Thursday, April 28, 2016

I am enormously encouraged by your Sous Sous experience, Pascoag Girl (comment yesterday). We’ll both get there in the end, I am sure. And, for the moment, I feel I have your permission to knit on, on the half-brioche sweater. I am within about four rows of finishing the tedious initial ribbing on the front.

I am also enormously encouraged by having been able to write the preceding paragraph. I was sitting here just now, blamelessly arranging my thoughts, when the computer went ding, ding, ding and thereafter everything I typed was in the Greek alphabet. Even when I closed Word and went back to my emails, everything I said was in Greek. If I had tried to do it, it would have taken me at least an agonized half-hour. I solved the problem (thank goodness) by restarting the computer. I want to try to find out what combination of keys I must have hit to produce so remarkable an effect, but meanwhile I am profoundly grateful to be back with Times Roman.

I think I felt a bit as King Midas must have, when everything he touched turned to gold. It’s no use invoking Help and typing in “alphabet” if you type in “alphabet” in Greek and Help says it doesn’t know what you mean.

My husband has a genius for creating unexpected computer problems by just looking at the screen, but even he has never achieved that one.


Genetics: Rachel says that Thomas and Lizzie, the eldest and youngest of her four children, have her brown eyes -- Thomas, of course, being the father of the wonderful Juliet. My own eyes are a sort of washed-out blue, and my husband has always claimed that his are hazel. He was an orphan when I met him. We have a drawing of his father which makes it pretty clear that his eyes were light in colour, but I don’t know about his mother. And you may well be right, Knitlass, that Juliet’s eyes are kitten-blue at the moment, rather than brown. 

8 comments:

  1. Having your computer speak Greek must have been fun. We used to have a neighbor who would call us from time to time to ask for my husband's help because her television was speaking Spanish again. Makes you feel for those who move to a new country without being fluent in the language. I'm glad you're back to English.

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  2. Maybe you were designing? In type layout (at least in the olden days) they called filling columns with nonsense text Greeking. (In fact, it is usually mixed-up Latin from Cicero - Lorem ipsum ) to see how a layout looks before there is actual type. The classics are ever with us.

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  3. Juliet is a beautiful little girl!

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  4. Anonymous1:43 PM

    Wikipedia has a nice bit of history on the “lorem ipsum” business, although none has ever explained why fractured Cicero became the text of choice.
    As for the Greek keyboard, you can toggle between selected languages and keyboard layouts by pressing ALT + SHIFT on some systems. Perhaps that is what happened? Glad restarting fixed it; otherwise we would be correcting your Greek accents for days! (Despite a Ph.D. in it, I still struggle with getting ancient Greek accents in the right place.)
    cheers,
    CKP

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  5. Syd T.4:10 PM

    Ohhh that Juliet has the look of a wise but very amused young one...she is going to be one to watch...oh the places she will go!

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  7. Thank you for the restaurant recommendation from your trip to London last February. My husband and I are visiting and just had a great dinner at the Chicken Shop. We tried the corn on the cob but nothing beats fresh local corn, but everything else we tried was super.

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  8. Now that's an adorable little one. Eye color can be weird in the way it passes, too. My mom's got green eyes with so much gold they look brown, my dad has/had blue, as did my mom's mom, and I got their blue.
    I think it's like 2 or 3 genes at least, maybe more, with brown and black being more dominant, and the lighter colors being more recessive, with blue either being the least recessive or simply a more common gene?
    But darker eyes have advantages, less chance of cataracts for one (light-colored eyes have less pigment just like light skin, which is also why babies are born blue-eyed, as blue eyes have the least amount of pigment).

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