Some days...

Some days, you can bust out the imperfect subjunctive (the one with fosse and avesse and all that) without even thinking about it and people are all "yeesh, where did you even learn that?" and you are all proud of yourself and feel that your efforts in learning Italian are paying off.

And then there are all the other days where it does not feel like that at all. And then there are those really special days when you go from using cadesse in one sentence (possibly even correctly) to having to describe 'lightening' as "quando nel cielo c'e' l'elettricita'" (when there's electricity in the sky) because you can't remember the word for lightening. (What's really disturbing about that is that then the other person said it and I was all "oh, yeah, someone else used that very word yesterday and I totally understood what they meant then" and now, not twenty minutes later, I can't remember it. Again.)

And moments after that syntactical gem, I managed to use "calore" when I meant to say "caldo". And I'm pretty sure they're not the same thing at all. And the conversation in question was with my boss' husband. Clearly me speaking Italian was not meant to be tonight. Here's hoping that the fact that it was 11:30pm after a full day of work (starting at 8am, evviva!) and the fact that it was probably kind of obvious that I meant the weather and not something else and the fact that I was holding a book by Italo Calvino in my hand (and might thus had been primed for some archaic, possibly inappropriate use of random words) excuses me somewhat from the ridiculousness of that mix-up.

Plus, also? In Spanish caldo is calor. So. Really not that far-fetched. Except that this is Reggio Emilia, not Spain. But whatever.

After another heroically lengthy day (8:30 to 6:30 with only one ten-minute break today! I am woman of iron! not - I was whimpering by the end), it's time for sleeping!