new bomba and thoughts about learning

Well after we destroyed most of the old water pump we found out how it works there are 3 meters of metal tube then 32 meters of hexagonal wooden rods with brass joints every now and then and head on down into the 110 mm wide hole, the rods fit into an alkathene pipe with a non return valve on the bottom and the engine goes round and round and the piston goes up and down and the rods go up and down and water arrives..or not...in this case not; to get the motor and pump to separate from the rest of the gubbins we ended up cutting the main shaft carefully not dropping anything into the hole then hauling it all up into the garden. It was pretty well worn broken and horrid looking and the temporary borrowed smaller pump and shorter bit of pipe didn't work so we spent a week in the UK instead of sorting it out. I cut the down below bits into littler bits when we got back and quite a few people said "You didn't want to do that it could have been repaired, they are great those old pumps" or something like that but actually we did want to do that we were a bit fed up with low pressure and rusty water in the bath. So a long story cut short is that Carlos down the road spent hours trying to find us the best deal on pumps and eventually struck on the chap who drilled the borehole and fitted the original pump. Carlos and I went to the unit on the Rio Pozo industrial estate, had a chat with the boss and someone was to come round in a couple of hours. About 20 mins after I arrived home I looked outside to see a lorry belonging to the firm with a drilling rig and a huge transformer on a trailer parking outside and a man walking into our drive. "The boss says we are to look at the job at your house later after we have set the rig up just up the road and would it be ok if we left the lorry parked here mate ?" Phew no misunderstanding just a coincidence. How did I understand all that I thought.

Anyway today we have water Sondeos Rodriguez www.casaviega.es offer a great price (not cheap not expensive) great service, great pressure, nice and quiet, quick installation and a great chat about history, archeology and learning languages with one of the engineers; its been an odd day for learning there was I faltering over learning Spanish and Galician if anything going backwards over the last few months and suddenly it has all started to fit together not like a jigsaw though. I don't really do jigsaws although they are good for demonstrating some aspects of flow theory you know when it all starts to make sense you get so far in, the goal becomes visible, the challenge surmountable and suddenly the momentum gathers and you are into the groove and you just flow you don't sense time passing, you are focused and wham bam whoosh there is the finished picture, a big smile then a bit of an anticlimax (for a more academic explanation see Csikszentmihalyi. M. (1992). Flow: The psychology of happiness. London: Rider...and...Larson, R. (1988). Flow and writing. In M. Csikszentmihalyi & I. S. Csikszentmihalyi (Eds.) Optimal experience: Psychological studies of flow in consciousness (pp. 150-171). NY: Cambridge University press.)

For me Learning Spanish has suddenly started to hit little flow moments and it is like millions of those little plastic square puzzles with about 16 squares and one blank and using the space place you shuffle the other pieces to make a picture, anyway there is a seamless sea of them in my head and the pictures of words are starting to stabilise, the ones I need are starting to hold steady rather than shuffling around all the time. I realised also that I learned too much complexity in the beginning. Most things I really need to talk about happen now or need to happen soon, I could have cut out most of the past tense at risk of sounding daft but at least meaning works. for example learn - last year, last month, last week, yesterday, use one of them to start a sentence then talk in the present tense. "last year we all go to the beach; what do we do ? We leave the sunscreen at home and we all get burned" That kind of thing works OK in Spanish and you get twice the mileage out of present tense and manage to attenuate the complexity of the learning task. Prioritising the right verbs and questions to learn helps as well, to do, to go, to eat, to have, to make, I want, I need, when, how, who, what, why, where are fairly important ones to know.