Saturday was a second visit to Brookfield Zoo (first for Colin) which happily turned out to be free admission for the day. It was colder and we ended up with only a couple hours to see things but the monkeys and apes were definitely a highlight. Then we bummed at a Caribou reading and sipping hot drinks until we went to meet up with the awesome Lenya for dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant. Then, all too soon, Becca had to leave to go back to her crazy busyness.
Apparently an earthquake started about 30 miles from here at 4 in the morning Tuesday, but everyone was so tired dealing with the load of snow (something like a foot?) that got dumped Monday that nobody noticed it. And it wasn't wimpy - 3.8 magnitude. Personally, I welcome the snow - it means people actually pay attention to their driving and don't get quite as impatient when you don't gun it the split second before the light turns green. Still had some idiots on the roads and everyone seems to be back to their normal driving habits now.
I've discovered a technology I wasn't aware of that is turning out to be quite useful. It's called web captel. Similar to TTY (which I've never used) except I get to talk out loud to the person on the other end and both read and hear what they say. Captions for telephones! It's not perfect - if you've ever been to live event or watched live news with captions you would have probably notice they lag a bit behind the speaking and sometimes have weird word combinations that are phonetically related to the word that was actually said. But it's still useful. I've only used Hamilton Web Captel but I'm going to try Sprint's since I've read that people like it better.
It's free and very simple to use, as long as you have a phone and a computer (with a web browser and internet connection). Go to https://web.hamiltoncaptel.com/index.asp. You have to sign in (easy signing up) and then put in your telephone number and the telephone number of the person you want to call then click "Call." It will dial you first then the other number and then you can look at the captions on the screen while talking. So far, you need an additional device (laptop or you can buy an additional special device to carry around with you) with one exception: you can call and read the captions on an iPhone.
Speaking of hearing-related technologies I've just tried, watching Sherlocke Holmes in the theatre last month was the first time I'd ever been able to utilize a captioning device in the theatres. They don't do it for all movies; apparently only one at any time ("It's Complicated" is captioned right now) but definitely a step up from any other theatre I've been to. It was harder to watch in the theatre than on the TV with captions since the captions are not right on the screen. You have wrestle with the mirror device so you can see the captions and then whenever you want to shift your position you have to move the device again. I felt like I missed quite a bit more of the actual visual parts of the movie but being able to follow along greatly made up for it.
And speaking of movies and TV, we watched "Faces of America" last night - PBS show following the genealogy of a handful of famous Americans including Yo-yo Ma, Meryl Streep, and Stephen Colbert. It was quite interesting; although there was nothing on how the information was actually found, it was a great way to hear stories connected to historical events such as the Holocaust and the Japanese Internment. Can't wait to see the next episode!
Still doing my personal genealogy research. Started looking at a branch that was in Michigan as early as 1850 but that we know little about. Definitely not as easy as looking for the Scandinavian roots when I found and connected with a cousin of my dad's who has done tons of research and there's a very active tree on geni.com (kind of like facebook for families).
A couple of silly things:
I'm still making my way through Julia Child's "My Life in France" and I run into words like "manuscripple" that I've never seen before but their meanings are clear. I searched for "manuscripple" using google and only found one hit - for an online copy of her book. She made this word up and it didn't catch on?? Imagine what would have happened if Shakespeare had used it. So now, here's to hoping google picks this entry up and displays it as the second result for "manuscripple."
There was an attempt to build a snowman today. Shaheli, Mike, and Fazal (some of Colin's coworkers) were corralled into this activity. However, the snow was too fluffy to actually pack into snowballs let alone roll into bigger balls. So we threw snow in a pile and patted it down, trying to make a mountain resemble a snowman. Then I snapped a picture (Fazal and Shaheli are on the left) with my phone before we went to get coffee and hot chocolate. Probably will get knocked down but oh well.
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