Reality, mine and other's.

Ok, I am going to have to grow up now and stop whining about blogger. I was settling in to do my latest post, with a now compliant system, and wandered through the bloglines...there were a couple of delightful new posts, for instance Nomad has a most welcome new post up. It is great to hear from her as she emerges from her move. Simultaneously though, as I was about to embark on a light-hearted romp through my day, because that is what I was lucky enough to have, I read Beth's latest post revealing some of the struggles that she is handling at this time. Beth here is also, to say the least, struggling.

Then I went to this blog. I have mentioned her before...she is a Palestinian woman and journalist and mother living in Gaza, and as we write and read this, she has been locked down by two solid days of gun and mortar fire with her three or four year old son.

While we were sailing there were times that we had to help the children cope with frightening and dangerous situations that we could not change...the three biggies that come to mind are thunderstorms...more accurately lightning while sitting in a sailboat, tornadoes, and potentially dangerous crossings, whether they are the Gulf Stream or a particularily committed pass. It is not fun. It asks all of you to draw on reserves that you would really not like to go to, and weather at least is neither malevolent nor personal.

I am finding myself feeling bound and uncertain. My experiences, which I had planned to transmit here are so different from what I have read this evening that it feels like tap-dancing during a crisis; what I have read has affected me. Where do I go from here...can I make a coherent piece that encompasses both truths. My real lived life that I share here on this blog with my family and friends, both old, and new on-line, and the sorrow I feel from what I have read of others....

Here's my reality.

Barca just scored in the finals. There is mass cheering in the bar across the street, I can hear it with all the windows closed. The guys downstairs have the TV on and I can hear the cheering. There are fireworks going off in the town as I type. Real life. I do feel horrendous about what is happening in Gaza, and I think that whatever your politics, you cannot help but feel for anyone anywhere who is trying to negotiate your son or daughter's childhood with as little fear and as much normalcy as possible while sitting shut off trapped in your home by mortar fire and chaos.

Here Barca scored and the folks here are thrilled. Both are real and both have a valid reason to appear. I by nature, and in nature, instantly look for the beauty around me to counter the ugliness. Balance balance balance.

We had a wild boar come down out of the mountains this last weekend. We heard it from a man in town. A mama wild boar wandered down from the mountain with three babies. She came down to the fringes of town and my Catalan/English buddy and her dog saw her. My buddy left as fast as she could since these animals can be quite dangerous. In fact, sadly two dogs decided to try to mess with the babies. One dog is dead and the other is still at the vets.

I find it fascinating that they still live up there, and faintly alarming. Though after hiking in bear country, I am a little more inured.

One of the fashions here that I find most difficult to understand is on guys, it is kind of like the uber-mullet. Very very short top and sides, and then the entire back of the head, not just the fringe at the bottom, is quite long and usually dreaded. It is U.G.L.Y. This post of course dooms me to a long stream of boyfriends spoting this do that my girls will bring home for years and years when the time comes. *sigh* They will all have droopy ass pants too with their underwear, nay, their entire butts showing. Do you realise that guys have to use Neat_tm to wear that style? Yup, guys are going out and using Neat on their pubes. If that isn't too much information, I don't know what is.

I said I would post more about the tunnels in the hills. I am sorry to say that I have failed you here. I simply forgot to ask at work today. Clear slipped my mind. Oooh, they are cheering again, and it seems that I didn't take a picture of one of the other tunnels that I thought I had, I will go either tomorrow or the day after and have a look, maybe even use the flash on the camera, and get a shot inside.

Teaching went exceptionally well today. It is nice to have days like this that make you feel like you are actually capable. There are days when I doubt it. I had to teach the, what the heck was it, present perfect continuous? The one that goes...I have been teaching this evening...that Subject + have + been + verb-as-a-gerund-with-the-ing job..."I have been confusing you." That one.

Anyway, I actually pulled it off. The kids, and teens and students and I in all my classes all had a good time, and I think they learned a bunch, and I did too. They are a neat group of kids.

We had a lovely day. Eldest went up in the mountains for the day with her class, they painted, and I haven't heard what else because I had to work, and youngest just had a basically good day. The man is getting ahead of the to do list at work, and is feeling good about that. My god mother flew to Paris for a week, which we were all sad about, but she is coming back at the end for another 10 days. The kids and I are all having a lot of fun with her, and we haven't even left the village.

