(no subject)

Leif is so neat.

I just caught him trying to stick a CD into the CD/DVD drive on the computer.

Christof wondered if perhaps he wanted to watch a movie, as that's the main reason he sees us stick discs in the drive, so I got out his movies and told him to choose one. He did, and seemed happy when we played it for him.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this. It seems clear that he knew what he was doing when he tried to put the CD in the drive, but whether it actually had anything to do with watching a movie is another question.

Still, it's very cool.

Yesterday we drank tomato juice with tabasco sauce. He liked it better than I did.

(no subject)

I know I shouldn't make fun of the mistakes of non-native English speakers, especially considering my poor grasp of Spanish after years of instruction, but this email we received (about an ebay auction) was too funny:

Would you send me to Brazil by Air Mail?
Payment PayPal.
I would like to know the sending cost for Air Mail for Brazil?
I would like to know if I won, if I could send the payment through payPal in 07/10,
the reason is the limit of purchases of my card this month. Thank you.

He asked only 45 minutes before the auction ended, and we didn't see it in time. He didn't win.

I received a spam today where the text appears to be an excerpt from White Fang. The HTML attachment is the actual spam. I'm sure this is common enough (I don't usually pay any attention to spam, but read this one by accident), but it was kind of neat.

As neat as spam can get, anyways.

Speaking of my poor grasp of Spanish... I've been thinking about it, and it makes a lot of sense that I can't understand Harry Potter. I have the vocabulary of a 2 or 3 year old. This means I have the opposite problem of someone who is learning to read in their native language - I can read the words just fine, but I don't have the vocabulary to know what they mean. I'm not entirely hopeless - some I remember, some are close enough to English that I can guess, and sometimes I can figure out from context.

I'm not sure I'd do all that much better with a book aimed at first graders. The vocabulary isn't all that much different - the sentences are just less complex.

I suppose if I work my way through it with a dictionary, I'll get there eventually.

I realize that none of this is exactly rocket science, but it helps me to think it through.