Igenlode Wordsmith

I think my marigold seedlings probably got frosted last night; they are not looking at all happy. I suspect the trouble is that they were still in the shallow tray. Fortunately I had not put the tomatoes out -- although since the surface of the balcony is currently warm to the touch in the sunshine and the indoor temperature is still only 55F, I have them outside at the moment!

I have typed up about half of Chapter 2 of "Ashes", and it is clearly going to be far too long (four and a half thousand words already, and we have at least three more major plot points to cover; in fact very little has actually happened yet). It will almost certainly need to be cut heavily and/or split, but I don't think that simply splitting it is going to solve anything :-( I suppose I shall need to go through yet again and try to pare it back to focus on the actual original vision for the scene, as opposed to all the embellishments that seemed like a good idea at the time...

( Gloom )

Pages on AO3 continue to fail to load on a regular basis, which is particularly awkward if you are trying to submit any kind of data (e.g. edits or reviews), but apparently the problem is not actually at this end for once... ("known performance issues")

I have my first chilblains of the year (not from boots in the snow, but from cycling to market in two pairs of socks). On the other hand, my pink Linaria is amazingly *still flowering*, despite a hard frost!

The dwarf pea seed planted indoors, however, simply failed to shoot at all, which is not a terribly good omen for next spring.

The special offer half-price boiler service offered by British Gas earlier this year ("you can go on enjoying the summer, knowing you're all prepped for when cold weather comes") that turned out not to be actually scheduled, due to high demand, until October 21st, has just been rescheduled, "due to a high number of breakdowns", for January 13th -- the middle of winter! Let's hope the boiler doesn't actually need urgent servicing... :-O

(Also, the big and very heavy antique clock on the wall in here has stopped, and sadly I'm not in a position to gently invert it in order to magically bring it back to life; it is all I can do to lift it down off the wall, and I had to hastily replace it since the top of the pendulum was bending alarmingly when held in anything other than a vertical position. Probably it just needs oiling, but the mechanism, although much larger and cruder than the little mantel clock, is a bit inaccessible.)

We have the first germination of seeds in the tomato and chilli pots -- definitely not tomatoes or chillis! I'm guessing that the first-comers will probably be chickweed...

It is still very cold at night, and in fact I have been using my eiderdown, which I hadn't got out earlier in the winter. About 56F in here over the night, although in bed I was toasty warm ;-)

The Dreamwidth error reports on the 403 error situation have finally 'stuck', after a very weird period when they would all get deleted within a day of posting.

Apparently it is "a Cloudfront issue": https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=48647 (not to be confused with CloudFlare, which is what locks me out of fanfiction.net!)

I harvested my Demon Red seeds today, opening two chilli pods as usual just in case one of them turned out not to be viable. The plants are definitely starting to suffer from the cold, and I have brought them inside pending my getting round to picking the rest of the chillies. I rashly wiped my eyes after handling the inside of the fruit (but *after* washing my hands!) and can vouch for it that they are definitely hot...

The central heating came on for the first time last night, and I really need to get down the rest of my winter clothing -- I have emptied one trunk but still have the big one to do. Fortunately the small trunk was the one with all my thermal underwear in it :-)

And... once again the Great Changeover is completed, once again on *exactly* the same date as on the two previous years of record -- which is odd, because it's a different day of the week each year (so I'm not always doing it on a Sunday afternoon, for instance).

And precisely as I noted last year, the short-sleeved shirts really didn't get worn to speak of (I dare not cycle in them, for instance), and I have been existing in a state of semi-changeover for some weeks after partially emptying the trunks earlier.

( Pyjamas )

It's definitely winter now -- not only am I taking a hot-water-bottle to bed, but my central heating came on for the first time at six o'clock this evening! (Not for long, as the sensor is in the warmest place... the corridor outside the kitchen :-p)

---

Paris was in a positive ferment of Royalist conspiracy at present, and there had been a great deal of ill-feeling over the circumstances of the Duc de Trélan's capture. It should be possible to effect his escape, and indeed a promising scheme was afoot for the very next day. Precision would be required, and sufficient purloined uniforms to outfit an entire escort and commanding officer, who would present counterfeit orders for the prisoner's transfer to some other place of confinement.

