Chillies et al.

I finally pricked out the Demon Red chillies from their windowsill pot, putting six of them into a narrow tub in the mini-greenhouse with an eye to thinning them out later, and two into a temporary cardboard toilet-roll with an eye to giving them away in the near future; I should of course have hardened my heart and simply disposed of the spares! I did steel myself to throw away the very small ones.

The seedlings had better roots than the ones I potted up last year, although of course I'm doing so a week later.

And I do *finally* have a single nasturtium coming up, very belatedly.

I moved the Roma tomatoes out of the mini-greenhouse to make way for the chillies to live outside; the ones that were inside it do look a lot more vigorous than the ones that have been outside and unprotected all April, but it's quite possible that I put the 'best' seedlings under shelter in the first place and left the runts to take their chances! It looks as if I *may* have some germination from the fresh batch of basil that I put in there a couple of weeks ago, although the soil in that pot is looking very green and compacted. The only sign of life from the furry hedgehog wildlife garden is a single shoot of grass and a whole lot of white mould, but I shan't repine if that basil doesn't grow at all :-p

"Mam'zelle Guillotine", Baroness Orczy

The scenes in England at the beginning are verging on self-parody (and abuse of adjectives) on Orczy's part, but the French setting is vivid and alive, and it's interesting to have a female antagonist for a change, while Gabrielle gets an unusually detailed backstory to explain what made her the way she is: I was getting strong flashes of Madame Defarge in "Tale of Two Cities", the victim who becomes a monster out to destroy an entire family. ( Read more... )

All the cases

I can't believe that after delaying the introduction of *any* mention of noun case-endings at all until Lesson 9 (and anything more complicated than the accusative and prepositional cases, which the other book covers in the very first lesson, until *after* dealing with verbs of motion!) the 1960s Penguin Russian course then proceeds to hit you with all the plural cases at once -- plus all the numerals from 1 to 100 in addition -- to be memorised in the course of a single lesson :-O
( 1930s Russian Basics )

Of course it's ridiculous to be doing this after a year's worth of intensive Russian listening practice, multiple films, and a whole load of fairly complex song translations, but I'm afraid I do actually need the formal grammar, and it hasn't painlessly inserted itself into my brain by means of mere passive exposure, toddler-fashion...