Today’s mail brought, among other things, an Animal Crossing DS game I’d bought on eBay for Petra a couple of weeks ago. She was thrilled when she came home from school and found it waiting for her, and as soon as she’d finished her snack she fired up her DS and got busy playing.

All was going swimmingly until she came to the first screen that needed reading. Not being a reader herself yet, she presented it to Olof, who after one brief look sent her straight to me.

“Dad says you can understand this,” she told me, thrusting the console in my direction.

At first I assumed that Olof had passed the buck my way merely because he had more important work-type things to do. Turns out, however, that he really couldn’t understand it, because the text was in Spanish, something the listing for the game had neglected to mention.

Now, two years of high school Spanish more than twenty years ago did not exactly leave me fluent, but I grant that it put me in better stead for this situation than Olof’s long ago German studies. Still, I’m not selling myself short when I say I get maybe one of every five words on that blasted game. Guess I’d better get to brushing up.