Exercise 2

I watched another 'graduated comprehension test' in four levels, which confirmed to me that I am indeed somewhere between 'B1' and 'B2' in terms of listening comprehension; I can understand everything up to the B1 level, and can follow the meaning of the B2 conversation without being able to understand every word of it, provided that I look at the subtitles. Which is an interesting brain-quirk, given that objectively speaking I have spent far more hours *listening* to Russian than reading Cyrillic over the last few months... but apparently words are still easier to recognise in their written form, even in a foreign script!

I subsequently did the exercises from Chapter 2 of Colloquial Russian and made a ridiculously large number of mistakes (at least where the answers were provided in the back of the book for comparison), to the degree that I felt I ought to go back and do the whole thing again an hour or so later. Which I successfully did without mistakes this time, but probably as much simply from memory of the corrections as from actually having mastered the material...
( Mistakes )

Gloves

I have resolved that from now on my cycling gloves shall live in my front bike bag rather than my jacket pockets; this will reduce carrying capacity in the bag, but at least makes it still more or less possible to repeatedly take them off and put them on again during a long trip, which tends to become necessary as my body overheats and then cools. And it should mean that they are always available when cycling.

Meanwhile I have unearthed my old home-knitted mittens (knitted at least twenty years ago, I think), with the very thin inner 'liner gloves' that I purchased from a fishing tackle shop that no longer exists, in order to substitute for my heavy cycling gloves in my jacket pockets. The double thickness is reasonably warm and reasonably windproof, and because they don't have the stiff cuffs they squish down better into the pockets and should be less apt to fall out. (Although I just found one lying on the floor of the hall on the first day of wearing, which is not a good omen! I think I probably let it fall after taking it off to put my key in the door, then stooping to pick up the post...)