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Tuesday, December 04, 2018

Lacking senses

Last night we sang Away in a Manger at the beginning of Family Night. Zoë decided that she needed to accompany us so she went over to the (electric) piano, turned it on, put on the headphones, and pounded away while we all sang.

When she was finished she came back to us all looking rather proud of herself.

"That was wonderful, thank you," I said.

Andrew, Rachel, and Miriam also offered their compliments.

"Very nicely done."

"Great playing."

"I loved it!"

Zoë beamed with pride.

Benjamin, however, started to cry.

"I didn't hear her play!" he whined. "I didn't hear anything."

"That's because only little boys who behave can hear the piano," Rachel quickly (and savagely) answered.


Benjamin went from upset to devastated. His body shook with racking sobs, his lips were turning blue, he could hardly breathe for all the crying he was doing. He can be...a little melodramatic.

"She had the headphones on," I said, trying to reassure him. "None of us heard her play a single note (and a good thing, too, because she was making up her own music and it probably wouldn't have gone very well with what we were singing). You're just fine."

He eventually calmed down and we had a wonderful family night lesson about...Hanukkah. We played the dreidel game, watched a video about why Jews celebrate Hanukkah, talked about their Great-great-grandpa Ted's family, added a flame to our menorah, read the Hanukkah prayers, and recited the eleventh Article of Faith.

*****

Andrew has been, once again, interviewing like crazy this semester, which has been made even more crazy than it has been the last three years we've been on the job market by all the other craziness going on at our house lately. For example, he was supposed to do a fly-out the weekend his mother died (but the school was very understanding and allowed him to fly out later and we've been crossing our fingers and toes ever since).

He's done a few other tele-interviews and, most recently, has been emailing one particular school to set up some interview-y stuff. He shot off four emails to this school (eager beaver much?) but didn't get any response and was feeling rather nervous about it until someone else emailed him back and informed him that his email was...blank.

Looking through his "sent mail" folder had Andrew scratching his head because he could read the email he had sent to this person.

He forwarded the email back to her and asked if she could see it.

She didn't see him asking that but so helpfully emailed back to say that this email, too, was blank.

After much investigation, he found that because he'd recently switched his display to "dark," his font had automatically changed to white so it could show up on the darker background, and he'd accidentally left the box checked that made it so his sent mail would also be sent with white text.

Unfortunately, almost everyone else in the world sees their email on a white background, so if you send an email with white text to someone whose platform has a white background...they can't see anything you send them.

So he unchecked that box and solved that problem, but, oh, how we were laughing over that one!

2 comments:

  1. White font on an email. I didn't even realize this was a thing you could do...

    ReplyDelete