I have endeavoured to pick up the paint brush again, there have been times in my life where I had a little facility with it, so I have begun the underpainting of a watercolour of the hills that surround us. I can do sky and sea pretty well, having spent quite a lot of time looking at them, studying them for my well being and the well being of my family, and generally being wildly in love with the sea and the sky for, oh, years. Mountains and forests, while not exactly a novelty, have not up until now been the focus of my observations, so I am starting out. I would like to beautifully paint one tree before I'm done. One tree, executed well, and I will be pleased.






These photos are three stages of a sketch/underpainting/experiment so please do not feel obliged to comment one way or another. They have a very long way to go, and may well end up in the bin. But that's one of the things I was working on today.

Best wishes and hopes and caring thoughts go out to all of you who are facing adversity with all the courage and strength you can muster. Wish I could send you more.

aaaagghghgggggggggggghhhhh!

Blogger...I'm hatin' ya...

I had a big 15 min to write today's post, and it took me 10 whole minutes to get into this screen. WTF?

Hmmmm...could also be telefonica...the Spanish Bell Canada/Verizon, that everyone loves to hate.

Well, I don't have time.

No time no time NOTIMENOTIMENOTIMENOTIME!!!!

So, coming soon ..... well, in several hours when I am finished work...

wild boar
baby wild boar

really really ugly haircuts

more tunnels.....

see ya soon....

Mystery tunnels, and scratches and underwear.

Went for another long walk in the hills today with the dog...I love it up there...of course I eventually ended up bushwacking off the trail, there are vines that look like rose bushes, but they climb up trees and I cannot see the leaves...I felt the thorns though, and have the scars to show for it.



At one stage I was pushing through fifty feet of shoulder high rosemary bushes, in flower...it was almost too much, and I must smell amazing. It will hurt next time I am in Canada buying a five dollar bottle of rosemary...the smell was absolutely overwhelmingly wonderful. One of the things I trip over every now and then in the mountains are doorways set into the hills...I was walking, off the trail, up a dried river bed, having to bend double while I climbed for the entire distance when I came across this at the top of the hill......




I, with great excitement, want to believe that these tunnels that we see everywhere are old escape routes through the mountains, or out of the castle, or for guerrilla Catalans fighting the bad old, well, nearly everyone...there has certainly been enough fighting here for long enough that some of these tunnels certainly might have been used for hiding troops and ammunition...more likely though they were originally built by the farmers and peasants for storage of wine, or ice or tools, or well, I cannot think what, they are a long way up the mountain. The man is prosaically certain they are for storage. I am not so sure. These babies are armoured...look at this door. Metal with rivets all over it and a handle that I cannot figure out how it works.





I also got a bunch of pine nuts. The trees here are primarily pines and when the time comes the cones fall, and you can tear them apart and get the nuts out....The pine cones start to look like little more than a shell to carry the seeds, which is in fact their job, but never quite so apparent. Those two dark impressions are the packaging that the nuts rest in.





I got all of these from one cone, they are still in little hard nut casings that have to be hammered off afterwards, but the nuts inside are quite scrumptious. The kids love bashing away at them with the hammer and then eating the lovely little nuggets, it keeps them happy and busy for a long long time...





I scrambled up cliffs and over boulders in river beds, and through brambles and vines. I went through one section of different trees. Their branches had all died at the bottom, and they were twiggy and brittle. They were also low and I had to force my way through bent double, the dog bounding gleefully ahead of me, better shaped for this part of the forest. A word of advice, when doing that sort of climbing, wear a really loooonnngggggggggg shirt. I had twigs in my underwear by the end, and I had to drop my drawers and clear everything out twice, and there were still twigs falling out the bottom of my pant legs a mile further on. Not totally comfortable.

I also talked to Nomad on the phone, after her visit there were a few things left behind. One of the endearing things about her is that every single time she comes to visit she leaves something behind. I like to believe that it is because subconsciously she doesn't want to be completely gone. Works for me. Anyway, we mailed back some children's socks, a toy, a book, and a pair of Nomad's underwear that turned up in the wash. When I talked to her on the phone, seems that I have sent her a clean but used pair of someone else's underwear. I have NO idea whose....fairly hilarious. A gift. Used underwear.

Ah well.

I am going to be studying Catalan for an hour again today with my buddy, wish me luck. I am going to get her to check what I have done with the pronouns and ask her a few questions about some aspects of the language that I am currently confused about.

