bits

 

  

I got Esme a Greek drachma for her birthday, and a book 'How to Tame a Fox (and build a dog)' - 'oh, it's about the silver fox project!', she said.  I thought she might find it interesting and it is nice to have something to hand to page through instead of just relying for it to be on the internet.  The coin isn't worth much, but I told her that - to our eye - she has been growing up quite wise for her age, and that we were proud of her.  And the owl is the 'owl of Athena' the Greek goddess of wisdom.

Grandma also gave her a few coins, which she is going to look up, and a pretty card with some for 'her shark fund', which is based on a joke I had made a few years ago about her going into an antique store and coming out with a wooden duck sculpture, after saying 'Now watch, I'll find a shark or something', to which I had to draw a comic about that.

I've got a cake in the oven for her for dinner tonight, and hopefully serve with bacon and eggs and cherries.

I found a little app called 'golingo' that is speaking exercises in multiple languages.  It only recognizes about 80-90% of my spoken French - maybe room for improvement, maybe error in the system.  It only gets about 50-60% of my Welsh and it has abbreviations like 'ut wyt ti' for 'how are you' instead of 'sut dych chi'.. don't know if that is North vs. South or modern street vs book learning etc etc... anyway, it's kind of a cool addition to learn something from.  A friend tried it for Greek, and didn't like it much at all. *shrug*  

I have been studying still a lot of Japanese, a bit more Czech, and French and Spanish (on the golingo), and went and dipped back into Latvian / Lithuanian vocabulary and had not forgotten too much of that.

I had given myself such a headache yesterday, trying to cut back on coffee for other health reasons for a few days... drinking juice and water and diluted tea, but it wasn't enough as I ended up with a raging migraine and all of the other fun joint popping and earache and other inflammation that happens when I try to stop coffee.  Back to half-strength today and I have to avoid the work coffee because it is just too strong and dark, it will get me right back to square one.