Грамматика today.

LP: "And so when forming the passive perfective gerundive you.... Liza, what is on your necklace? The keys to your house?"

EB: "No, some old keys I found at a market."

LP: "Oh, I see, because we have such strange keys here! And strange doors! Strange, old doors. I have a key that is long like huh and strange and impossible to get the door open, like this..."

And then we had show-and-tell of the different kinds of keys we all had for about ten minutes, followed by a ten-minute rant about how stupid it is that all the apartments in Petersburg have double doors because the middle class is so scared of intruders but, "what of value do we keep in our apartments anyway? Furniture? Who cares!"

Grammar class. Always a good time.

Debbie Downer Abman was right. The snow didn't stick in the least, but the puddles were frozen this morning and there was black ice around which Bryan sent all of us a frantic warning email about. There was even some frozen urine in my courtyard for a change. Ah, I love winter.

I also showed my art to the class today in my audit with Emily Newman which was not that frightening as.... only Emily was there for the first half. Apparently as most people in the class are auditing, very few people have been showing up recently. For example, this was the first time I'd been there in three weeks. Oops. And then the nicest, quietest Russian student showed up for the second half. And we got on a long tangent about students studying abroad and their intentions. Ha. But it was a good one-on-one crit session and she gave me some good ideas and advice about how to tie up my final projects and even suggested I have a photo show in the little Smolny gallery on the way to the library. I might show my self portrait project series on December 14th, the six month anniversary of the project. Speaking of which, small photo update (self portraits & indian food & prints of apples).

Damn. Six months. That's insane.

... and I am still pretty ужасно at speaking Russian.