SPIDERS!

Aren't these cool? I saw them the other day, and they are the homes and hunting lairs of spiders......I have to do some homework on what types of spiders they are, but presumably they notice something bumbling across the bits of web outside and leap out and grab them, dragging them back into their lair....

We had the most spectacular weather today, it has been hot and hazy, and then it got more and more grey and then black out...then it let loose....thunder, pounding rain, lightning....the works. It was incredibly windy as well. Then it was over, and it is a beautiful clear sunny day...still very wind and hot, a bit like living in a blow drier....feeling a little parched.

This is the center of a round-about in the industrial part of town. Doesn't look like much, but all of those plants in it, the low ones, are lavender. You would not believe how good the smell is. Chuck was all excited as well, and rather difficult to walk with the rain must have brought life to a thousand old smells, he wanted to sniff and pee EVERYWHERE....we had rather a slow walk.



More political graffiti....Franco is dead....and the Catalan flag.

It has been a quiet day overall, work and chat and I just had a long telephone meeting with the friends we are creating the camp with for the summer....it is looking very good, we have hired the main counsellor and we are taking it from there....I am getting excited about it all. The girls are as well.

Now I have still more work again....only two classes tonight tomorrow we may go into BCN, I am not sure how many of us at this point. My god-mother made lunch for us all which was absolutely lovely, and she has brought us some delicious bread from up in Northern Europe.

Lucky us!

Gotta run, literally

Politics and BCN

The local mayoral race is on here, and the politics are heating up. Even I am getting to understand them. There are eight people running, seven of them calling themselves the left of some form, one of them right out calling themselves socialists. There is only one right wing group that I can discern, PP who are the Francoists, or once Francoists...anti-immigration right wing, but not really terrifyingly far right. They probably exist in Spain, indeed I am certain there are some, but they don't seem to be running for government locally...

The political graffiti seems to be building this one I found particularily confusing....the circle and lines is a Catalan flag, "contra Espanya" is obviously 'against Spain', canya however means cane or reed, like a fishing cane....hmmmmmm 'reed against Spain' there must be more to it.

I went into BCN this morning to pick up my God mother, well, sort of god mother, I was never baptised, but she adopted me as god daughter anyway. It is going to be great having her here. She's here for 3 days or so, and then gone for a week, and then here another 10 or so....

My time in BCN however was less exciting. I sat at the bus stop where the airport bus comes in for two hours or so....it was sunny and hot and when I moved into the shade, the ground was sticky where a British tourist had spilled a coke, inadequately cleaned up and then left the dirty tissue on the seat. Lovely.

There were cops hanging around all the time, and by the time I had been there a while I was just waiting for one of them to come up to me and ask what I was doing. Every single airport bus that came up, I got up and mingled with the crowd to see if my friend had arrived. They come every six minutes. Did I look like a pick-pocket? Quite possibly. But, she got there before I got questioned. HOT.

My husband and the girls and the dog went up into the mountains....they got back, the girls immediately went up on the terrace and hosed themselves off, the dog gave me one quick sniff and lay down, the man got a drink and then had a shower.

My god mother is having a nap, then we'll probably go for a walk....the girls are doing watercolour work, I see the need for more paper in the near future....

A friend is here, I avoided sun stroke and it's a beautiful sunny Sunday. Life is good.

Hunger, shoes and looking Catalan.

We had a meeting at work last night, it was one of those times when cultural differences hit you in the face. It was scheduled from 7 to 9 PM, on a Friday night. No one had had dinner, and most of the women were straight from work. There was no coffee. There was no tea. No donuts, cookies snacks of any form. One of the ladies wandered out and got the basket of sugar free candies from the staff room.

About 8:30 pm someone flicked a switch in my head and I went from generally understanding the Catalan at the meeting to hearing nothing but garbled noise. I went and got some cookies. I offered them around, no one took any. I ate four, after which I started to understand Catalan again. After the meeting I suggested that we should order a pizza for those meetings. They actually laughed.

Can you imagine a meeting from 7 to 9 at night, when NO one has eaten dinner, and there wasn't even water to drink?

Gurk.

My Aunt took a choir group of teens through Spain, and they all nearly starved to death, no food when the kids needed it, and far too much either just before they had to sing, or so late they were too tired to eat....

I can so see it.



...and what a bunch of gossips...and politics, and well, the meeting was funny sometimes too.

