Thursday, January 14, 2010

Figuring It Out

It turns out my voice was no better when I woke up today than when I went to bed last night. I still felt ok, but when I opened my mouth not much came out.

If I had a desk job with no need to talk to anyone, I could have gone to work today with no problem. However, according to the day's lesson plan my activities included playing games with small groups, singing songs, and supervising a Play-Doh table at quiet time-all things that required talking. I left a very scratchy voice mail for the preschool office manager and an email for my classroom teacher and the school director saying I wouldn't be there.

Now what? I've never taken a sick day when I wasn't completely under the weather. When the boys were young, the house rule was if you're too sick to go to school, you're too sick to leave the house. If I followed that edict, any type of errands were out. By 9:30 I had caught up on all my e-mails, straightened the kitchen and family room, watered the plants, and completely read the newspaper. I opened the refrigerator later in the morning and noticed it was right-before-payday empty, so I took out all the shelves and gave it a good cleaning.

In an effort to make myself better, I kept gargling with vinegar, doing comparison taste tests of the five different types in the house. (In my opinion, balsamic is the best, but the rice wine was a close second). I occasionally tried speaking a sentence on the cats to see how I was doing; the results weren't pretty.

After lunch there was an e-mail in my Inbox that told me I had a comment on a blog post from some time back. However, I couldn't read the comment because it was in a foreign language that looked like Chinese! The comment needed moderation before it could be posted. Was it a real comment or spam? The comment was connected to a Blogger user profile that looked normal; the profile was connected to a blog that was written in the same unfamiliar language. Before I just deleted the comment, I wanted to know what it said. I turned to the all-encompassing Google to help me.

I used the translator function of iGoogle. Under the more drop-down list is a handy Translator gadget. You add text or a URL, click the Translate button, and if it's written in one of the 34 supported languages you get an answer back! My comment was interpreted as:

To continuously update go you!! I wish you a happy mood

I doubt the translation was perfect, but at least I had a general idea of the message, and let the posting go through. So, Sister, if you get back to my blog, thanks for making my day a little more interesting.

3 comments:

  1. I recently recovered from hoarse voice from travelling around, and it took a glass of hot milk mixed with a spoon of turmeric each night.

    Always a relief to get the voice back at the earliest, and so do I hope you do too, soon.

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  2. Anil-Thanks for stopping by. I didn't read anything about turmeric in my research last night, but based on your suggestion I just mixed some together with milk and drank it. It's not my favorite spice--I find it a bit bitter--but it doesn't matter if it works.

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  3. I will have to try that translation tool. I sometimes get some languages written that I cannot read and am not sure if they are spam or not.

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