Eureka!

When we lived up north years ago, an old friend gave G an old English-Italian, Italian-English dictionary. It was copyrighted in 1909. G speaks Italian, although he isn't as confident as he used to be. When we got together with his parents, the conversations were always in Italian with the occasional English word thrown in. I could get the gist of most conversations.* His dad spoke quite good English but his mum struggled, and now that they're both dead, G never speaks it. He was looking for this dictionary a few weeks ago to find a word, and I set it aside for a future blip. I really like the decorative title page. I'm not sure, but I think that Eureka I have found it refers to finding the word that someone is searching for. Not sure why the woman is a queen though!  Any ideas? Google was no help. I included a photo of the front cover as an extra. The book is very fragile.

*Most of the Italian words I know are swear words. 

I had a good walk down Xwaaqw'um today to check out the flooding on the road - all fixed. I didn't drive all the way down just in case. When I got home, neighbour Bill was here. There had been a loud buzzing noise on his phone, and he called to see if ours was okay. It was. Bill called the phone company to see what was happening and the problem seemed to be solved, but an appointment was made to have someone come to investigate the possible cause sometime on Friday. Bill was told that the company would call to give him an approximate time - but how could he get the call when his phone wasn't working? "We'll call your cell phone." Ha! He doesn't have a cell phone! Why would he when we don't get service here? A bit later, his phone died completely when he was talking with Gus, and he came down to call the company again. He gave the person our phone number after checking to make sure we'd be around on Friday to get the call about the approximate time of  the appointment. We will be now - or one of us will be.  I think there's definitely an assumption now that everyone has a cell phone.