I'm running out of ways to open these entries inventively, without resorting to flooding your journals with animated .gifs and videos. Perhaps that's a sign telling me I ought to start cross-posting from Dreamwidth, if only for a change of pace.

I have a Russian competition coming up, so I've been working on four short compositions to memorize as well as a poem by Boris Pasternak. (Note: the English translation on that website is awful. Here is the one we were given.) Unfortunately, I've been having problems with the poem: my professor told me in so many words that my reading was thoroughly bad, and asked me to translate it myself to get a better feeling for its meaning. She did compliment me greatly on the first composition, though, so I'm feeling positive about the competition as a whole.

(  Time let me hail and climb,/Golden in the heydays of his eyes. )