Is it OK to say: "Can we talk in one hour" ? If I'm busy right now and I want to ask a person to talk to me later, can I say "can we talk in one hour" ? Maybe you can give another example. Thanks.

The New School Year Is Started! Today was first school day for my daughter. In fact, when I brought here to school at the morning, there were a lot of parked cars around the school, so I parked on the next street and we had to walk to the school by feet. It turned out, that there was a small ceremony for each kid entering the school, so all parents were stuck in the line waiting to enter the school at the school gate. It took time until we entered to her new class. Anyway, people here are happy that the school is begun and parents don't have to make arrangements for kids any more. It's a bit complicated when you are working and you have to take care after your small children.

What Happened Today. Today I had wake up earlier than usually. Even though it is my holiday and did not have to go to work I needed to bring my car to a garage for a regular maintenance service. I booked the visit at 7:30 because I would rather finish this business quickly and do not wast whole holiday for waiting a car in a garage. I think I was the first customer who showed up at the place immediately after the gate was opened. The car maintenance operation took less than two hours, while during this time I enjoyed reading my next English book in a waiting room. I think it was worth getting up earlier as at 09:30 I had my car serviced and ready for the next 15000 kilometers run, I benefited with one hour of amusing reading and I even managed to get back home to get breakfast with my family. PS: This is my seventh notebook entry on this week. So I have to admit that It's written mostly out of commitment to keep on my writing for seven days. Anyway I tried to use new expressions and words.

An Application Letter Dear Sir or Madam I would like to apply for a sales assistant post with French Dress Corporation, witch was advertised recently. I always have been a fashion enthusiast and if you look at my resume, which I enclosed in the letter, you will see that I have a great deal of experience in clothes sales sector. I have to mention though, that I am not available immediately because my contract in my current company requires one-month notice. I feel that I am the ideal candidate for this position and I strongly believe that French Dress Corporation and I will mutually benefit from our cooperation. Looking forward to hearing your reply in due course. Yours Faithfully. B. L.

People and cranes Today I want to tell a story that I recently heard from one of my English podcasts. The podcast topic was about ecologists trying to save a rare species of cranes. As I understood, today we do not have this kind of cranes living in wild, but there are several flocks of these birds in several zoos. As part of an effort to restore the population of these birds, the ecologists decided to return one of the flocks to a wild environment. They came up with an idea to use a light plane to lead the cranes to a conservation zone. I was surprised to discover that the pilot of the plane had rich experience in this unusual area and he performs this sort of flights with birds almost twenty years. The mission were successfully accomplished after several days and the whole flock arrived to its new home. Now, the ecologists had to teach the birds how to survive without a human help. When the cranes had been living in zoo they was fed by humans, but now, they had to learn how to feed themselves. People living in the area were asked do not give anything to the cranes. However, after a month or so, the ecologists tracked the birds that had been frequently visiting a backyard in one of the homes in a small town. They found out that in the backyard there was a feeder and the birds could always find food here. It turned out that in this home lived an old women. Her behavior were very stubborn; she did not want to listen to any explanations and constantly refused to remove the feeder from her backyard. Only after long and endless negotiations the true reason of her stubbornness was found out. She told that her husband suffered from Alzheimer decease. All that time she was helplessly watching how her beloved man was slowly disappearing, but one day she discovered these huge birds on the yard and she noticed that her husband was watching the birds. After a long period there was interest in his eyes. The birds did not help him to recover from decease, but they certainly brought an enormous relief to his sufferings. when he sat on a porch watching on noble white birds, it looked as if he had forgotten about his pain and enjoyed the life again. Keeping birds on the backyard helped to the old lady keep her husband alive. I have written only concise plot of this great story. It is sad and touching. You can listen the full story on the original website: http://www.radiolab.org/story/birds/

