but we have enough differences (she's studying it at uni and does meatspace stuff like going to rallies etc) to make things interesting. Lots of time spent snarking about hypocritical narrow minded activist types (growing up in our family you lose the "Anyone who cares about social justice is awesome and special and could never be bigoted" gloss pretty young).