Igenlode Wordsmith

My electronic scales (used for very fine measurements -- I use an ordinary balance and set of weights for cooking!) were mysteriously not working *again*, what feels like only a few months after I had to replace the battery last time, and despite barely having been used in the interim. They don't have an off-switch, so cannot have been accidentally left on long-term; they always time out after five minutes or so. I am not impressed by the longevity of the "+70% Extra Life" Duracell batteries ("Baby Safe With Repulsive Taste") that I was sold.

( Special screwdriver required )

I was also displeased to discover that the latch on my bathroom door has malfunctioned for a third time, making it impossible to keep the door shut -- just in time for the chilly season :-(
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I have a bulb-shoot in the trough! Almost certainly the garlic, I think, rather than the tulips, but given that when it went in it was bone dry and had been out of the ground for months, and we're currently only in November, that was unexpected speed!

I repotted what was left of the chives, since the surface of the pot was looking waterlogged -- I thnk the drainage holes were entirely blocked by dead roots. There were a lot of what looked like rotted stems, and a few green shoots in the middle, so we'll see how the latter respond to being put into some drier compost. I also potted up four more spring onion stubs from the greengrocer, since only two of the old ones still survive, and put them into a new pot rather than trying to insert them into the existing one.

I have also harvested, or at least cut down, the basil seed spike during a dry day this week, and put it into a fresh brown paper bag labelled 'Basil 2025'; there is still some seed in the bottom of last year's bag and I don't quite like to throw it away.

The first of the towel-tomato plants has now entirely died, so I have been able to clear that pot. The others still have some live foliage on them, although it has mainly been a question of picking the unripe tomatoes for their own safety as the tendrils supporting them wither away. The Roma tomato, oddly enough, still has two vigorous branches with one decent-sized green fruit on each.

I note that in Chapter 83 of "Vingt Ans Après", Athos and Aramis find a drawing left by d'Artagnan at Peronne with the sinister message "We are being followed" and, understandably disquieted even though the trail they are following is already cold, proceed to gallop frantically for three or four hours until they encounter the giant boulder moved by Porthos, under which the next message lies. We don't know what time they arrived at Peronne, but since they don't appear to have spent the night there and only discovered d'Artagnan's drawing as they were leaving after a failed search of the town, it can scarcely have been before mid-morning at the earliest, especially since the date is early March and they will not have started travelling until winter daybreak.

After galloping all the way from Peronne, they are obliged to allow their horses three hours' rest, and it takes them a further six hours of riding to reach Compiègne, where they learn that d'Artagnan and Porthos were overtaken and captured. This adds up to a minimum of twelve hours' travel, at the end of which we are told that they dined hastily in order to be able to set out again immediately that night (since Blaisois and Grimaud are left behind with instructions to take the spent horses back to Paris "tomorrow") on hired horses. Even if we assume that they set out at dawn from some nearby hostelry and reached Peronne at 8am or thereabouts, it must have been well and truly dark by this point!

( The journey continued further )

( Grimaud and Mme de Longueville )

I actually wrote a good deal (about three pages) on "Little Gentlemen" today, mainly thanks to the fact that d'Artagnan's arrival scene consists largely of dialogue, which I always find *much* easier -- but partly due to the fact that I got back home after successfully writing a couple of pages, only to realise that I had completely forgotten to include the planned 'crossover dialogue', for which I had gone to the lengths of writing out the relevant canon passages in two languages upon a piece of paper so that I could take them with me and include that material! ( Read more... )

This new batch of Russian lessons are definitely different in style and emphasis (and, alas, in sound quality) from the preceding ones. A much higher focus on formal grammar (or at least verbs) rather than the conversational/lifestyle vocabulary of the previous batch, I think, and in consequence much simpler sentence structure. It gives me the feeling of having skipped back to the starting lessons... until I get asked to repeat back the dialogue, at which point I realise that while I have a perfect passive understanding of it, I don't know the different tenses and constructions accurately enough to be able to reproduce them on request, and flounder :-(
https://youtu.be/BWmZP1SJLZU
"This is Petya. He is writing a letter. He was writing yesterday and he is writing today. Now finally he has finished writing his letter" -- that sounds like my sort of letter... or email, for that matter :-D

(Wow -- Russian students had to bed down with *three* people sleeping in one small room, and get up at seven a.m.? I thought Americans and their mandatory 'room-mates' had it bad!
On the other hand they get a sizeable selection of savoury breakfasts. Except for Lida, who apparently just wants cake :-p And yes, she is *gorgeous*...)

