Scale drawing

Two snippets that aren't worth a post on their own but that I don't want to get away:

Scale

While we were watching cricket during the last rites (aka 'match') of the Ashes tour, my daughter asked me where Hobart was. Breezily I said it was close to Sydney, and as an afterthought I said that the meaning of 'close' in that context was a matter of scale. Trying to flesh this caveat out a bit, I later looked in an atlas, and came up with this way of describing the actual distance.

Hobart is at 42°52′50″S 147°19′30″E  and Sydney at 33°51′35.9″S 151°12′40″E. In other words, if one were to pitch the same question in the northern hemisphere, and Hobart were in Orkney 59°00′N 3°00′W, Sydney would be roughly where Penzance is (50.1279°N 5.5107°W): 
about 9% of latitude and I cheated a bit about the longitude because the latitude was so neat and 
anything more Longitudinally Correct would be in the sea.

Drawing

Well, lápiz actually, but 'scale pencil' doesn't trip off the tongue so neatly. 

My Tai Chi sesssions resumed this week, for the first time this year and we were joined by a new 
student. During our introductions, we learnt that he had a background in tango dancing and our 
teacher was quick to say that there were similarities between that and Tai Chi. I didn't think this was 
any more than a conversational gambit, to make the 'new boy' feel at home.

Later though, while we were doing a Chi Gung exercise sometimes referred to as pencil rolling ,
our  new-found tango correspondent said it was like the /læpɪs/ (because of the English vowels I didn't
immediately put 2 and 2 together). The 2s in question were lápiz and pencil-rolling.

In matters of balance, pencil-based metaphors come readily to mind.

b

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 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?)

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: over 37,250 views  and 5,200 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with 1867 views/867 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.