Five Hours In London Several years ago I and three my fellow workers had a business trip. On our way back we had a 7-hour connection in London. Only one of us had been to London before. We decided that we can not miss the opportunity and we are going to spend 4-5 hours in the famous city. Our next step was to agree about a destination. We didn't have too much time so we had to choose only one target and we would prefer the place located close to a subway station. In this way we would spend less time on transportation. One of my colleague didn't want to go to any place though, he said that he just needs to buy souvenirs for his children and his wife so he would rather separate from us at a subway station and he would return to the airport alone. Rest of our company came to decision that we must visit a traditional english pub. When we arrived on the subway to the city center we separated from our fourth colleague with agreement to catch up with him at the same subway station five hours later. Honestly we did not know where to look for a pub, but we assumed that it might not be hard in the center of London. After crossing the Piccadilly street we continued to couple of smaller streets and we came across to the place that we were looking for. It was small pub without tourists; it has only three tables on the first floor and four tables on the second floor. We had three hours to enjoy beer, chips and hamburgers and after it we made our way back to the subway station where we came from. Even though we thoroughly planned our schedule we found ourselves running through the London’s streets because we had only 15 minuter to the train departure. It was not easy after beer and hamburgers. Near the subway we bumped into our fourth companion who also was rushing all his way back. This small adventure successfully ended with jump into the almost missed train. Two hours later we embarked on our flight and the plane took a course to our home country.

How To Write The Most Readable Notebook Entry On Italki. Looking back through my 43 notebooks writing on italki I noticed that some entries has been viewed as twice as more than others. Moreover, it doesn't depend on the age of an entry. I assume that the answer to the riddle is the article's title. There is a good chance that your entry will be viewed by many "italkiers" if it has a catchy title. It can be something intriguing or confessing. Seems that people are curious to find out more about a person hiding behind an icon and especially if the profile picture doesn't contain a human image. Apparently all kinds of "howtos" articles also can be considered as a catchy category. People are interested to learn new tricks and tips especially for tasks required a great deal of time, such as language study, job search or maybe maintaining strong relationships. Couple words of advice specific to italki site. It is important to set the right target language for the article because your entry will be easily filtered out and your creation will not reach target audience. However I can't say anything about adding pictures to your writing because I didn't do it in my notebooks. So far it doesn't look to me as an important factor, but who knows, in my recent notebooks you can see that I started to put pictures. An additional things that might be taken in consideration are time of your publication and number of your followers. Of course, my findings are not something completely new. Students studying journalism or seasoned bloggers will find this writing amusing and amateurish, but I predict that this entry is going to be my one of the most viewed writing.

A Birthday Gift. There are many people who are scratching their head every year, trying to figure out which present to choose for a birthday. Presenting a gift on a birthday celebration is a quite popular tradition in many cultures and we found ourselves puzzled again and again having no idea for a gift. It seems as people are getting tired of the tradition and start cheating. The recurring nature of the tradition rubs off on choices that we do. It happens that people give money as a present or even worse it might be thing that people themselves have gotten as a gift. Most of us try to play fair however, and apply a practical approach in choosing a gift by trying to find something that can be useful in the household. We say: "Hey! This toaster might come in handy for Mr. D.! He eats toasts every day on a breakfast and his toaster is pretty old". We even don't care too much that Mr.D.'s toaster might still have been working well. "Let's present him the new one with this slick design and a temperature regulator. He can leave the old toaster as a backup and start using the new one right away!" - we exclaim with relief of getting rid of the burden of looking for a gift. People feel obligated by the tradition and by the peer pressure, but we have almost forgotten about origins of the tradition. The main goal of the gift is to express your sincere feeling towards your relative or friend. Your gift might not be handy on a kitchen, but it must remind to the person that has been gifted about your estimation and love. Maybe this is a main reason why we keep a simple children's painting over the years and we don't remember where the toaster come from after a half year.

Summer Writing Sprint Since my writing of new notebooks entries has been gradually decreasing, I've decided to challenge myself with commitment of writing an entry every day during 7 days. Each entry must contain at least 150 words. The most problematic part of this task is to find a theme for a story. I'm not a professional writer and I'm not sure that I could make up a story easily even in my native language. I have yet no idea what my next story is going to be about. There are suggestion of several writing ideas on italki, but I'd rather refrain from writing too much about my private life, though things like: funny experience or travel story could work for me. I'll not turn in a professional writer, nevertheless, it looks as it's going to be an interesting experience and I hope that I can pull it off.