Today the girls and I went shopping in the nearest biggish town...youngest needed new shoes...these are what we got....



She wanted sandals, that were colourful, but which were still good for running and kicking a ball, these seemed to fit the bill and weren't too brutally expensive.

I also ended up doing quite the Catalan assimilation thing today. I got one of these shopping baskets that everyone uses, even the men....although I got this one because most of them have what I consider to be a rather ugly quilted floral patterned lining. Just me, but I think it's ugly, it also means that you can't hose it off if the tomatoes get mushed inside your bag....



I like the thick braided leather handles and the leather clasp...makes the bag for me. The girls were concerned that it would attract pick-pockets because it doesn't close properly...I think no, it looks too local, and no one every has anything but beach towels and groceries in them. Which is also probably all I will have. I got it also partially as a bid to reduce the outrageous number of plastic bags we all use, and which are a serious hazard to marine mammals and reptiles. They eat them and die.

We got art paper, water colour pads for youngest and I, and an artists sketching mannequin for eldest....

Finally I got these, we would call them espadrilles, but the Catalan's call them espardenyes.....they are for wearing around the house in theory, we'll see what happens, the berks went off to a shoe maker...everyone cross your fingers please...maybe they will be in good form when they come back. Every has espardenyes, they are only 6 Euros each and are pretty much disposable. Starting to look more and more like a local. Dog, kids, espardenyes, and a shopping bag.




We also stopped at a place that had been recommended as having great chocolate and xuxos (pronounced choochos)....pastries, deep fried and sugared and filled with custard usually. Well, the xuxos were so good they got eaten before I got a chance to take a photos, but here is the chocolate, the Catalans make it very very thick, more like eating really good hot chocolate pudding....



The spoon wouldn't quite stand....

Good day for the beach, and we have movie night tonight.

........later............

click. click. click. click.

click. click. click. click.

Youngest is in the bathroom playing with the light...I am about to bellow out something loving and motherly like, "Leave the freaking light switch alone, you know better than that."

......when.....

"Hey Mom,"

"What"

"Hey, this is cool! My pupils get smaller in the light!!!!!"

"Yeah, neat eh?"

click click click click click click click

"Do everyone's do that?"

I LOVE having kids around.

Funny start to the day

I made a big switch on the bed last night...we have been sweating under the duvet for a while now...I kind of like Duvets, but they are rather all or nothing, and there are times when that doesn't work. We are there. The other problem we were having was that the dog was gradually stealing the covers every night. He would lie on the floor, on my side of the bed, on the little bit of cover that reached down that far. By morning, he had a good couple of feet of duvet, and the husband had none. This was compounded if the man came back and lay down on top of the bed before going to work, which is kind of his routine...he gets up extra early and then lies around listening to the radio on the head-phones till it is time to go. The only problem is that with the dog pinning down one side, and then the man lying on top of the covers on the other, I was waking up in sweaty imprisoned nightmares, pinned tightly down by the two of them, and way way too hot....

The duvet is gone, and I hung the dog hair duvet cover on the line....


I was joking with the kids this morning about how some people worry over and take care of things as if they were their first born child. There was a pause, and then youngest piped up, "What about the second born?" Oops.


The eldest went off to the local museum today, they have been doing a sort of dawn of man to modern times romp through history this year, and one of the neat things about being here is that we have a bit of everything in this town. There are ancient neolithic tombs, roman ruins, mediaeval churches and castles and tombs and houses, Feudalism basically continued here until the dawn of the industrial revolution, and then was dealt a death blow by the introduction of a California worm that killed every grape vine in Spain. That sounds like an exaggeration, but isn't. It pushed most of the rest of the farming peasants off the land. The feudal agreements around land between the peasants and the lords were based on the lifespan of the vine. When all the vines died, the leases all came up. Many were not renewed. Later they introduced vines that were resistant to the insects, but they were not as long lived as the originals, and so the leases were shorter, and often the vines were planted, not by peasants anyway....

It is interesting walking in the hills here, so much of it is still terraced, you can see how far and wide the cultivation has been, and how little there is now. In the hills, there is little more than home cultivation patches...big, but certainly not enough to make a living from the sales. There are bigger growers, many of them, but they are further down where the land is flatter.



Walking through these once terraced areas is strange. They feel at times like Northern Ontario.



