bits

 My little Tacoma mail truck had a strange issue today, I went over a bigger-than-I-thought dip in a parking lot and hit the pavement at a bad angle - and the whole truck jumped quite a bit - and then the gas pedal went to the floor and there was no vroom... but everything else was working and I couldn't figure it out.  The vehicle moved forward very very slowly, and did not accelerate - but braked fine, turned off and on fine, changed gears (same in Reverse - very very slowly, no acceleration possible, but braked fine).  Called my mechanic and sent him this picture and we worked out over the phone that the cable to the pedal had slipped out of it's harness bracket and thus, had no tension to be pulled back and forth by the pedal.  He instructed me to place the cable back in the harness and tighten up the nuts so that it held in place again - and all worked out good.  She still needs to go back to him for the fuel injectors are not sealed entirely... but I've been working all week and he's had the other vehicle so I've just been trying to limp to the moment we can exchange and get this hopefully small adjustment made, so she can go back on a longer route.  I went on a longer route with the company vehicle the other day because I didn't think she was safe to take out on that - and got a bunch of wire wrapped up around the drive train underneath in a you stay on the side-of-the-highway or be wiped by a semi-truck sort of thing... mailbox to mailbox etc, but the postmaster was able to cut it all out with wirecutters and then the vehicle worked ok for the rest of the trip.

So, vehicle excitements - let's not have any more, please?

I got some more seeds in the mail, some for our greenhouse operations, and some for the gardens.  I would like to use some time out there tomorrow.  I've been working on French and Spanish on my two Duolingo apps, and Russian - and backing that up with the Russian lessons on Busuu and Bulgarian and French on Clozemaster.  I got the little reading book in the mail for French, but it is a bit higher level than I had hoped to go over with my daughter - still good for me, but I will have to stick to the children's primers with her over our family chat line for a bit.  I realized a few months ago that I had been avoiding Chinese and Russian and a few other languages simply because well, those were the "growing up during the Cold War" type languages that why would you learn those unless you needed them for some reason?  But also, that I was missing some essential knowledge as a linguist-wanna-be by avoiding them, and how much Russian was similar to Czech and Bulgarian - which are some of my target languages... and encountering it in movies and a few animal videos I'm watching.  Then I found the course on Busuu and it is really really good - presenting things in a very understandable manner and also very different than on Duolingo (much more focus on spelling and understanding the grammar reasoning).. so, wow, I didn't think I'd be learning that this year, but I am.



Languages : (PROGRESS)

French :      L 25         XP 50804 20804 XP beyond Level 25
Welsh    :     L 24         XP 29792 +208 XP to next level
Spanish :     L 23         XP 24646 +1354 XP to next level
Japanese :     L 19        XP 14335 +665 XP to next level
Czech :         L 19        XP 13649 +1351 XP to next level
Romanian :   L 17        XP 11143 +857 XP to next level
Portuguese :  L 16       XP 9632 +868 XP to next level
Italian  :         L 15       XP 7625 +1375 XP to next level
Greek :           L 14       XP 6955 +545 XP to next level
German :        L 14       XP 6041 +1459 XP to next level
Finnish :         L 13       XP 5515 +485 XP to next level
Catalan (es) :  L 12       XP 4052 +848 XP to next level
Swedish  :       L 11       XP 3689 +211 XP to next level
Norwegian :    L 11       XP 3097 +803 XP to next level
Spanish (fr):    L 11       XP 3025 +875 XP to next level
Russian           L 11       XP 3007 +893 XP to next level
Hungarian :    L 10       XP 2438 +562 XP to next level
Ukrainian :     L 10       XP 2288 +712 XP to next level
Irish :             L 9          XP 2174 +76 XP to next level
Turkish :        L 9         XP 2044 +206 XP to next level
Polish :          L 9          XP 1798 +452 XP to next level
Chinese:        L 8         XP 1446 +204 XP to next level
Dutch :         L 7         XP 998 +127 XP to next level
Hindi :         L 7          XP 977 +148 XP to next level
Zulu :         L 7            XP 789 +336 XP to next level