From my diary

Grey, drizzling, with bursts of heavy rain.  Must be summer!  Hard to wake up today, although the arrival of a postman with the hardback of the Eusebius book at 7:50 am did force me out of bed somewhat sooner.  Fortunately I was semi-awake, and I know the knock on the door.  The postie had tried to get the book through the letterbox and had wedged it halfway.  He told me that he knocked, because he didn’t want to leave it in the rain. And then scarpered, leaving me stood there in rather less than was decent.  As I stood there, a parcel van arrived with a box.  Fortunately the parcel chap was braver, and managed to free the book.  The packaging protected the book OK.  The box contained a couple of acrylic plastic stands for books — which I shall use at the patristics conference.

Into town to return Brockelmann’s Geschichte vol. 1 to the library.  No sign of my other interlibrary loans, despite the fact that some were ordered earlier.  Summer is in everyone’s mind.  Even I shall be going away for a few days in the not too distant future.

I vaguely intended to scan another of Michael Bourdeaux’s books, but I didn’t.  Instead I am working with Finereader on this German textbook.  More tweaking, and I think the scans are as good as they’re going to get.  Time to start proofing.

I did toy with running a German spell-checker in Word.  I bought the Office 2000 proofing tools many years ago, but I’m not sure these are compatible with Word 2010.  Microsoft want quite a bit of money per language, it seems, to buy new ones.  I found a site on the web with some bootleg ones — but I don’t quite know about that.  It seems to me that pirate items like these might well be booby trapped.