Igenlode Wordsmith

( Cold )

It will be interesting to see if it gets any better traction than all my "Twenty Years After" book-canon one-shots managed, since I've done my best to make it clear that this is quite definitely based on the BBC TV series instead!

( How would one write a story that was clearly based on the Soviet Musketeers? )

I decided on a last-minute title change from "Night Watch" to "The Four of Us Together", which emerged from the text and seemed to fit the eventual 'theme' better (it was watervole who clarified to me years ago the difference between the *plot* of a story and what it was *about*, with titles very often arising out of the latter). It may also appeal to the target market better, though I'm not holding my breath for that.

And as usual I suppose I shall need a summary of some sort before I can actually upload it...

---

The Four of Us Together

In a winter wood, one young Gascon and three of the King’s Musketeers sleep and stand watch by turns. D’Artagnan is cold but content. (Very early Series 1)

There was a tree root digging into d’Artagnan’s back, and his neck was stiff where he’d wrapped both arms around himself for warmth. High overhead, through the interlaced branches, the moon was moving painfully slowly towards the mark he had set for himself, when his watch would be over. His head began to nod forward, and he caught himself with a jerk.

( Read more... )

I am currently wearing a ridiculous number of layers (thermal vest, heavy brushed-cotton shirt, thin jumper, sleeveless hand-knitted tank top, heavy roll-neck Aran pure wool jumper given to me after it had shrunk in the wash from XL to S, silk scarf under the roll-neck to keep the neck of the jumper clean, fluffy novelty scarf wound many times over it -- and a similar arrangement on my lower half, ( Read more... )

Since the temperature outside my bed was 49F I didn't feel like getting up until finally forced to do so by the demands of my bodily functions, so spent a further three happy if somewhat mindless hours watching uploads on YouTube from Russian channels celebrating the New Year with archive footage, Project Zomboid playthoughs (a game I have never played and shall never be able to play, but for some reason find entertaining to watch), and, by an inevitable process of intersection, Project Zomboid videos *in Russian*... the game being popular enough to have generated its own circle of players there, and even its own Project Russia setting, which remaps everything in the game to a 1990s Russia instead of 1990s USA (the game developers are not, in any case, American, so the original setting reflects zombie movie culture rather than anything else ;-)

After which YouTube proceeded to suggest to me an hour-long interview with Mikhail Boyarsky from 2007, which turned out to be, as so often with the lively Boyarsky, highly entertaining... and also turned out to be completely without subtitles of any kind, either English, Russian, or auto-translated, as I discovered about 15 minutes in when I actually wanted to check what had just been said ;-) ( Read more... )The great thing about Boyarsky as a performer is that he has absolutely no embarrassment and no inhibitions :-D)

† "Mama"....



At any rate I am feeling unusually pleased with myself for once -- and almost ready to gird my loins and tackle the broken-spined paperback 1960s/70s Penguin "АБВ of Russian" (ABV -- the first three letters of the Cyrillic alphabet) that I have just acquired, with an eye to formal grammatical study!
(Never mind grammar, there are words that I don't know in the very first lesson: 'school-desk', 'blackboard'. This is what happens when your vocabulary acquisition consists of words like "honour", "sword" and "hand-to-hand combat"... :-P)

Edit: heating is on. Temperature in here now 54F -- am sweating a little!

I finally completed (well, mostly; a sizeable amount of it is still strewn over the foot of my bed to be burrowed under in search of sleep) the Great Changeover, possibly at the latest ever date; I generally seem to be pushed into it by mid-November, but it just hasn't been all that cold this autumn, and I have been successfully existing in multiple layers of midweight clothing [edit: and hot water bottles!]

I only really did it tonight as a means of procrastination of my music practice -- which then duly didn't happen at all, since I spent the next three or four hours playing around with a video of Veniamin Smekhov talking about Vladimir Vysotsky...

I am currently not doing the sink full of washing up because I am wearing a jumper with long dangling cuffs that would get horribly dirty and matted -- or at least, that's my excuse...


I have carried out half the Great Changeover, emptying and refilling the smaller trunk, as usual, in order to get at my thermal underwear (and then finding my bed still occupied by a heap of winter clothing at 5am when all I wanted was to roll into it and sleep until the alarm went off at nine :-p)

I decided to plant one clove of the garlic that did, for once, successfully bulb up this year, in with the tulips in order to give it a chance to overwinter. We still have no idea what the 'mystery bulb' is, since it didn't flower, and died down long ago -- whether it is still alive or has rotted in the recent rain I have no idea.

