We have lots of tiny pink Linaria seedlings. Also possibly chives -- it looks for all the world like some sort of little stars of bog-grass or young moss growing in the pot, but as there isn't normally any grass up here the odds are probably reasonable that it might be the chives that I did after all sow in there. There is a good chance that it is moss, though -- really doesn't look like newly-germinated seedlings to me :-(
A Swan River daisy has germinated. Sowed marigolds and (optimistically) basil, in a very small pot that can be squeezed into the mini-greenhouse alongside the peas.

I repotted the thyme by the brute-force method of ripping the disintegrating plastic pot off it into pieces, then pulling off a lot of the rootball so that I could fit some compost in around it -- this is in fact the 'old' thyme that I thought was dying several years ago and that was supposed to be replaced by the acquisition of a new seedling. The two plants are now approximately the same size! The stump of the 'old' kale that was supposed to be being replaced by its seedling offspring is still producing leaves and looking about as healthy as they are, too...

The sorrel probably wants repotting yet again, but I confined myself to pulling off the mass of roots that have come out of the bottom of the pot. I think that what happened was that it grew roots downwards (where there was very little new soils for it) rather than sideways as I had hoped -- unsurprising, really, but I don't really want to sacrifice one of my deep tomato-pots for its benefit. The winter purslane has rotted away entirely, and I don't think it managed to set any seeds :-(

I had an entertaining episode yesterday when I was helping a lady with her Spanish homework (Level A2) despite never having learnt a word of Spanish; apparently a knowledge of French, English, a smattering of Italian, and an acquaintance with Hornblower and the Peninsular War are enough to get you a long way :-D
What I don't have, of course, is any knowledge of the grammatical structures, but since I know grammar *in theory* it was easy enough to identify what the questions in the course book were designed to test (e.g. masculine/feminine/plural endings)...

Interestingly, the Spanish word for 'oil' looks as if it ought to mean 'vinegar': aceite

Planted up another square of towel-tomatoes, since I have just emptied another windowsill-wide mini-margarine tub... this time using the 'good' seed, i.e. from the fruits that had lots of seeds in them rather than saved across lots of fruits that didn't have many, and labelled as "Towel (good)" accordingly.
After 15 days I already have a ridiculously large number of tomato seedlings in the other two tubs, unfortunately; I think I may have got 100% germination this year!

we shall see how the 1990s book introduces the subject when it arrives in that course.

Well, in my next lesson in *that* book I now have to memorise the declension of eleven pronouns† across six cases :-p
Fortunately I actually have more or less subliminally absorbed/remembered those already, to the degree that I can simply ask myself 'what sounds right' when I can't remember the answer and mostly come up with the correct result. Mostly.

† First person singular and plural, second person singular and plural, third person masculine, feminine, neuter and plural, 'who', 'what', and 'itself' (also masculine, feminine, neuter and plural, so I suppose it's fourteen rather than eleven...)

I had a strange experience this morning after listening to another chapter of "The Three Musketeers" in Russian (last night I was already too sleepy to even attempt it). YouTube subsequently showed me a video of a Polish priest conversing in the Vatican with an American via the medium of Latin, and I genuinely could not work out whether I was hearing Russian or not :-p( Read more... )

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I found an envelope of spring onion seeds which I evidently harvested last year from the spring onion that flowered, so have tried sowing those, since the two surviving stubs of the old ones are looking pretty sick. It didn't help that something came along and ate the tops off them -- and also ate the flowers off the calendulas, quite deliberately, half a head at a time, coming back every night to finish the job and then moving on to the next plant -- I would be more annoyed about that if they hadn't been flowering all winter so that I was rather bored with them!

The tulips are all blooming heartily, with the exception of the bulb at the end, in between where the two garlics were put in, which is only just showing a bud. Presumably due to competition from the neighbouring bulbs, even though the garlic cloves were much smaller....

I have spent what feels like a week (certainly multiple days) in trying to memorise the Russian verbs of motion, going so far as to write them out and carry them around with me to study in spare moments, and when I finally ventured on the exercises at the end of the chapter I still managed to get almost 50% of them wrong -- just as often via simply mistaking the (irregular) verb form as via picking the wrong version of the verb! I seem to remember that I never really mastered verbs of motion the first time round ( Read more... )

So far I have made it to Chapter 15 -- 4:26 hours out of 9:30 -- in my Smekhov-narrated "Three Musketeers" audiobook, although admittedly I tend to predictably fall asleep within the first ten minutes or so every night (or at least realise that I have mentally 'tuned out' and haven't understood a word of what has just been said, and get up to turn it off). "Brave New World" to the contrary, having mellifluous Russian administered to my sleeping ear doesn't seem to result in any subconscious acquisition of knowledge :-p
(And to be fair, some of the recent chapters do appear to have been very much shorter than the others!)