At others like Georgian Bay, up on the Canadian Shield, and at others, it feels like Arizona. Cactai and heat and poor soil.



There are trees on most of the old terraced areas now, and scrub bushes, as well as rosemary thyme, asparagus, and anise growing wild....it is like the soil is being replenished and reserved. Re-enriched by this long fallow period. Wealth and bounty waiting for it's time. Health rebuilding in the soil.

This morning I was staggering off to the baker to get a couple of loafs of bread when one of the local tradesman's trucks went by...out the window, a cheerful voice shouted, "Good morning"

"Hola" I shouted back, took a couple more steps and spun around..."Hey! That was in English!" We all laughed pretty hard at my giant double take, and he said something else, but the truck was noisy, the street narrow and he was almost gone...next time I see him I'll have to chat with him about where he learned English, and how much he knows. God only knows how many languages this man speaks, I am assuming that he is North African since he is black, I know he speaks Spanish as he has legal work here, his English, what little I heard, was accentless, and it is possible he speaks something else as his native tongue, as well as at least some Catalan, and maybe quite a bit. He's got a good sense of humour too, brightened my morning quite a bit.

The local tradesmen are not like the neanderthals gentlemen I was discussing in my previous post, who are brought in by a larger company. The tradesmen live here, and their kids go to school with mine. If they think things like the construction workers at least they keep their mouths shut, which goes a long way.

Funny way to start the day.

RANT

There is a construction site near where we are living, and I go by it every day on my way to work. Sometimes several times a day. Now here is an interesting observation....the guys working on the site were initially WAY down underground...it is built into a hill, and at the top end, they were at least 70 feet down. While down there they never said anything to me as I walked by, not when I saw them in the street, nor while they are working. As the project grew upwards, still, they were silent...but now suddenly they are above the road level, and every single time I walk by the site someone says something. Every time.

I don't know what sort of warped delusion construction workers exist in...do they really think that passing women are going to be so overtaken by lust at the slimy things these fat stinking sun-burnt slobs are shouting that we are immediately going to strip naked and run across the exposed rebar and moist concrete in the hopes that they can fulfill our desperate needs?

WTF?

The man, who used to work in the construction industry, once tried to tell me that this is a cliche and that construction workers don't shout lewd comments at any female that isn't actually in a casket, they are far to busy....After I wiped up the juice I had snorted out my nose when overcome with hysterical laughter at this entirely bizarre and hopelessly incorrect comment, I disillusioned sweety about the realities of this charming group of humans.

If you are a construction worker who shouts at passing women, and you read this....remember other assholes say the same things to your wife and daughters.....

Did you ever notice that dogs are also more aggressive when they are physically higher up...like the top of the stairs or a wall. Seems some of us haven't evolved very far.

In all honesty, I have no idea what these *ahem* gentlemen *cough* are saying to me, as I don't understand the language, but I will admit that, while I am tarring them with their North American brethren's brush, I doubt I want to understand.

Ants, grammar and food......

I just noticed that yesterday's post was number 200...hmmm, that's a lot.

Blah blah blah blah blah, eh?

The lovely Catalan lady came over and helped me with grammar yesterday, and the pronouns are even more complicated than I wrote yesterday. A good deal more complicated, but the good thing is that I understand them better, clearly...now I am down to the memorisation stage, but at least I largely understand what to memorise which is frankly a big step forward....

I was up late last night working on it, and came up with some further questions. I debated waking the man up, but thought that it would be cruel and unusual to wake someone from a sound sleep and force them to think about grammar rules. More like a nightmare. I asked one of the teachers at the language school, and she could sort of answer me, but, like most native speakers of any language, she doesn't know her own grammatical rules well, and floundered before giving me a half answer....I'll think about it and ask again.

I walked the dog in the afternoon yesterday up in the hills again, gosh I love it up there....





I saw that egg up there as well, I have no idea what kind of bird it is, obviously we need a book....

While I was up there I sat on a lovely shady rock with a view of the sea, it was cool, there was a breeze, Chuck was sitting next to me...I looked down and saw a couple of ants. Really really big ants. Hmm I thought, ants.

I looked around at the view for a while...can you see where this is going?

Hmmmm, I thought, there is something itching my side....and my back....

I looked down and there were HUNDREDS of Really Biggggggg Ants...Hundreds.

