Igenlode Wordsmith

Broke a glass. Cut my foot, despite having very meticulously swept up all the broken pieces all across the kitchen. Didn't notice until I saw the trail of bloody footprints across the floor, whereupon it suddenly started hurting :-p

(To be fair, after I'd washed off all the random smears caused by treading in my own blood, I eventually discovered that I had a very small cut on the *top* of my foot, so I think it must have been inflicted as a result of flying glass shards, rather than by treading on anything...)

---

( Tomatoes )

( Dill )

I am immensely amused by the current Count Bin-face saga.
(There is something utterly and reassuringly English about this particular response to dog-whistle politics: P.G. Wodehouse poking fun at the 'Black Shorts' rather than Rallying to the Flag to Defend Democracy...)

I managed a reasonable facsimile of Russian varen'ye by soaking and then simmering a handful of home-picked blackcurrants, raspberries and one loganberry (visible on the bottom right, I think!) in an equal weight of my elderflower golden syrup -- according to my cookery book, Russian jam was originally made by simply simmering berries in honey, so this was a reasonable imitation!


I wanted it to eat with the leftover curd cheese from the raspberry cheesecake that I had made...

Ants swarm a fallen caterpillar -- unfortunately their small black bodies are almost invisible in the photo, but it was being carried along on its back in a series of jerks...

I can't believe that I managed to forget to put out the food recycling *again* this week( Read more... )

( Clothes moths on the stairs )

My first two towel-tomatoes have ripened (and been eaten). ( Read more... )

The sweet peas have almost finished flowering( Read more... )
I had a second attempt at making syrniki, using the left-over cheese from my first attempt, when I made them rather too thin and burnt the outsides by using too hot a pan:

This time I sweetened them using my elderflower syrup, which meant I then ended up adding extra flour to counteract the liquid content! This time round I made them into little balls rather than little rissoles, and got better results -- though by the time they had finished cooking they weren't very spherical any more :-)

It's 5am, and I have woken up for the third time tonight.
Temperature in my bedroom is still a princely 78F, and there is a constant blur of white noise from what is apparently the grille of my neighbours' industrial-strength air-conditioning unit immediately outside my bedroom window (presumably accompanied by their waste heat) which makes it a noticeable struggle for me to try to listen to Russian -- just the same as when aircraft fly over :-(

I attended a screening of "The People's Emergency Briefing" last night( Read more... )

I'm currently getting a "You have been semi-randomly selected to complete a captcha" challenge all over Dreamwidth (e.g. any time I try to reply to anything, expand a comment thread, etc.) with no visible captcha, so that I can't get any further... it will be interesting to see whether I can actually post to my own journal or not...

[Edit: well, apparently I can do that at least]

[Edit: I can't reply to comments even on my own journal, though.]

[Edit: I can 'reply by email'...]

I came back from a walk in the woods -- where I spent half an hour or so this afternoon watching some rabbits grazing -- with three large plant pots for the benefit of the tomatoes, acquired from the recycling boxes of the rich (one of them still had a £59.99 price tag adhering to it where someone had bought an instant olive tree...) There was an even larger pot as well, but I left that behind on the grounds that I didn't have space for that kind of thing :-p

It was just as well I did, because moving three of my most crowded tomato plants (one towel-tomato, one towel-tomato (good) and the Roma tomato) into the new pots used up all the compost in my 'new' bag, and I only have a very little dry compost left from all the pots that were emptied back into the old bags last winter. ( Read more... ) I really need things to hurry up and finish setting seed so that they can be harvested and the pots/compost retrieved :-p
( Buddleia and flax )

No sign of germination as yet in the fresh batch of dill and basil seeds that I planted.

Lesson 23 of "Let's get to know one another", set at a health resort on the Black Sea, is a welcome return to form after Lessons 20, 21 and 22 all variously turned out to be less than satisfactory -- and in the case of Lesson 22, the blame could be laid, I'm afraid, pretty squarely on the script by one "V. Smekhov": oops!

The dialogue for the episode varies between unnecessarily and incomprehensibly over-complex (there were significant chunks I could only get by replaying it with the subtitles, like the business about the 'Middle Ages fortress walls'(?) [*looks it up*: yes, that's a very obscure adjective]) and the wooden and uninspiring phrases ("Do you play volleyball? No, I don't play volleyball") that were presumably part of the brief for this lesson, but which are not worked into any sort of actual story :-( ( Read more... )

Lesson 23, on the other hand, is immediately very much better; it embraces its limits and manages to provide both entertainment and educational content at the same time, while supplying what feels like a great deal more dialogue for learning purposes. As is so often done in these tele-courses, they use the device of involving children to justify the simplification and repetition that is needed for effective learning( Read more... )

I was distinctly surprised to discover by chance that Daniel Defoe actually wrote a sequel to "Robinson Crusoe" (The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) in which his protagonist ends up spending more than a year travelling through Russia ("Grand Tartary") at the beginning of the eighteenth century... published in Russian, apparently, as "Robinson in Siberia"!
https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/cruikshank/crusoe/38.html

He is now a local tourist attraction :-)
https://visittyumen.ru/what-to-do/dostoprimechatelnosti/pamyatniki/zhizn-i-priklyucheniya-robinzona-kruzo-v-sibiri/

Finished Part II of the 1930s Russian study book -- the final part being for some reason, a parallel text translation *into* Russian of the opening section of a 'Basic English' version of "Gulliver's Travels"! I can only assume that the Orthological Institute, who published this book, happened to have the copyright to Gulliver conveniently to hand, since it is really not the most obvious text to use ( Read more... )

The English text of the 'everyday conversations' in Part II, however, really does have an unmistakable pre-war flavour to it ;-p Goodness knows if the corresponding Russian text is equally colloquial, but I rather suspect it may not be( Read more... )

(When did people stop saying "do/don't let's"? It's not *wrong*, but it holds a very distinct flavour of its era, while the current generation of foreign students are confused if I say "I shan't be around next week", because apparently they don't even get taught "shan't"/"shall not" as standard English usage any more...)