by A couple of weeks ago one of my students texted me to ask if I’d be interested in trying some pumpkin seed oil. I was in the middle of the lesson at the time and replied with a very quick yes, without even noticing that she’d mentioned the price of the stuff, and promptly forgot all about it. Last Monday she came with two half-litre bottles of the oil, which was only marginally cheaper by volume than printer ink. I paid up, and was actually glad I did. (If I’d seen the price I almost certainly would have refused, and would have missed out on trying something new.) I’ll give my friends in St Ives a bottle when I go over there in two weeks. Talking of expensive food items, I saw salak (a.k.a. “snake fruit”) on sale at Carrefour yesterday, at something like 70 lei per kilo. Plenty of people were picking it up, smelling it, stroking it, but not buying it.
This morning I saw a small brown dog, probably a mixed-breed stray dog (or vagabond dog as they say here) using the pedestrian crossing during rush-hour. It was fascinating to watch in a way, as it strode across into the middle of the road, scurried back, and then (with no urgency whatsoever) ambled to the other side. When my friends came over in the autumn, the roadsides in places were strewn with dead dogs.
I took a 180-point beating in Scrabble yesterday, my worst on ISC to date (I’ve still played less than 100 games). I performed a post-mortem on my thrashing in Quackle, and it turns out I didn’t play that badly. I did miss one bingo I should have spotted. I’ve only just started attempting to learn bingos. Up until now my focus has been on the short words.
It’s the second half of March. And it’s snowing.
