Month: April 2008

A day at work brought to you by the letter C…

… and the letters H, L, M, P, Q, S, T and X. I’m pretending to be a programmer again and putting a demo together to try to persuade my boss’s boss’s boss to give us money to do something. It’s all very web-ish, and all the abbreviations are making my head swim: SQL, PHP, XML, XSLT, HTML and CSS, with some magic pixie dust via Scriptaculous. I now know only enough to be dangerous with some of them, and less with the rest.

Shaping up

Tots and Nots started with French, using a shapes and colours game of L’s (much to her disgust!) to revise rouge, vert, bleu, jaune and learn un carre, un rond/cercle, un demi-rond, un triangle, un rectangle. Supplementary vocab included un de (and lancer le de), un clown and je voudrais… Oh and c’est a moi 🙂
We started with L, K and E, then when J and J were having their go SB arrived and joined in too (vocab list mostly for your benefit Helen 😉 ) with K helping her on words she did not know having missed intro.

French went on until pretty much snacktime, then after snack we did some Latin – a whistlestop tour of Minimus ch. 2 ready to start ch. 3 next time, then a worksheet from the Vindolanda website about being in the Roman army. We got into a fairly detailed discussion of what shape was best for a shield (rectangular so it can tessellate) and for a fort (round, square and rectangular all had their supporters; triangular was universally rejected). They all earned their legionary certificates, then we finished with the story of Daedalus and Icarus: a stark warning to listen to your parents 😉

By sheer coincidence Gina had brought along a craft activity involving squares, but I’m not sure mine got round to doing it – must check, as it would fit nicely 🙂

Blokus and chess also happened, and some long involved game with dens which threatened to exclude some of the children and led to a heavy talk (mostly from me but with some child input) about involving people…
It was quite late by the time we were all cleared away, piano lessoned, finished playing outside and so forth, but we have Bob’s parents here for the weekend and no time to shop tomorrow so came home via supermarkets and didn’t beat Bob by much.

A very snotty and a bit clingy,so once we were home not much happened until Bob got here, when he took her and the boys to collect a prescription while L and I thought about tea. She fell asleep in the sling and he ended up going out again for chips. Oops!

Pinched from a good friend…

A local dignitary is visiting an Edinburgh hospital. He enters a ward full of patients with no obvious sign of injury or illness and greets one. The patient replies:

“Fair fa your honest sonsie face,
Great chieftain o the puddin race,
Aboon them a ye take yer place,
Painch, tripe or thairm,
As langs my airm.”

The local VIP is confused, so he just grins and moves on to the next patient. The patient responds:

“Some hae meat an canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat an we can eat,
So let the Lord be thankit.”

Even more confused, and his grin now rictus-like, the VIP moves on to the next patient, who immediately begins to chant:

“Wee sleekit, cowerin, timrous beasty,
O the panic in thy breasty,
Thou needna start awa sae hastie,
Wi bickering brattle.”

Now seriously troubled, the visitor turns to the accompanying doctor and asks “Is this a psychiatric ward?”
“No,” replies the doctor, “this is the serious Burns unit.”

The language of genius

Three little linguistic nuggets, not really related other than they all cropped up this weekend.

Yesterday we went down to London to the baptism of Xavier. He was utterly well-behaved and cute throughout, and the church was lovely – a holy place. We had only met X through photos and email and, because of his mum’s linguistic background, I thought his name was pronounced in the French way i.e. zavvy-ay. Actually it isn’t, it’s pronounced zay-vee-er (rhymes with saviour), which I think is the way that Saint Xavier is pronounced at least in the UK. Any way his name is said, it was lovely to finally meet him and to spend time with his family again.

The second is with my grateful thanks to Mr. Portico who sent me this link – a work (video) of genius.

The last is a quote from Le Ton beau de Marot. I was inspired by the recent visit of the Off The Path crowd (among many others) at Easter to dust off the bits of my brain I stopped using when I finished university. I’ve had Gödel, Escher, Bach and Le Ton beau de Marot on my shelf for ages and only ever managed a few pages before my brain over-heated. I’m trying Le Ton beau de Marot again, and came across this passage:

Indeed, let us consider how they say “brassiere” or “bra” in German: Büstenhalter. To the German ear, this word busts apart naturally, yielding its meaning as “bustholder”. To my American ear, that sounds awful. I admit that it’s not just the fact that it’s a compound, but also its blunt consonants and vowels. Büstenhalter strikes me as just about as gawky as “blockbuster”. I’m not saying “bra” is a beautiful word, but at least it doesn’t sound like a harsh warning that a Communist border guard might have yelled out to stop some desperate would-be escapee from scaling the Berlin Wall.

I have German colleagues and customers whom I respect and like, but I still find German the language of engineering and precision whereas English and French are the languages of conveying meaning smoothly. (I’m very glad that all my dealings with German and French colleagues and partners have been in English – I’m amazed that they can cope with intense discussions of the details of entity-relationship diagrams and subtle meanings of requirements while speaking a foreign language.)

Hair

J asked me to cut his fringe. I agreed and sent him to get the hairdressing scissors. He disappeared upstairs for ages while I waited. Turns out he was having a go at doing his own hair :slap:

While he was proudly showing me his handiwork, bald spots and all 🙄 he left the scissors in the sink, where L found them and decided to play at sleepover parties. What do girls do at sleepover parties, she asked herself? Oh yes! They do their hair – so she did 🙁 J found her there when he went up to get the scissors so I could rescue his hair – “don’t worry though Mummy – she’s only done a little bit of cutting!” :wall:

So I’ve just spent the last half hour giving J effectively an army cut (to get it in proportion enough with the bald spots to not look stupid) but without actually shaving it, as he prefers long hair (so err… no, I won’t ask!), then shedding a few little tears as I bobbed L’s beautiful locks and finally trimming K’s fringe so he doesn’t feel left out!

Poor L. I don’t think she had twigged at all that cutting is permanent. Only this morning she was saying she can’t wait for her hair to get long enough to sit on (it was waistband length in ringlets, longer pulled straight) and as I was trying to decide what to do to rescue it she was sobbing and asking if we could get someone else’s hair to add on to the short bits to make it all long again. In the end I had to bob it, because she had cut most of one side and some of the underneath at the back to that length already. All the curl has gone now though 🙁 and most of the blonde 😥 plus her hair is really thick (each hair is thin but there are a lot of them) and doesn’t really suit a bob but she is desperate to grow it long again so we thought all one length would be easiest. All one length, that is, apart from the fringe, which is non-existent, as she copied her big brother and trimmed that up to the hairline 😯 Her suggestion, once she realised it would have to be cut short to match and would take ages to grow back? “Mummy, please can we not go anywhere for three weeks?”

Waaah! All those lovely blonde ringlets have gone and what’s left looks suspiciously like my hair, in which case it will never be curly again 😥