Wee Doggies

It was cold this morning when I got up.  My phone said 30°, but I'm pretty sure the official reading comes from the airport in Greenwood.  It should be pretty close, but I've noticed at times there is a degree or two difference than what the app says and what I read here at the house.  

Except that I couldn't check my temp here, because my thermometer broke.  It was one of those old fashioned ones with the red liquid inside a little glass.  I noticed a couple of days ago the glass had broken.  It had to have been after I got home from the store Friday, because I surely would have bought a new one.

Be that as it may, it was cold.  Cold enough my heater came on, and I keep it set at 65 at night.  That little fire sure felt good, too.  I really want to widen the doorway between my kitchen/dining area and my living room so that the heat can reach into there, too.  You can definitely tell the difference in the temps as soon as you walk through. 

Well, I did what many of you might consider to be a very doofusy thing.  And what was this doofusy thing I did?  I blew up my DuoLingo. 

See, I've been using the DuoLingo app to try to learn French -- and also to refresh my Spanish and Italian -- but mostly French. 

They recently changed the way they structure the lessons.  In the old way, they had the lessons arranged in what we colloquially called a learning tree.  Like so:

For those of you unfamiliar with the app, each language tree had several units.  Each unit had these groups of lessons -- indicated by the circles in the photo above.  Each circle had usually five or six levels, and each level had about 5 lessons in it.  Once you completed enough lessons to reach level 1, it unlocked the next circle, and you could begin working on the lessons in it. 

Recently, they changed from a lesson tree to a language path, like so:

I'm not sure I like this way, because you can't skip around like you could in the old way.  For example, if I got tired of doing lessons about food, I could go do a few about animals, or family, or phrases, or whatever.  With this new way, you're stuck doing lessons about food until you complete the set.  

The problem was, when they switched me from the old way to the new way, if I'd completed even one level of a set, they counted the whole set as complete.  I'm guessing that's what they'd done, but I don't really know.  What I do know is they jumped me too far ahead, and it's like I've missed out on a bunch of stuff.  I mean, they were referring to stuff I hadn't learned yet.  They did this in both French and Spanish.  

I got so frustrated that I deleted my progress in both courses and completely started over.  It wasn't so bad with the Spanish, as I'd just started, but I'd been working on my French for over three years.  I had over a 1000 day streak -- longer really, because when I first started, I didn't know about streak freezes. 

Anyway, I'm back to square one on both.  Not that it's that big of a deal.  The goal is to get a basic foundation in the language, not get through the course as fast as possible.  

Finally, I got the cat moved out of the laundry room and into the kitchen.

She approves.

By the way, her tail boo boo seems to be healing just fine, so I've put away the Betadine for now.  She approves of that, too. 

Oh, and I almost forgot, when LSU beat Alabama in overtime, the crowd got so loud they set off the seismograph in the geology department:

Pretty rad, huh?