Still sick. Yesterday afternoon my cough moved from the innocent stage to the gritty, raspy, painful stage. I take it that isn’t good. It seems that every time I get sick, it takes four or five days to recover. Good thing I only get sick twice a year (or so).

I need to start updating other parts of the site. I’m tempted to really dive into XML. And Perl. But I really ought to be focusing on preparing for my mission. I’m getting close to having the Thai script learned. I need to memorize which consonants are in which class (low, middle, high), since the tone rules are based on that (e.g. if the initial consonant of a dead syllable is a middle-class consonant (I doubt economics are involved), the syllable’s tone is low). Dead syllables end in a stop (k, p, t) or a short vowel. Basically anything that you can’t prolong. Live syllables end in a nasal (m, n, ng) or a long vowel. (You can say ‘m’ for as long as you have breath, but you physically can’t prolong a ‘p’.) Syllables can’t end in any other consonant sounds, by the way. For instance, the letter ‘j’ becomes a ‘t’ when placed at the end of a syllable. Likewise, ‘l’ goes to ‘n’, so King Bhumibol’s name is actually pronounced Phumiphon. (B’s and p’s are rather interchangeable as far as romanization goes.) It sounds more difficult than it really is. I think studying Welsh and other languages where consonants change sounds has made it easier. I haven’t really started on the tapes yet. I want to learn the script first, so that I can follow along with the tapes and see exactly how each letter is pronounced. But before long I’ll spend a lot of time with the tapes, since I need to get a feel for the language and the way it rolls off my tongue. That’ll help with getting rid of the accent. (I have a feeling that it will take many, many months before I’m even able to come close to losing my accent, though.) At any rate, the language is coming along quite well, even though I haven’t spent as much time on it as I should. I hesitate to memorize vocabulary until I have the pronunciation mastered, since I don’t want to reinforce bad habits.

Earlier today I was looking at a Georgia-Pacific box (a Xerox box, or whatever that size is called — the kind that paper comes in) and liked the colors (white, pastel blue, and dark grey). So I started fiddling around with the color scheme on here. I quickly realized that the layout wouldn’t really allow me much artistic freedom as it was. So, since I’m not the type to give up easily, I redid the layout. I quite like this one (#7 — there’s a history of the different layouts on my About Blank Slate page). I’m still not sure if I like the colors for these journals, but I can change that later.

The last time I did any creative writing was at the beginning of April, I think. Today that changed. I’m on the lds_writers mailing list and decided to write a story based on one of the prompts. The result was “Encircled.”

Apparently the Thai dialects (there are four main ones — central, north, northeast, and south) are as different from each other as Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese are. Wow.