A Grand Day Out

Those of you into Wallace and Gromit may recognize that title. My daughter loves those little cartoons.

Anyway, that title for me means that we have been invited by friends of my husband to eat at their house tonight with other guests, and then to stay the night and go hiking tomorrow. They all have kids our kids' age, so everything works out well.

That, plus the fact that a heavy storm knocked out our DSL router last night (I am working with a backup modem on my husband's computer) means that you won't get much blogging out of me for a few days till we get a replacement. This is a real pain, because I usually blog while lunch or dinner is cooking, and I can keep an eye on what the kids are doing. I can't very well do that from my husband's office in the house nextdoor. And to top that off, typing goes really slowly on my husband's French keyboard.

For those of you who have never seen any foreign language keyboards, and you've not taken the time to think about why keys aren't in alphabetical order, here's an explanation for you: the letters used most in the language the keyboard is intended to be typed in are in the most convenient places. Now who decided what is convenient is another issue entirely, but there's at least a reason the Z is in the bottom left corner instead of the middle. So, naturally, different languages use different letters with different frequency. We barely ever use the letter Q in English, but since most conjunctions and question words start with Q in French (que, quoi, qui, quel...), it's right where the A key is on American keyboards. Luckily, there aren't tons of differences in our keyboards, but those keys that are different, are, of course, those that you use most frequently. So, I'm sitting here typing with my two index fingers like a computer programmer (only slower - against all logic, those guys fly). The one can't quite figure out, though is the period key. You have to press the shift key to use it. Otherwise you get a sentence that ends like this; Silly, if you ask me, since they use periods at the end of each sentence, too. I guess maybe they are counting on you holding the shift key down through end of one sentence on into the beginning of the next to capitalize the first letter. I wasn't taught to type in French, though, so that's just a guess. Either way itt's annoying for someone using the keyboard to type in English.

Well, very quickly, a bit of knitting news: I finished the bird's nest scarf, though it needs to be blocked. I'll pictures and give more details later.