Tomorrow evening, provided it all went exactly according to plan, Valentine and her husband would be making for the coast.

I took out a torch and caught a dozen or so smallish slugs roaming around my pots in the (very cold -- I thought they were cold-blooded? It's only a few degrees above freezing) dark. I imagine that explains what happened to my mesembryanthemums... and to another batch of slow-growing succulent-type seedlings that had just begun to take off after almost two months, when the most promising plant was eaten through last night at the stem and left with its plump leaves decapitated across the compost.

Unfortunately I wasn't equipped with any very effective means of dealing with them. I no longer have a sharp trowel to cut them in half, and while I normally condemn slugs to shrivel to death on the scorching hot tiles below my balcony, simply dropping them off (or even flicking them as far as possible) isn't necessarily going to stop them climbing back up in search of greenstuff. Perhaps I should have taken a bowl of boiling water with me. (I'm not prepared to waste that much salt...)

It was certainly too cold for bare feet. My toes are still burning with returning circulation.

I set of to market to get some emergency vegetables (the greengrocery delivery was cancelled again) -- or at least I tried!

I discovered that I simply couldn't turn the key in my bike lock; I've heard of the locks on car doors being frozen, but I'd never encountered this particular problem before. Fortunately a squirt of penetrating oil managed to melt matters a little. When I finally got the lock open I found chunks of ice falling out of it, and a large piece of ice dropped out of my saddle cover.

I eventually set off about fifteen minutes later than intended, and worried about getting back before dark as it was already pretty overcast (at 2.30pm!) Since I was going cautiously, it took me a while to notice that nothing whatsoever happened when I tried to change up a gear -- first of all I thought the gear change lever had also frozen up and managed to wiggle it loose, but while it then clicked into all its accustomed positions, the gears didn't actually engage. I was stuck in first gear for the foreseeable future.
( a frozen rabbit )
Total distance covered: eleven and a half miles at an average speed of around seven or eight miles per hour. I hope the gear hub does unfreeze without any further issues once the thaw starts, otherwise my horizons are likely to be even more limited than they have been to date. There is no local market, but there is a greengrocer's stall, if it's still running in this weather (he, too, may have decided the likely level of custom versus the discomfort is simply not worth it).

Total odometer reading now 2427.8; another four hundred miles since last July and seven hundred under lockdown. Goodness knows what my foot mileage has been...

How on earth have I managed to acquire a streaming cold when I haven't so much as spoken to another human being since last Saturday?

(In fact I've had my usual succession of colds with precisely the usual frequency since last spring; I think my mother must have been right, and that the constant nose-blowing is some kind of generalised allergy to the world rather than an actual infection. But I've currently got an awful lot of handkerchiefs in the ironing pile...)

I have acquired an impressive collection of chilblains -- including an implausibly large one on the underside of my big toe where it must have been pressed against the chilly floor, as opposed to the customary collection of swellings on the tips or sides of my digits -- and have progressed to the three-jumper and two-pairs-of-socks stage. (I'm currently wearing two thermal vests -- a 'heat-tech' T-shirt on top of an oldfashioned sleeved vest -- to compensate for the fact that today's selection of jumpers is a bit skimpier than yesterday's.) And on a couple of occasions I have worn (a) a night-cap and (b) a silk handkerchief knotted around my head. I have also taken to wearing my cycling neck-gaiter under my woolly hat outdoors as a sort of compound balaclava, the only part exposed being a triangle of mouth and nose for breathing purposes, plus the eyes peeping out from under the low-pulled hat-brim.

And I've got a split in the end of one finger that may be a paper cut but I suspect is just a spontaneous parting of the fibres, also cold-related :-(