How many things you love can you share in 10 minutes?

'Smile - #16' photo (c) 2012, Artondra Hall - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Many people in November take the 30-day gratitude challenge. This morning I read a new post by Judy Lee Dunn "Can You Name 99 Things You Love in 10 Minutes?" and I immediately felt inspired to try. Especially given the fact that I've written a post about gratitude a very loooooong time ago. So let's see how many things I can come up with in 10 minutes.

Some things stay the same as they were 2 years ago, plus there are a few more:

1. Sleeping :)
2. I love tea!
3. Going outside in the middle of a busy day and relax
4. Playing Uno with my daughter
5. Watching my daughter during her swimming classes. She is progressing so fast!
6. Hearing Delia's teachers praising her for great work at school
7. Watching our budgie. He is still a gangster and we still love him :)
8. Looking at the violets
9. Looking out of the window and watching people and nature
10. Going for walks with my fam
11. Watching cartoons with Delia
12. I love it when my ESL student (right now I tutor only 1 person) gets excellent grades at school and shares the news with me!
13. I love when my clients praise my work
14. Chatting with my colleagues in social media
15. Blogging
16. Walking. I'd walk everywhere if it was possible :)
17. Learning something every day
18. Teaching something new to somebody
19. Fruit
20. Shopping
21. I love silence. I never listen to music while working and very seldom listen to anything while doing the chores. Silence is the most wonderful thing in the world for me.
22. Sunsets and sunrises
23. Sitting on the sea shore, listening to the nature sounds and watching the waves
24. I love making my loved ones happy
25. Pleasant surprises
26. Reading
27. Skating (though I am a very bad skater)
28. Making snow angels (or watching Delia making them)
29. Waking up early in the morning when it's still dark and nobody is up, and the silence is so intense!
30. Meeting new colleagues
31. Singing in the church
32. Saying "thank you"
33. I love it when I cook something and my whole family likes it. It doesn't happen all the time, but I'm working on it :)
34. Blowing bubbles
35. Doing something interesting and unusual with children during Sunday school classes
36. Talking with children. They are often wiser than adults
37. This feeling of excitement before I have to give a speech or host a webinar. It's a whole mixture of feelings which is hard to describe actually.
38. Watching a judo competition when a fighter does a really good throw and gets ippon (the highest score)
39. Playing with my grandniece. She is the happiest child I know. Plus nobody in our family loves eating like she does :)

What? 10 minutes gone? No way!!! I love flowers, looking at the clean blue sky and so much more!

A question for you: what things are you grateful for? Share them in comments. Or better write your own post about things you love and share a link to it in comments! And if you want to take the challenge, try sharing as many things as you can in 10 minutes.

10 interesting facts about the Russian language

In my previous post I promised to follow with the interesting info about some other languages. So here are 10 facts about the Russian language which might be of interest to those who are studying it. If you would like to have this list in Russian, please contact me and I will send it to you by email. So, what do I find interesting about my native language? 1. Russian has about 500,000 words, but only 2,000-2,500 of them are used frequently. 100 most frequently used words make 20% of all written and oral speech. A high school graduate's vocabulary usually has 1,500 to 4,000 words. Those who have graduated from a higher educational institution normally have a richer vocabulary consisting of approximately 8,000 words. 2. It's compulsory for all astronauts in the international space station to learn Russian, so we can call it an international language of space :)

15 interesting facts about the English language

I prepared this list for one of my English classes. And then it dawned on me that I can share it with you, too! So here are 15 facts about the English language that I find very interesting. Hope you do, too ;) Rudyard Kipling was fired as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. His dismissal letter said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language. This isn't a kindergarten for amateur writers." No language has more synonyms than English.

Clients vs translators: how do we show that we're honest?

This is a personal post, and I'd really like to hear the opinion of my colleagues about such situations and how to deal with them. My situation is kind of like the one described in Mox's blog . In December a new prospective client wrote to me asking about my availabiility for a new project. When I read the overall description of the project, I got really interested in it. But the client needed to know exactly how much time it would take and how much it would cost. No problem, just send me the text to look through or a part of it so I could get the gist of the style, level of complexity etc. In the reply that person just stated the wordcount, but there was no sample. I thought, maybe they didn't understand me. English is not my native language after all. In my reply, I stated the estimated time and cost based on the client's wordcount, but I repeated the request to see a part of the text. And then the person thanked me and ... disappeared.

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