I went to the supermarket to buy another month's worth of groceries (red and green lentils, evaporated milk, lard, brown rice, etc.) and came away with a pound of very heavily discounted minced lamb that was being reduced because it was (a) date expiring that evening and (b) "20% fat" (evil!evil!evil!)
So I had a quick change of cooking plans and used half of it to make a 'dry curry' from a successful recipe in my scrapbook: https://101things.wordpress.com/2006/06/17/kheema-matar-minced-lamb-curry-with-peas/
(it's very handy to have a non-tomato-based curry, though I don't have lamb mince available very often :-)

( Read more... )

( Piquant Beef )

(I froze the rest of the minced lamb; I can use it in meatballs, or I believe I do have some Caucasian recipes in the Russian cookbook that call for fat lamb... or possibly 'fat-tailed lamb', which is not necessarily the same thing!)

To quote March 3rd last year, it has been warmer, and I sowed a batch of chilli, towel-tomato and Roma tomato seeds.
Although stupidly I deliberately elected to sow the 'bad' towel-tomato seeds, being the ones that I managed to glean early on in the season from the few fruits that had seeds in, rather than the known 'good' ones that came from later fruit bursting with seed, on the grounds that I didn't want to risk my best seed on a too-early sowing. But of course if these do germinate than I shall end up with adult plants from possibly-defective genetic stock (although to be honest all the plants behaved the same way, and they are probably seeds from the very same stock, just picked later in the year).

I also planted out some more of the mixed salad/lettuce seed from last year, as it was pretty successful. I don't know how well it will have lasted, so I sowed it quite thickly.

So we've finally met 'Malish' -- who gives his real name, but I didn't get it as it flew past...

I started off on this 'episode' of "Smok and Malish" (half an hour or so of watching; we are still in the first episode of the series) with the studious intention of doing all the 'work' over short segments; watching the scene straight as intended, then rewatching with Cyrillic subtitles, then rewatching with Cyrillic subtitles and pausing with a dictionary, then finally rewatching with the auto-translated English subtitles to see if that picked up any colloquialisms or other material that I'd missed. And for the first couple of scenes I did do just that( but got carried away ) while YouTube persisted in inserting advertisements in the worst --or most effective-- places imaginable.

It absolutely cannot have been random. Every time something lethally dangerous happened, there was another cliff-hanger ad break at that exact moment, with multiple ads clustered close together in the most action-filled section :-P

I mean, objectively I knew that both characters had absolute plot armour at this point in the story, because neither the titular Smok nor Malish (even if we don't yet know how Kit becomes 'Smoke') couldn't possibly die in their first scene together. I even consciously *told* myself that during one of the enforced pauses for advertisements. But by that point the film had grabbed me to such an extent that I had my nails dug into my palms and my jaw clenched tight, and couldn't look away( cliffhanging action )... and I breathed a long sigh of relief and was finally able to stop watching ;-)

So by this point I'm clearly *very* much emotionally engaged in Kit's story, whether because it's an excellent lead performance or a compelling production overall (based on promising source material)!
Created a new tag, because we're obviously going to need it :-D

"Waiting for the Out" finished on a high with two unexpected yet earned and credible happy-outcome twists: a series strongly recommended.

( Marie Antoinette )

Kit Bellew is now firmly launched (although not yet rechristened 'Smok') on his Yukon adventure in "Smok and Malish" -- though I'm afraid that, as with the Soviet "Twenty Years After", after an initially hopeful start I was able to pick up rather less of the plot in what followed, despite the fact that large chunks of this section are completely dialogue-free, and indeed shot in what amounts to fluid silent-film storytelling technique...( Read more... )
As I said, this section consists of a lot of what are effectively silent film sequences with the occasional 'title card' snatch of dialogue, so Smekhov's expressive face is used to convey a lot of his character's thoughts and decision-making, to my benefit; it was the actual conversations I had trouble with!


I was somewhat shocked to gather from the podcast that the composers for "Ali-Baba" apparently didn't get paid for their work; they were classified on the record sleeve as 'dilettanti' ('amateurs'?) due to not being members of the official Composers' Guild, and thus the mere glory of getting their work published and distributed was presumably supposed to be enough! (Smekhov, likewise classified, presumably didn't get paid either due to not being an officially sanctioned 'writer'... but then the project was his idea in the first place. They were just doing the music in their spare time as a favour.)


I am now several chapters into the Russian version of "The Three Musketeers" as bed-time entertainment( Read more... )