( Clocks, watches and fic )

After the brief biannual period of wearing my short-sleeved jumpers I am now considering doing the full changeover to winter clothing; I am wearing dressing-gowns (albeit summer ones) in the morning and snuggling down under an eiderdown and two blankets at night, which thinking about retrieving the third one from upstairs! And I really need more vests, even if not quite full thermals as yet.

( Swan River daisy and marigold seed, and pink Linaria )
( Chives and spring onions )

( Poppies )

( Wildflower trough and tomatoes )

( Chillies )

( Basil )

Despite several days of sub-zero temperatures, the pink Linara is still flowering.... (Doesn't it know it's supposed to be in the middle of the winter?)

A couple more of the kale plants have bitten the dust, however, and one of the beetroots -- I didn't really need three anyway.

The very belated honesty seedling is still alive, although it is now sharing its pot with a self-seeded orange poppy -- despite my concerns earlier this year, I am now able to distinguish them from the red field poppies on foliage and growing habit alone :-)

( Garlic and spring onions )

My alarm clock now seems to be working reliably again, thank goodness( Read more... )

( Chilblains )

( Hot water bottle technique )

And... again my alarm failed to go off in time for me to get to market, after successfully ringing every time for a couple of weeks (but alas, the market was closed last week). I'd started to think that whatever-it-was had stopped happening :-(

My heating has been coming on all this week, and I was finally stung into completing the Great Changeover, having as usual been making do for several weeks with just the thermal underwear, by the sight of a hard white frost all over the roofs! So I am currently wearing my really warm dressing-gown instead of the summer one plus a rug round my shoulders...
I discovered from the manual that the flashing bar which had appeared on the left-hand side of my fancy wireless thermostat system was a low battery indicator( Read more... )


I improvised a 'chocolate beetroot upside-down pear pudding' by combining the recipes for wartime beetroot pudding and 1960s upside-down pineapple pudding (and adding an ounce of cocoa). The beetroot pudding is made with half an ounce of fat, an ounce of sugar, and '6oz wheatmeal flour' to 4oz grated beetroot, and tastes precisely as chewy and uninteresting as one might imagine :-p But I thought adding the chopped pear and 3 tablespoons of golden syrup (which took *forever* to extract from a squeezy bottle) might liven it up.

( Read more... )

Planted up a third attempt at Demon Red chillies using the last of the saved 2022 seed, in case there was something wrong with last year's, and put it on top of my (condensing) boiler in the vain hopes that things might be a little warmer up there from time to time -- it is simply not hot enough indoors, with temperatures still sitting in the low 60s. Fine for me, but no good for germination of semi-tropical plants :(
It gets a good deal warmer *out*doors, enough to dry out the pots, but only when the sun is out... we just had a shower of sleet, from which I had to rescue the tomatoes and the washing!

I also replanted a third batch of Swan River daisies using some of the 2022 seed.

Potted up two of the kale seedlings and two of the marigolds into deeper pots, as they didn't seem to be doing much in their small seedling containers; they didn't have a lot of root on them when dug up, though.

Well, I managed a twenty-minute bath without stopping the clock...

My cycle computer (with its brand-new battery) stopped working again after the bike fell over on a Sheffield stand; I initially assumed that the magnet and/or transmitter had become displaced, but no amount of adjustment made any difference. Eventually it occurred to me that the battery might have been dislodged internally, and when I managed to prise off the cover -- always a fiddle -- this fortunately proved to be the case: one end had been jolted sideways enough to break contact but not enough to open the cover.

And after several days of wondering whether the flashing red light on my replacement central heating controller represented 'Alarm' or 'Receive' (according to the labelling it doubles as both!) I finaly got worried enough to look it up on the Internet, having failed to find the original manual in my Box of Manuals, and discovered that it meant 'low battery'. I also immediately remembered exactly where said manual was, and was then able to consult it as to how to change the batteries... yes, you really do need to use a coin to open the battery cover, as directed. A butter-knife will not work! :-p

First hot-water-bottle last night....

The central heating came on this morning for the second time this year, and most of the leaves have gone from the trees; winter is definitely coming on. (Which, in the second half of November, is pretty much when you'd expect it.)

I have progressed from a microwaved oat bag in bed to a full-length YuYu bottle and bed-socks -- but not yet my eiderdown or nightcap, although the former would be a good idea.