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The high point of the day was a Skype video call to Moscow this morning with my mother-in-law, who turned 83 today. She looked pretty good, and in pretty good spirits, all things considered.
We then set about getting ready for another showing at 11 am, and let me tell you, I'm getting pretty sick of showings, because the SOP for real-estate showings calls for the place to be not just clean, but Better-Homes-and-Gardens clean. Hide the newspapers. Break out the fancy-folded "show" towels. Stack and put away the papers lying on the desk. Shove the portable radio/CD player into the closet. Unfurl the fancy bed covers.
What made this showing particularly hard was that not only did we get the time of the showing wrong (it was for 1:30 pm) but miraculously, we also got the date wrong (it's for tomorrow). That'd certainly be one for the record book, if we were keeping records.
As it turns out, a prospect who saw the place a few days ago—and had offered us 70% of what were asking as rent—wanted to come by and look at the place again today at 5:30 pm (this, after we had countered by dropping the asked-for rent by 7%).
I didn't feel too bad about the second showing, or the short notice. At least this way, it wouldn't be as if Galina and I had cleaned the place up, like, for nothing, y'dig? <grin>
In any event, the agent called about an hour after the showing to tell us the offer now stands at a hair above 90% of what we originally wanted. I've promised a response tomorrow morning, but then there's that showing at 1:30 pm, and another one scheduled for Sunday. I don't know what we will be inclined to do.
* * * I followed up on something I had read in Frances A. Yates' book on The Art of Memory, quoting Quintilian—who did not have a high opinion of the widely touted method of loci—on the one memory technique he felt would be of assistance to a learner, i.e.,
I did not quite go as far as to add little pictures or imagines agentes (as Yates calls them), but I can tell you that my recall of the lines I worked with this evening was pretty impressive. (What my recall might be tomorrow morning is obviously yet to be seen.)
The technique appears to take advantage of little quirks I've noticed over the years in using indirect—one might almost say counterintuitive—visual cues to aid in recall (such as the time, in fifth grade, when I remembered the answer to a flash card based not on the question printed on the front, but on a smudge that was left above and to the left of said question by someone's ink-stained finger).
More observations some other time, maybe. It's late, and it's time to go examine the inside of my eyelids.
Cheers...
We then set about getting ready for another showing at 11 am, and let me tell you, I'm getting pretty sick of showings, because the SOP for real-estate showings calls for the place to be not just clean, but Better-Homes-and-Gardens clean. Hide the newspapers. Break out the fancy-folded "show" towels. Stack and put away the papers lying on the desk. Shove the portable radio/CD player into the closet. Unfurl the fancy bed covers.
What made this showing particularly hard was that not only did we get the time of the showing wrong (it was for 1:30 pm) but miraculously, we also got the date wrong (it's for tomorrow). That'd certainly be one for the record book, if we were keeping records.
As it turns out, a prospect who saw the place a few days ago—and had offered us 70% of what were asking as rent—wanted to come by and look at the place again today at 5:30 pm (this, after we had countered by dropping the asked-for rent by 7%).
I didn't feel too bad about the second showing, or the short notice. At least this way, it wouldn't be as if Galina and I had cleaned the place up, like, for nothing, y'dig? <grin>
In any event, the agent called about an hour after the showing to tell us the offer now stands at a hair above 90% of what we originally wanted. I've promised a response tomorrow morning, but then there's that showing at 1:30 pm, and another one scheduled for Sunday. I don't know what we will be inclined to do.
namely, to learn a passage by heart from the same tablets on which he has committed it to writing. For he will have certain tracks to guide him in pursuit of memory, and the mind's eye will be fixated not merely on the pages on which the words were written, but on individual lines.I tried this with some lines from the famous "No, thank you!" rant in Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac that I copied, in the original French, onto an oversized page and then marked up—using different colored inks—with little mnemonics of my own (ranging from "s'en fait" becoming "Santa Fe" to "exécuter des tours de souplesse dorsale" becominge "execute towers [that are] soup-less [while Tommy] Dorsey [plays trombone]").
I did not quite go as far as to add little pictures or imagines agentes (as Yates calls them), but I can tell you that my recall of the lines I worked with this evening was pretty impressive. (What my recall might be tomorrow morning is obviously yet to be seen.)
The technique appears to take advantage of little quirks I've noticed over the years in using indirect—one might almost say counterintuitive—visual cues to aid in recall (such as the time, in fifth grade, when I remembered the answer to a flash card based not on the question printed on the front, but on a smudge that was left above and to the left of said question by someone's ink-stained finger).
More observations some other time, maybe. It's late, and it's time to go examine the inside of my eyelids.
Cheers...
