Zeeeee

We had a startling discovery yesterday. We can see daylight through a part of our apartment that we shouldn't. It's not the walls or ceiling.....IT'S THE FLOOR!!!! Our building is built into a cliff-like hill. We're on the ground floor in the front but our floor is the third one up in the back. We are seeing the light slantways towards the back of the building. There apparently is nothing between our floor boards and the outside world!!! This explains a fair amount like why we get so much dust in our apartment(we don't know if there is nothing but dirt directly below us or not), how cold our place gets is the night and how easily the damn bugs and spiders crawl in!! Since it's Sunday, we can't heckle the leasing agent about it today, so for now there is a big heavy phone book on the crack. (We hope the industrious bugs aren't strong enough to lift it off!) Very soon they (leasing agents) will be getting deal with the problem instead of us.

I'm teaching Ruth Ann how to make bassoon reeds. I'm hoping she'll have a natural talent to it so I don't have to deal with them. She's learned how to shape it pretty well, but we'll see how she does with the scoring and if she cracks up the middle of the tube. I have high hopes as she's learned the ins and outs of making oboe reeds. When she has finished her first one, we'll post a picture of it!

We had several amusing run-ins with Australianisms regarding the alphabet. An 'h' is pronounced with an 'h' sound to it so it sounds like 'haych' but not everybody says it like that. Also in the U.S. we all learned to say the letter 'Z' as zeeeee. Here they pronounce it 'zed.' While working in the library we've gotten several confusing looks been politely corrected by patrons when we say zeeee. We asked one of our friends, Ian, about this and he said, "Yeah, I used to think the band was called Zed Zed Top!"

Cheers!

~Mike