Igenlode Wordsmith

I have been struggling with Chapter 22 of "Colloquial Russian" for what feels like two weeks at this point after they decided to hit me with all the participles at once (just as they did all the plural cases at once); yet again, the gulf between the online YouTube material (which, when I went looking for additional practice, made the whole thing feel trivially easy) and the actual textbook study is enormous. The difference, I suspect, is that with the textbook the assumption is that you have already paid for this up front, and now you are jolly well going to learn it and like it; online 'content creators' get paid by the click, and they need to flatter you and keep you coming back (and assume that their audience has a TikTok attention span, so they can't afford to spend too long on any one subject...)
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My nasturtiums have become so anaemic and invisible in colour (and did so badly this year, setting only a couple of seeds) that I decided it would be a good idea to start again by gathering some fresh seeds from the descendants of the same variety that were romping along the wall beside the railway footpath -- these had apparently diverged in the opposite direction, losing their patent variegated foliage instead of losing their dark red flower colour.

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( Roma tomato )

The towel-tomatoes are still flowering and have green fruit on them, but are definitely starting to die back now. I have cut back the last of the rudbeckias after harvesting seed from some of them (mostly destined for the seed library). The bonsai plum is duly bursting buds on its new leaves after being cut back; the 'new thyme', having initially put out a little fresh growth after being savagely barbered, now seems to have died off even in the sections that I left uncut :-(
Well, we still have the old one, which is now so thick and gnarled as to make a decent bonsai in itself, and we really didn't need two... but I would have been happier if it had been the ancient plant that died rather than the putative replacement!

( Swan River daisies dying )

( Lamb's-lettuce, chives and spring onions )

Unlike last year, the chillies are still not ripened, but there is plenty of time left for that. As already observed, they were later in flowering.

Fresh caterpillars continue to appear and strip the brassicas -- the pak choi have been reduced to skeletons entirely, although perhaps their sacrifice may have helped reduce the overall damage to the kale...

NB The Celtic Button knot was a success( Read more... )

My blue finger is now entirely back to its normal hue( Read more... )

I spent the evening dying a couple of long strips of embroidered curtain off-cuts sky-blue, using some second-hand dye, with an eye to making up an embroidered waistcoat using a second-hand pattern I stashed away about ten years ago. I now feel like a cross between the Tailor of Gloucester and William Morris (after his indigo experiments), since there was evidently a pinhole in the forefinger of the right-hand rubber glove I was wearing, and that entire finger has gone blue up to the knuckle despite all my precautions :-p
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I've recently read two very different books about fans and the experience of fandom: "First of the True Believers", by Paul Charles, and "Esther is Now Following You" by Tanya Sweeney.
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Now that the bonsai trees are no longer under extreme heat stress I took the opportunity to cut them back fairly brutally( Read more... )

The buddleia has saved itself by putting out a single scented flower ( Read more... )

Meanwhile two of the Swan River daisies have mysteriously died back before the flowers had even started to set :-(( Read more... )
One of my towel-tomatoes has also died back, although after having finished fruiting( Read more... )

The pot that used to have sweet peas in it is currently hosting what looks like another iteration of the feathery and rather invasive thing, and having traced that (and hence knowing that it is a rather boring unscented umbellifer) I should probably get rid of it so that I can clear out the pot!


This is presumably the culprit where the brassica caterpillars are concerned...

Every day I find more fat green caterpillars appearing seemingly out of nowhere -- I haven't been able to harvest from my kale and pak choi for weeks because they have practically no leaf left; it is being eaten off as fast as it grows. (This plant was in relatively good condition until today...)



I assume these are Cabbage White caterpillars, since they are completely ignoring everything save the brassicas -- which is one blessing.

I did find a few smaller ones camouflaged along the stems this afternoon, so I hope that having removed those will postpone the next monster munching for a little longer...

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( Celtic Button Knots )

I've been doing an assortment of YouTube online tests (when you view one, that naturally biases the system into showing you more) over the last week or so, and they all tend to confirm the verdict that after eight months of formal study -- a.k.a. revision of things that I was supposed to have learnt in the classroom thirty years ago -- my level of Russian is approximately B1( Read more... )
Although given that I was able to watch an entire film in Russian a year ago (even if not a terribly challenging one in terms of dialogue), I'm not sure my ability to passively *understand* has necessarily gone up that much, if at all -- I was guessing somewhere between B1 and B2 at that point, and I'm not sure I've acquired a lot more vocabulary since. The main improvement of which I'm conscious is that I think I'm getting better at being able to understand text that contains abbreviations or errors, rather than simply being completely thrown by the appearance of a word in an unrecognisable form; I'm getting more experienced at predicting what *ought* to come next and filling it in if it is missing :-)

I was told today that "we shouldn't be using" the expression 'picking the low-hanging fruit' (in the context of *literally* having picked off all the easily accessible low-hanging fruit from a tree...) because "it was about bad things happening to black people".

Which (a) is an obvious erroneous confusion with the protest song "Strange Fruit" and (b) a ridiculous approach to censorship in the first place -- even if Billie Holiday *had* decided to call her song after an existing proverb, that doesn't subsequently ban the original owners of the saying from ever using it in any other context...

I was told on the previous day that one shouldn't use the expression "the old folks at home" because it comes from a nigger minstrel song, and I could sort of see some twisted logic in that, even if I don't agree with it, but banning any mention of low-hanging fruit because some middle-aged lady has mixed it up in her mind with lynching (an activity which was in its origin inflicted upon American 'loyalists', i.e. those who retained their allegiance to the British Crown and refused to join the colonial revolt) is just *silly*.

I needed a portable hand-held packed lunch, so I made baked samosas using raised dough for pirozhki rather than the 'healthy' filo pastry specified in the recipe (and broad beans instead of chickpeas, because I discovered at the last minute that I'd used up all the frozen chickpeas that I'd cooked!) I know from experience that yeast pastry is much more flexible in terms of wrapping around a filling than standard pastry, although looking up the *real* samosa recipes online this morning I think I could probably have got away with simply using their flour and oil dough rather than the filo adaptation :-p