( Captioning )

(via pedanther)

Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fic title? One fic per line, ‘A’ and 'The’ do not count for 'a’ and ’t’. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

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Score: 18/26, from about^† 62 works -- surprisingly low (I wasn't expecting X, Q and Z, but that still leaves me about five letters short!)
I did manage to get eighteen different fandoms, though, as the book and musical versions of "Phantom of the Opera" are very different :-)

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† NB: my stories are currently split across AO3 and two different accounts on fanfiction.net, for assorted reasons, and therefore I'm not entirely sure how many unique works in total I have...

I really do need to empty out my trunks of winter clothing now, especially the thermal underwear and warm dressing-gown (currently wearing my silk one as the warmest of the available summer options!)
The heating came on last night for the first time this year, and I have been having a hot-water-bottle for the last couple of days, which is an unforeseen pleasure that I always forget about; it really is very nice to slip down into a blissfully warm bed in a cold room :-)

I have just been going round resetting all the clocks and watches, including the central heating timer (not supposed to need resetting, but it had accumulated ten minutes' gradual error since I last changed the battery) and my cycle computer -- I hope that is all of them! Of course it helps from that point of view that two of my clocks are still stopped...

Current elapsed cycle mileage: 414 miles, namely 151 miles in the eight weeks since the end of August, or my normal average of eighteen miles a week.

After spending so much time referring to YouTube's auto-generated transcripts to try to decipher Russian (they are basically a timestamped listing of all the auto-generated subtitle text, I think, so they enable you to look back at the context of an entire phrase as opposed to just the handful of words visible on the screen at any one time), it dawned on me a couple of days ago that it is of course possible to read the transcripts of *English* text as well. Which is particularly useful in the case of videos which are basically a voiceover with marginally-related images screened for visual appeal, because it is possible simply to read the transcript and not bother to actually listen to the speaker at all, especially if the title appears to be clickbait :-p

It's the equivalent of playing the sound back at 6x speed, without the high-pitched gabbling effect :-) Of course the text isn't formatted into neat sentences and proper names are often weirdly mangled, but it makes it possible to skim through to the actual relevant content, if any, and/or go even faster in order to ascertain that there isn't any...

In Russian, ironically, reading the transcript is actually considerably *slower* than simply listening to the entire video. ( Read more... )

It doesn't work to have Aramis responsible for pushing Athos into this (and I'm not sure it works to have a Raoul who is *not* Athos's own son as being the start of it all; if he is going to take in an unprecedented foundling at Aramis' insistence then it would need a whole lot more detailed backstory to explain how Aramis argues him into it). So having written this section I then deleted it and replaced it with an alternative version that is less heavily based on the canon scenario where dealing with Raoul basically pulls Athos out of depression ;-) In the current version, the 'school' is implicitly something he goes into by his own choice, with Raoul then being added to the collection subsequently, which makes more sense of Aramis teasing him about his 'menagerie'... and requires less explanation at a point where it ruins the pacing of the chapter!
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Since I now have another batch of real quinces (after making japonica jelly last week) I made a recipe from my Russian cookery book -- technically speaking now a Soviet cookery book, I suppose, since it takes it for granted that you will be interested in recipes from all the now independent parts of the Soviet Union!

Azerbaijani bozbash bears a probably not coincidental resemblance to Persian cookery and to lamb plov, ( Read more... )
(Similar recipe online: https://bestrecipes24.com/recipe/azerbaijani-style-lamb-bozbash-soup-with-chickpeas )

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"Little Gentlemen" is coming along quite nicely, although the style is in danger of becoming stilted and verbose -- not very Dumas!
I have now successfully introduced my young OC Venya (playing the 'Nat Blake' role, with Raoul taking on the role -- and vocabulary -- of the cheerful Tommy Bangs who introduces him to everyone and everything) into Athos's house, which is at least fifty per cent of the material envisaged, and am attempting to finish the scene in which Athos reads the accompanying letter (also establishing AU material). ( Read more... )