Cold toes and tech woes

I think it was rainy in Seattle on Thursday, and Rachel said it even hailed. But unlike yesterday, when I suddenly had to walk Eric to school in my flip-flops, I spent the whole day inside. Fortunately, the temperature has been mild. Now I see that the moon is out.

Nicole signed up at the last minute to teach a kindergarten class at Coe (not Eric's, though). However, when she arrived on scene she found they had someone else for the job, presumably procured through a different channel. Nicole was justifiably disappointed, and also prevented from taking another job because of the timing. She signed up for a middle school science class in West Seattle tomorrow.

My day was chock full of hiring committee packets and meetings. I only broke for a short lunch. By the time I looked around again, Rachel was home. The other kids arrived from Spanish a while later.

We got an email notification of a positive case in Colin's class. He hasn't been identified as a contact case, yet, but we would have tested him anyway tonight, except the testing app on my phone would not start up this evening. I'm giving it until tomorrow, then I may have to clear app data.

Speaking of tech troubles, Rachel lamented that she couldn't take her Kobo e-reader to school to read her library book because it wouldn't sync. The UI showed the last sync was in April. Where has the time gone? I tried a few things this morning without success, then Nicole contacted customer support this evening. Rachel has done that a couple times before, but not since April, it would seem. Their factory reset advice did get it to sync, but if it stops working again as usual in the next day or two, they seem to be willing to issue a replacement. We'll see.

The French word of the day is défoncer, as in "les temps ne sont pas si malheureux qu'il ne puisse se trouver encore à Vivetière une pièce de cidre à défoncer pour vos hommes." I don't think this is new to me, but it's all I got from today's couple pages. (I read enough to see more imperfect subjunctive, though.) It means "smash" or "stave in", or metaphorically "get smashed", too, evidently, but in Balzac's example it seems slightly more civilized, though I guess I don't really know how much violence is involved in opening a barrel.

I made more progress on my Wordle investigation tonight, but there's still more to do. I can now partition all the words into groups that give the same answer for a given guess. I suspect the sizes of those partitions are important.