cappyhead

Yesterday, I finished up the background of the painting I had been working on. I'm not sure if the foreground needs to be lighter or not. At least, the tedious part is finished, so now I can work on the other parts. If I need to adjust the colors, that isn't so hard to do. I also drew in the AT-ST (the walkers that the Ewok's destroyed in Return of the Jedi) into the tall painting of Endor. We're both happy with the initial sketch, and I am definitely looking forward to getting that done, since the project has been dragging on forever. It should look nice, though, when it is done.

I had a webpage when I was studying Russian for flashcards. That worked well, but it was very much set up for Russian. Now, I'm studying Portuguese, and I find that I need something similar. I have a paid program that I use, but it doesn't have all the words I need, and I can't add new ones. So, as I prepare to work more on Portuguese, it is time to revive that flashcard website.

Since a lot of my websites broke when I upgraded to PHP8 a while back, I expected the flashcard site to just puke errors all over itself when I opened it up again. However, it has been surprisingly stable. So, I'm just working through it one step at a time to get everything set up to handle more than one language.

So, the government reimbursed me for the neurofeedback. Yay! I went into the closest town with a branch of my bank to deposit the check, and now that is all done. Phew! However, it occurs to me that this may be the first time (or one of the first) that I've gone into town on the bus, stayed until another bus arrived, and taken the bus back. Previously, I freaked out and got an Uber home. It is a good reminder that I'm not going from moderately functional to very functional with neurofeedback. I'm going from completely unable to handle almost anything to better than that.

In other news, Joel came up with this fantastic idea for the armoire (did I already say this?). He will paint the panels, which were of a different wood than the rest of the armoire and would need to be stained to match, black and then I will paint the door from Lord of the Rings that only showed in moonlight. (here it is) Probably one of the other panels would have the tree from the banner of Gondor. I'm super pleased with this.

Quite a while back, I bought a couple of ebooks by Irving Finkel on Amazon, but I never got around to reading them. Now that I'm reading more, I wanted to fix that. Happily, I was able to find audiobooks in the library, so that was solved.

Why, though, did I want so much to read these books?

Dr. Irving Finkel "is an English philologist and Assyriologist. He is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he specialises in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia." He is also a minor internet celebrity, mainly I think because he is funny, has a big white beard, and a halo of fluffy white hair. (Here is an interview, if you want to get an idea of what he is like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9cLjQqVtGg.)

I'm only about an hour into the book, but so far, it is just excellent. Incredibly interesting and quite funny.

There are quince trees all up and down the street that runs to our house, and the fruit fall and end up in the road and the gutters. Quince are prepared with sugar, so I've never had much interest in them. Also, they belong to the land owners, I think. However, after two falls of seeing no one show the slightest interest in the quince in the road, I decided to pick up some of the more or less okay fruit and see if I can use them to make jam. I got the fruit and prepped them, but the AI says that I should have some lemon to make the jam, so I froze the prepped quince and will take them out to make jam when one of the lemons on the tree is ready. They have a lovely smell, so I hope they will be delightful for Joel.