On Jun 24, 8:47*am, "W. D. Grey" wrote:

Seems we have been in a hotbed of Welsh language speakers. Im into
languages and in the process of getting around have asked a few times
of folks for help pronouncing things. Well, Our little group has
become something of a community project. Yesterday the postman stopped
and backed up on the little lane we were hiking down to administer a
pop quiz for retention and added a few new vocabulary words by way of
assignment. Then at dinner another fellow pointed out proudly that he
had taught me the one and two letter connectors, (the y words), to
which Dewi added some racy bits. I think it would be possible to be
speaking Welsh in a month or two more of immersion as almost everybody
here is at least partially bi-lingual and once you get some of the
things like the W, the ff, the dd, the ch etc down, the spelling
doesn't seem so strange. And many of the words that look weird in the
Welsh spelling, sound out like English, pronounced with a heavy Welsh
accent.

Today spent some time on a tiny (by US standards) dairy farm (10
hectacers) with a guy named Morris. He runs jersey cows (the little
brown ones) for cream and cheese, and some pigs., for the skim milk.
He showed me this old breed of pig from glouster that was 600+ pounds,
and as gentile as you would want. I don't know my pigs but I haven't
seen this breed in the US. Had a pork and apple burger from his last
kill and it tajsted great. These are good people here. I hope that
these efforts they are making to market the specialness of their farm
products helps more of the small holders survive. There is a similar
effort just getting legs in the valley where my place is in E. Wash.
One frenchie 3 farms up river from me is doing goats and goat cheese
on a commercial scale, and some friends relocated their bee/honey
business up on the North fork of the Touchet and scaled up. There is
decent infrastructure here in a mostly unused Seneca asparagas
operation so who knows.

Anyway, this has been a very interesting trip for me and tommorrow we
head North

Dave
Everytime I catch a look at the Teife I regret not packing my rod. One
the plus Ive got enough paintings in process for half a little coffee
house show already.