Classes as usual. Nothing odd. Our student who was ill continues to improve. Hopefully she'll be back in class tomorrow.

Kathleen and I had lunch with the founder of the school, Kenje. She is a remarkable person. Hard-working, thoughtful. I'm very pleased for us to have found such a good partner here.

Kathleen had a busy day of observing classes before our business lunch where we discussed plans for next year. Afterwards we had some free time. Go figure, Kathleen is fond of the Google game "Ingress," where you gain points by visiting various waypoints around the world. So we put in our 7 kilometer walk for the day and tagged those points. We saw things we would otherwise never have seen in the city. I posted a load of pictures to FB and was shocked at the number of comments.

Classes as usual. Kathleen headed to the airport for her visit to our program in Izmir. The 4-week group headed off for the Issyk-Kul excursion.

So this is kind of silly, especially out of a 50+ man, but I'll say it anyway. Kathleen has always been incredibly impressive to me. Her Russian is stellar, her German as well. She is focused, ethical, and never spares herself in doing things well. She is almost superhuman to my way of thinking.

This week, though, she arrived in Bishkek with monstrous jetlag. No surprise, of course. And for the first time I caught her making mistakes in Russian. I found that oddly encouraging. She is not superhuman, just a remarkable human.

Some years ago I found myself pushed to the limit. I decided to start taking a bit of pity on myself in terms of pushing too hard. That was probably a good decision. But over the last few years, I think I have grown to easy on myself. And I think Kathleen's example may help me push harder again.

Today I finished a curious piece of fiction called "The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse" by Keith Hartman. It's a variously odd work set in a world where most young gay men are Catholic, where Wiccans have actual supernatural power, and where Native American shamans do as well. This of course gives one a certain idea of the author's political and moral impressions.

That said, it was a decent piece of fiction. The author depicted a bunch of different personality types and political types fairly well. The mystery was sufficiently convoluted to not give it away from the beginning. The use of English was decent. Occasionally the irony was quite amusing. For instance, here is a scene at a police station:

Drew glared at me. “Don't even start with me today,” he growled... I looked up to see Tony Browning walking over to my desk. He was wearing a big cowby hat, and a pair of white boots with fringe, and... nothing in between. OK, OK. I should have known that something was going on right then. I mean, Tony and Drew don’t work for the same precinct.

I have occasionally thought of writing a novel. My command of English is sufficient, but I have often thought that my insight into various types of human beings is not sufficient to pull it off. My life has been much too “Leave it to Beaver.”

Well, when I die I will at least leave behind myself some poetry, some of which is actually good.

For those of you who have studied both Russian and a Turkic language, these photos might be of interest to you from the point of how KG plurals are formed. I was stunned by пирожныйлар.

Mirror