Rosetta Stone Emergency!

I woke up at 4:51 a.m. today and did the eighth lesson of Greek Pimsleur. It was already pretty light outside. I noticed an elderly couple from the adjacent building sitting out on their balcony. They didn’t appear to be doing anything other than just sitting next to each other and watching it get light. It was romantic and peaceful to have them out there, maybe just 70 feet from our living room window, as I worked on my Greek. 

So peaceful, in fact, that at 6:00 I went back to bed for a couple of hours.

Rosetta Stone Has Cute Shopping Bags

Last night I had a Rosetta Stone emergency.

What happened is that wires suddenly emerged from the headset’s USB plug. These wires were not supposed to emerge.

It is hard to say what the cause was. I did not myself witness any collision between the headset and any unyielding, or even yielding, surface, but I cannot say for sure that there was no contact between it and, say, someone’s bottom. I do tend to leave the headset lying around on sofas.

I found it distressing at 11:00 last night not to be able to do my Rosetta Stone lesson precisely when I wanted to do my Rosetta Stone lesson. I hate technology problems.

So today I rushed down to their store/kiosk at the Time Warner Center. When I arrived, there was a Dutch couple in there trying to decide between Latin American Spanish and Spanish Spanish.

Oxford Dictionaries: Buy One, or Collect All Three (Or However Many There Are)

I interrupted the discussion between them and the salesman, who seemed to me to be underestimating how much this Dutch couple had probably known about multiple languages before his parents even graduated from high school, to buy a replacement headset for 30 bucks. I vowed to take better care of this one.

While I was there, I went into the adjacent Borders bookstore and was overjoyed to find an inexpensive Greek dictionary, from the same series as my beloved Italian and Russian dictionaries.

Strange. I have been searching online and did not ever come across this one through my standard searches. I didn’t know it existed. So there is a reason for bricks and mortar (or in this case, steel and glass) after all. Or maybe just for better online search capabilities.

Time Warner Center: View of a Generous Bottom

Incidentally, these little Oxford dictionaries are the perfect size for transporting around town. They have enough words that you are not constantly failing to find what you need, but also not so many words that you end up with backaches and broken zippers on your purses.

The statue to the left is what you see coming down the escalator from Rosetta Stone and Borders. It is by Fernando Botero and is the female companion piece to the male statue I mentioned recently, the one with the glowing penis. People pay way less attention to her, I have noticed.