Cookies and hedgehogs

Yesterday was the end of work for the year, and boy was it a day. People cancelled and failed and came late and came way early and had emergencies, and a patient brought us the most wonderful Hawaiian cookies (no sugar or butter, just condensed milk!), and UPS was most inconveniently 23 hours late with a delivery, and I got to go out to lunch with a friend.

AND, in the cracks (there were lots of cracks), I got to do language stuff. It appears I'm kind of accidentally learning Russian. I cleaned out the 2006 files and discovered there were also 2005, 2004, 2003, and 2002 files in the cabinet--which explains why it was rather full. Then I made new 2007 folders, and labeled the monthly ones in English, Russian, and Farsi. :-D

The Russian for "hedgehog" is "yozh," and it's spelled with two letters, an e with two dots above and a zhe, which looks like a snowflake. We also discussed another letter, which is either a lambda on a lampstand or else a virus; office opinion varied. The hedgehog reminded me irresistibly of Pride and Prejudice quotes.

To Mr. Darcy: “Don’t just put her in the chair; be gentle. Do it kind of gingerly, like picking up a hedgehog.” Ben
“Girls are not hedgehogs. It makes us sound prickly.” Lisa
“Have you ever seen inside a hedgehog’s mouth?” Ben
We had not.
“Hedgehogs are really cute until they open their mouths and then they’re kind of scary. You remember the ROUSes? They don’t really have mouths like that, but hedgehogs do.” Ben
::later::
“You don’t tread on hedgehogs.” Hebda
“Granted, but..” Ben 3-2-06

Right before lunch, Lisa (not Thacia) and I amused ourselves with online translators. I found a whole lot, but it took three tries to find one that could translate "hedgehog" into Russian. There was one that tried to tell us "como esta" meant something very unlikely, I can't remember what. That, naturally, led to Latin and the immortal cookies of the previous post.

I came across one of my office-notes, covered with phone numbers and names and dates and Celtic knots and scraps of foreign characters, and found this word: "YE-sharitzeh." I can't remember what it means, why I wrote it down, or even what language it is. I thought it was probably Farsi, but then I was pretty sure it looked Russian. Being inconveniently American, I'd written it out phonetically in English letters, so the script doesn't even help identify the thing. Upon consideration, it might be Polish.

I think I'll go eat a cookie.