by We had beautiful weather at the start of last week with temperatures in the 20s, but we’ve been plunged right back into winter on 3rd April. We even had a light flurry of snow earlier today. Tennis has been impossible this weekend. What a turnaround.
I’ve got my new Samsung phone. I’m enjoying the extra real estate of a 6.5-inch screen, the battery lasts what feels like ages after my recent iPhone experience, and the camera does its job. The bad news is that I’m constantly monkeying around with settings to stop it from doing really maddening things, and failing almost every time, but at least I have a working phone. On Monday or Tuesday or whatever day it was, I FaceTimed my parents for the last time on my old phone; when I hung up, the battery percentage was way down into single figures, and no book no matter how heavy would keep the cable in place for it to charge. Damn. What about my contacts? My students and stuff? I’d tried importing them before with no success, so now there was only one thing for it: I scribbled down all the names and numbers as fast as I could before the battery went dead, which it did 15 minutes afterwards, and then tapped them all into my new phone manually.
Some people are easy to teach. Others aren’t. The eight-year-old girl I see on Skype each week is firmly in the latter category. Seriously, what am I supposed to do with her for an hour? What can I even give her that she can’t already get from YouTube? (I know she watches a lot of YouTube videos.) You’re bored, she told me on Friday, in the second half of the session when her father was (annoyingly) present. You’re telling me I’m boring, aren’t you? No, she doesn’t mean that, her father assured me. Of course not. Yeah, right. None of this is her fault, and I can only imagine what primary school teachers went through when they taught online during the pandemic.
Yesterday morning I had my maths lesson with Matei. We’re going through past “checkpoint” papers, which are exams they give you in the UK at age 14 but don’t immediately count for anything. (He’s going through the British system.) At the start of the session his mother gave me icre – fish-egg paste on pieces of bread, and doboș, a Hungarian layered cake. At ten in the morning, I had to work my way up to the icre, like edging into sea water that I know is too cold, but I finally took the plunge and it was fine. The doboș was delicious. After the session, his parents told me about an online influencer who knew all kinds of magic tricks to get people to view your content, and I was made to watch a video about him on their smart TV. Mercifully, it was only a few minutes long. What makes you think I should see this?
I looked at another property yesterday, and will get to see one more tomorrow. The owner of the place – a lady in her seventies and no more than five foot tall – was lovely. She seemed a typical older Romanian woman, with all her preserves jarred and labelled in the pantry. Talking to older Romanians gives me a fascinating window on their lives, and makes a nice change from hearing about ambitious career plans and trips to Greek islands.
I’ve been watching a weird series on Netflix, with a weirdly long title to match: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. Some exercises I did last week on car parts made me think of some other weirdly long titles from the recently (and sadly) departed Meat Loaf: I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That), and Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are. Both those songs were on the hugely successful Bat Out of Hell II album, which came out when I was a teenager.
This was my attempt at yesterday’s Wordle:
I was lucky to get so close with my second guess, but as for the actual solution, I thought, when did people start using this word? Luckily, there’s something called Google Ngrams which shows you how word frequencies have changed over time in printed material. You can even compare words, such as trope and tripe. Trope has indeed exploded in my lifetime:
Below is how the spelling of the country I live in has changed in English over two centuries. I certainly prefer the current spelling, which only took over in the 1970s. Note how mentions of Romania (spelt in any way) peaked during the Ceaușescu era, and dropped off a bit in the 1990s.
My mother still sometimes refers to the sort of computer you hold in your hand, like the one I’ve just bought, as a telephone:
It used to be unprintable, didn’t it? It’s now six times as printable as it was at the turn of the century.