Well, I stood up fairly fast and ran down the hill a bit, still kinda itchy inside my shirt. Whipped that sucker off pretty darn fast. The girls would have been SO embarrassed, but no way was I doing anything else. I shook it out pretty thoroughly, whipped it over my back a few times, and got dressed again. Chuck is looking at me, kinda perplexed and made a few half-hearted attempts at starting a game with my shirt. These were firmly discouraged.

Ok, all's well...about 3 minutes later I see something moving on my hat brim...you guessed it. Hat off, head upside down being shaken out, um, rather ahhh vigorously.... That cleared the last ones out. Sheesh.

Got a little treat at lunch today...



Yup, that is a chocolate dipped croissant. How good is that. The only thing they could add would be a chocolate filling as well, that would be decadent to the point of nausea.

One of the women at work lent us a tape of the multiplication tables being sung in Catalan...I'm getting good at them. The kids may not know them in English eventually, although they are better at them in English still....it's a pretty cool tape. "quatre per quatre, setze...."

Halo, daily life and pronouns...

For the last few mornings when I have been out walking Chuck, I have heard a cuckoo...which was initially quite exciting, but over time I came to the realisation that a wild cuckoo sounds indeed rather a lot like a cuckoo clock that doesn't stop. Unless they have another call that I don't recognise and which is completely different, this has got to be one of the single most monotonous birds on the planet.

The beach looks glorious today and I so want to go, but I must polish my halo today and get on with a bunch of tasks that are hanging over me, they are getting done, but I can just about feel my brain melting out my ears. These chores require great concentration and are simultaneously boring. Must be a bit like crop dusting. Though the payback for inattention is not quite as drastic.

Here are some silly mundane photos of my home that I took to get a break, and try to stuff my brain back in my ears...

The music I am listening to right now...they are an awesome French Canadian folk group with an amazing get your butt out of the chair and start dancing around like a fool sound. The man likes it less than I do.

The wine that gets delivered:


The last of the blankets for the living room thrown over a chair...it is headed for the wash pretty soon, we don't really need it any more. Maybe it could go on my bed, the duvet is too hot now, but one little blanket is too little, I keep waking up all sweaty.


Our doorstop that we picked up and hauled back in the mountains...a lovely bit of rock, and part of why sculptors have been coming to Catalonia for centuries...you can see that we need to sweep again...too bad, bwa ha ha ha ha


Gotta go buy fruit and veg. Normally I go today, but I had to carve this time out for the halo polishing, we'll just have to wait on the fresh veg...tomorrow's market day, so what the heck.






I have been struggling with Catalan pronouns as well as a break from other things...it wodges and constipates my brain up so thoroughly that it helps...the pronouns in this language are outrageously and offensively complicated. Not only do they have the usual run of them, but they are different for the direct and indirect objects, for reflexive and possessive, this is pretty normal, but also they through in some extras that don't exist in other languages just for the heck of it, and too confuse outsiders like me....I will give some examples so that you also can get a constipated mind...aren't I generous? Though you could easily just skip this section....

For the direct object pronouns...as in Joan saw me, me being the pronoun we have
em/m' (me)
et/t' (you) also it
el/l' (him) also it
la/l' - her
ens - us
us - you
els - them for guys - also it
les - them feminine - also it

these go before the verb generally, and the singular can be altered to the shortened form if the verb starts with a vowel or an h...

still with me?

indirect pronouns

as in, she gave the book to me

here we have em/m' -to me
et/t'- to you
li to him, her or it
ens - to us
us - to you
els - to them

these also go before the verb, and other than the first two don't seem to be abbreviated ever..why I don't know. How you handle a sentence like
I gave it to him I am not sure...

They don't use the first pronoun, it is included in the verb so we have
el dono a li???? it (I) gave to him???/

haven't gotten that far..

Then there are some extras...
en/n' is one...it is used as an article, as in the and a, but also a pronoun, when the quantity is not certain, but is more than zero...this is another form of it
Joan ate bread - En Joan va mengar pa (En=the, Joan is a name, va mengar=ate, pa= bread)
Joan ate it becomes En Joan en va mengar.

Then they also use 'ho' as a pronoun, I think again as a form of it...I haven't got this one at all...

That is only the first two of four chapters, in Catalan from this amazingly good Catalan grammar I have been lent. While this is still pretty darned opaque, there is at least a clear explanation with GOOD EXAMPLES!!!! this is what I needed....Yeah!

*phew*

Off to study more...

*gasp*