Igenlode Wordsmith

I have spent the last couple of days running tests on my USB bike lights to try to work out what they will and will not safely do ( Read more... )

So my provisional conclusions, from what I can remember of my test data, are that it should be perfectly safe to cycle for, say, an hour and a half, spend a few hours on various other activities and then cycle home again, provided you don't attempt to switch the lights *off* in the interim :-O Which means having them flashing away in the bottom of your bag in the cinema, say, and hoping it is sufficiently lightproof -- obviously you can't leave the bike parked and drawing attention to itself outside with the lights left on. It is the trauma of starting up on high-beam that seems to flatten a battery that should in theory have hours of continuing power left in it.
Alternatively, it would probably work if you can remember to switch them off briefly every half-hour or so while riding, which seems to contradict the previous result.
( Difference between tests and reality )

Archiving in their current form the verses that I've got so far, mainly because I've been carrying them around so much that the pencilled translations are starting to wear off (and for some irrational reason I find myself still reluctant to write over the various versions in ink...)
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I have now finished rough-typing the first chapter of "Little Gentlemen" and have reached the tweaking stage; it is looking quite good to me at the moment, which is probably due to the fact that it is now about six weeks since I wrote this chapter :-p ( Length and chapter titles )
I thought I had a translation for the next verse of the nautical ballad -- which really ought to be entitled something along the lines of "The Little Cabin-Boy" rather than "The Tale of the Tipsy Gunner"; I can only assume that it's supposed to be a story being told by the narrator in his cups-- but unfortunately I came up with the solution while walking home in the rain, which meant that I couldn't safely get the manuscript out. And when I came to write it down I found I had managed to forget what the word I'd come up with to end the third line was :-p

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I was given one of those 'cheese-making kits' and managed to make mozzarella cheese -- I was actually astonished at how successful it was!( Read more... )

I cut back my poor much-abused bonsai (a.k.a pet trees) using my poor much-abused scissors -- probably much too late in the year, so we shall see if they survive. The probably-prunus is now 7 inches high, although it suffered greatly over the hot summer, probably due to an inadequate root system due to my heavy pruning in order to convert it from a vertical to a horizontal pot. The birch is now 12 inches high and I think about six years old; I am still waiting for it to show some sign of going silver!

Out of the four spring onion stubs that I planted out at the start of the month, only one has survived; the others were either frosted or rotted off at the base for some other reason. I have two more on the windowsill in the kitchen, but have been hesitating to plant them out because they have the most colossal trailing roots which are hard to fit into a pre-existing pot -- it will be a job and a half.

My washing-line snapped this morning and dumped a couple of shirts into the mud below (I really need to sweep up where the old tomato-pots were, having now removed all the plants). The string always wears through eventually, but of course it actually breaks at the worst possible moment when you are in a hurry :-p I shall have to get out my Pot of String and rig up a new line; my third so far. The secondary clothes line has been functioning perfectly ever since it got its new buckle, with the sole issue being that the end of the tape that gets threaded through the buckle is becoming very frayed. I tried trimming it and rubbing wax onto the new end, but it didn't help.

Have I ever mentioned that I really, really dislike writing with no idea where I'm supposed to be going? :-(
( Multiple attempts towards an ending ) Not one of my best last lines, but it will do for a fic that basically doesn't have a storyline, the message being that Venya arrives as a 'waif and stray' and has now carved out a foreseeable place for himself in future at Bragelonne.)

Memes are good for procrastination (and I'm pretty stuck on this fic, as in 'I'm not even trying to write it because I don't know where I'm going and am not used to not having an ending beckoning me on'...)


From thisbluespirit:
From your AO3 Works page, look at the tags and find the answers to these questions.

Current number of works on AO3: 53

( Under what rating do you write most? )
( What are your top 3 fandoms? )
(  Which character do you write about most? )
( What are the 3 top pairings you've written? )
( What are the top 3 additional tags? )

I have another Boyarsky song stuck in my head now (and weirdly, I can't find the crude online translation I'm *sure* I saw for it when I first encountered the song and was desperate to know what was going on -- maybe it was just the YouTube auto-translate? At any rate I can follow most of it now from the lyrics and my memory, however obtained, of what it is *supposed* to mean...)


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( Tomatoes )

I think I have finally almost finished my Athos crack-fic (which, as usual, is of course completely lacking in any crack humour save for the initial bizarre concept, being written entirely straight). I am not particularly happy with it; the balance of the various parts is, I suspect, distorted by how much trouble I was having in writing them respectively, which means that what I thought was the main section, consisting of the introduction and arrival of my OC, is probably now overshadowed by the much longer following sections between the canon characters, making the beginning seem a bit pointless -- even if the only point of the OC was in effect to provide a handle by which the entire AU scenario could be established.( Read more... )

*checks on AO3*
There is no separate "Little Men" fandom, as it gets rolled into the general "Little Women Series" category; checking on characters from that fandom who don't appear in any of the earlier books (e.g. Nan, Dan, and Jo's sons Rob and Teddy) suggests that many of the stories that are set within that book don't bother to use the two or three variants on "Little Men" tags that do exist and are mapped to "Little Women", but I'm guessing that there are maybe twenty or so of them out there.

This performance made me laugh out loud (though I didn't realise until afterwards that it was supposed to be Baron Munchausen, which means that silliness can be expected).

The Baron is trying to get a priest to marry him to Marta, but unfortunately there seems to be some question as to whether he is already married or not. ( Read more... )