Fitting text into spaces

Strange thing. As a child, I got to the point that I could evenly space handwritten letters across a given area without really thinking about it. Write "Happy Birthday" exactly centered on a 16-inch banner with 4-inch high letters? No problem. Write "Lemonade 10 cents" so that it perfectly fit an 8.5x11 sheet of paper? No problem. But after living in Spain for a year, and speaking Spanish pretty much exclusively, I lost the touch entirely. It took several years to get it back.

And now I'm finding a digital parallel, in a way. When I'm typing into a text box and realize that I'm about out of space ... such as typing into Twitter and it's counting down to 0 characters left, I tend to type the last 10-12 characters >much faster<, as if typing them faster would make them fit.

Crazy how the brain works (or doesn't).