Last April I went to the spring workshop of Gaeltacht Minnesota. Afterwards I started taking their Irish Language classes.

Yesterday I went to their 2007 workshop, but in a more advanced group. Last year I was in Level 1 (absolute beginner), but yesterday they placed me in Level 3. The instructor was Nancy Stenson, a linguistics professor at the University of Minnesota and a local legend in teaching Irish. At first I was a little intimidated, perhaps understanding 1 word in 3, and wondering if I should transfer myself down to level 2. But the coffee kicked in, and the prospect of working with a person I had heard so much about was too good to pass up. It was a great day. I learned a lot, had a wonderful time with my instructors fellow students, and am reenergized for more Irish studies (although, alas, I will have to miss tomorrow’s class for medical reasons :-(> ).

Towards the end of the day we watched an episode from an Irish children’s cartoon series (originally in French) about a snowman named Bouli:

In the course of typical cartoon mishaps I heard this cute little guy saying a familiar sounding phrase as something was about to crash into a group of his fellow snowmen. Nancy then distributed some notes about it, which confirmed my suspicion: He was saying Fág an bealach!, “leave the way”, which is the modern Irish spelling of colgaffneyis war cry, Faugh a ballach!. It is a little hard to imagine him with one of our 17th century pikes, and I may have some trouble keeping a straight face when we shout that war cry in the next pike drill session.

After the workshop I went home and finished our taxes. Painful, but they are done: Submitted electronically and accepted by both the Feds and the State of Minnesota.

In the evening went went to a group sing at the home of a fellow member of colgaffneyis. This was a lot of fun, there were some very talented people present, but nobody was excluded. At one point we were singing Waltzing with Bears, and mia_mcdavid and I were able to find enough floor space to dance a waltz to the song. I also discovered that some of the guests had Carleton connections, and that we had mutual friends. A fine evening.

We had planned to take Tom to church, but when we got to his group home we found he had just gotten up, and had not yet had breakfast. So we went to church without him. This actually worked out quite well; we had more of a chance to talk to the people there. Afterwards we went back to Tom’s home and took him for a walk around Lake Calhoun–good exercise for everybody, in perfect weather–and then to a late lunch.