Modern Vespa

I'm guessing he's talking about the weather perhaps?

A replacement Oil Cooler.

This make me happy.

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Arts n crafts day

We'll probably be skiing until mid April this year. The snowfall has been a little below average. But so far March is getting more snow than average. Maybe we'll get a "March miracle" that extends our ski season. In 2023 the resorts around Tahoe were open until July!

Nice Ink!

Thanks but that's just the stencil.

I'll update once it's all healed, Bob got kinda juicy

Sitting in the front yard with a beer and Bruno listening to cars on the F1 track (currently the Porsche Carrera Cup).

I hope you've called noise control.

Asked them to turn it up

Yes. That exactly. The winter has been rough, not the bike.

Rode the Stella in this morning. 29º and clear. Not rough at all.

I bought a regular customer of the coffee shop that I go to a drink today after she realised that she'd forgotten her wallet.

She had the cutest Staffordshire Bull Terrier puppy so how could I not ?

That cheered me up.

But did you get her phone number? Enquiring minds want to know

ah, the old Staffordshire Bull Terrier puppy trick..

never fails

No, she's not my type and she has a partner.

The dog however is a total heart breaker.

I am very much looking forward to the opening weekend.

^^
+1

____________

I got my dirty mitts on my friend John's police service scooter. It's being delivered today.

Been hunting a service scoot for a long time. Pinch me. (And then punch me bc it's a Lambretta and Lammy's and I don't have the best history together.)

We're gonna need pics.

A friend offered to hook me up with a Lambretta deal once. I told him I was good. I mess with old Yamahas (this is on par with owning an old Jaguar, albeit one of the un-sexy ones) and I was already suffering plenty without a Lambretta in my life.

The temperature here yesterday was 60ºF. So, I put the battery back in my scoot, aired up the tires (they didn't lose much air over the winter), and went for a short 27 mile ride.
It was delightful, and is still cheering me up today! Riding weather is on the way - finally!

Hoje, terminámos a nossa aula de português. E isso está a deixar-me feliz.

Você deveria comemorar com uma torta amanhã.

Sim!

SS Windfall Penalty ended.
From '67 to '87 I worked and paid into SS.
Finally those 20 yrs have been acknowledged without penalty.
Think I'll take the Mrs for tacos tonight!



O.S.

4th grandchild and 1st granddaughter

Hi Eleanora 🩷

Congratulations

I have a coworker who is retiring in May because of this.

He learned that his income will be greater when retiring due to SS & pension income than if he were to continue working for the school district.

What completely? you've actually mastered the language and will never need another lesson?

If so, bravo

Oh, god no. We finished A1/A2, which gets us an official certificate that can be used in lieu of a language test when we apply for Portuguese citizenship. We've had class for 3 hours a day, four days a week, since the beginning of December.

We still have a long way to go to master the language.

Congratulations, Grandpa! Being a grandparent is the best!

I'm glad you got what you were due, finally. Take her to Mexico to eat tacos and really celebrate.

Most missed it - this restaurant is in Paris. (Govt. sent me a lump sum for the arrears!)
Treating it like found $.
(BTW: one of those years in that "20" - I paid no taxes. Actually, not sure if they collected SS that year. I was knocking back $7.91 a day as a medic, plus an additional $1.97 a day for the locals trying to kill me. Fortunately, a carton of Camels was only $2)

O.S.

Hey, wow--that's great! I'm straight up jealous about that. That's around 150hrs of class time?
Are you trying to speak at home and talk to the TV?

A little. I can read Portuguese (though slowly, and with occasional word lookups) and I can write basic sentences. I know all the basic grammar, and I know how to conjugate verbs in the basic tenses.

Speaking spontaneously is still quite difficult for me, though, and my oral comprehension is abysmal. We have been watching "Glória" on Netflix, in Portuguese with Portuguese subtitles. That has helped a bit, and we are looking for other media sources to help us get accustomed to hearing actual Portuguese speakers talk IRL.

We are finding that most television programming is nearly incomprehensible at our skill level -- the Portuguese are notorious for swallowing all their vowels when speaking. Portuguese radio is quite a bit more enunciated, though -- which I think is true in most languages.

One skill that I gained that I didn't really expect is the ability to touch-type with diacritics. I was already a fairly proficient touch-typist, but since English doesn't (generally) use any accented characters, my US-ENG keyboard doesn't (directly) support any accented characters either.

Fortunately, in recent years, macOS, iOS, and iPadOS have all gained pretty good support for adding diacritics to existing characters by holding down the character key for a moment longer than normal and then typing a single numeral from the diacritic menu that appears above the cursor. I quickly memorized the numerals that apply to Portuguese accented characters, and thus touch typing those characters becomes not too difficult.

à á ã é ê õ ç and so on.

But there is so much more to learn!

My pixel 8 (and the 6 before it) also allows for that with holding down, but you just slide to the one you want to use and release.

Sto ancora imparando l'italiano.

Apple support for non-English languages in their software ecosystem is stellar on default US hardware is nothing less than stellar. That said, I wonder if you'll at some point take the leap and get a Portuguese keyboard?

Yeah, that's how it works on iOS and iPadOS as well. And on macOS, you can use your mouse cursor to hit the correct accented letter as well. But for touch typing (and I mean that in the original sense -- typing on a keyboard by touch without looking at the keys), grabbing the mouse is a nonstarter, hence the numerical support.

I won't say never, but I am very much accustomed to an ANSI-layout keyboard and have difficulty on ISO keyboards (which all the Portuguese keyboards are). I can't even type very well on a keyboard with UK-EN keycaps, as it is also ISO.

The alphanumeric keys on an ISO keyboard are generally not the problem -- it's all the ancillary keys and symbols that programmers use every single day that pose the biggest challenge.

House a few doors down (townhouses) went on the market 7 days ago at more than double what we owe on ours (got it in 2010 after it was under short sale contract for 9 months and buyer bought a new car lolol...bank just wanted it sold so we got it about 15-20% lower than anything else in the area). It's already pending.

And it's not even summer, so.....inshallah we have decent luck.

I'm even happy to list at 25k less than they did just to sell it FAST (we'll still make plenty off the sale).

Or list at the same price and offer full closing costs for buyer if they're enlisted. Cause even retired I still want junior troops to be set up properly.

Also quite happy that this weekend we get to watch 19 very talented drivers and Lawrence Stroll's nepo-baby drive around Albert Park once again.

I've heard that people trying to learn English will watch soap operas because they speak slowly and clearly.

Is there anything like that in the Portuguese media?

Obviously this would only be a transitional step.

Portuguese telenovelas (their version of soap operas) are in fact plentiful, and also in fact incomprehensible by beginners. Also, Brazilian Portuguese media outnumbers European Portuguese media worldwide by an order of magnitude. And learning both Brazilian and European (or, worse, Brazilian when you need European, or vice versa) is a recipe for disaster. The two types of speaker can understand each other, but the differences between the two versions are substantial to be prohibitive for a beginner.