| Life at the ancestral home of the Foxes is not much different than at any other time in the last few years. I read, study, and write a little. The only difference is that I do it all at home, rather than largely at my circle of coffee houses. I'm still doing my language lessons. This evening a spent an hour on FaceTime with my Sinhala tutor, and Thursday morning I have my Catalan lesson. I'm still slowly reading through my first novel in Sinhala, and hope to finish it in a couple of months. I've ordered a Catalan novel, and that should arrive soon. But much of my reading has to do with the influence of the Dravidian languages Tamil and Malayalam on Sinhala. Everyone has always known that Sinhala is very similar in some ways to Tamil and Malayalam, even though it's not related to them at all. There's been a fair amount of discussion about this, but it seems a bit vague to me, so I'm writing a paper about it, trying to suggest how the influence occurred in a bit more detail. A friend who knows a tremendous amount about the cultural and historical background suggested some books to me, and I found them very interesting. So now I have another interest which I can't talk about with anyone lest they flee the room. A couple of years ago my friend Steve Fassberg and I read a paper at a conference, and he recently decided to try to publish it. So we were sending it back and forth for a while, adding things and neatening it up for publication. Yesterday I baked some bread, and it turned out nicely. I use the white bread recipe from the Joy of Cooking. And it's a real pleasure to work in my nice new kitchen. If only you could all come and see it! It's still unseasonably chilly, but everything is green (or so they tell me). The foxes on the front lawn are surrounded by verdure. |
| Created on 5 May 2020 by Samuel Ethan Fox |