More Tiny Triumphs

• We are now firmly in spring, and the winter coat has been stowed in the back of the closet. How glorious!
• After several more doctor visits and medications, I am no longer kept awake for hours on end by my cough. It's now pretty much limited to mornings and after physical exertion.
  
• My Basque (or rather Batua, the standarized Basque) vocabulary is expanding slooooooowly but surely. I still don't understand 90% of what I see/hear, but that's an improvement on the 99% I started at. A selection of new words are: berdin ('same', 'equal'), ezberdin ('not' + berdin; 'different'), lanbide ('job', 'profession'), ekilore ('sunflower'; eki = 'sun' and lore = 'flower'), bake ('peace'), and jatetxe ('restuarant'; one my faves, literally 'eat(ing) house'). I can even say most of them without thinking too much--sometimes even automatically!--though it is still impossible for me to string together an actual meaningful sentence unless it involves the one verb I am able to construct a sentence with: X hil da = 'X has died'. I don't get a chance to use that one too often, though I do like to randomly tell people Zakur beltza hil da 'The black dog has died' (and suffer their looking askance at me) just because I can. Time to learn a new model sentence that I can plug the different nouns I know into--but this time one that is a little more useful--until I can get my butt to an euskaltegi (language school) and do some proper learning.