Igenlode Wordsmith

Blood on the floor

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:18:09 GMT

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...)

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Word of mouth

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:05:54 GMT

I looked back at the YouTube page for the Dumas song, and discovered that it had acquired some new comments from the author discussing the decision to end the lyric with the phrase "on your lips" (у вас в устах) rather than "in your hearts" (у вас в серцах), this apparently being a significant decision taken because a memory held in the heart dies with the owner, but a memory passed on by word of mouth remains in circulation indefinitely. Which rather reinforced my existing dissatisfaction with my loose rendition of that concluding couplet :-(( Read more... )

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Varen'ye

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 01:31:40 GMT

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 in an equal weight of my elderflower golden syrup -- according to my cookery book, Russian jam was originally made by simply simmering berries in honey, so this was a reasonable imitation!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...

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Lyrics dump

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 22:06:55 GMT

Apparently I'm translating lyrics again... (Given that doing so involves considerable labour in copying out a song by hand and, in this case, trying to work out what the lyrics actually *are* in the absence of a transcript, I'm not quite sure how one can do it accidentally. But somehow I don't ever intend to do it!)

( Read more... )

Rough translation (done, as usual, *after* writing the verse ( Read more... )

DUMAS AND CHILDREN
( Read more... )

Verse form:

THE AUTHOR AND HIS OFFSPRING
( Read more... )

Edit: still frustrated by not being able to leave comments on anything :-(

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The enemy of my enemy

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:16:20 GMT

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...

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Cheers in the small hours

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 01:43:57 GMT

It dawns on me that the loud cheers, boos, and thumping from outside at 2:40am (as I insert a fresh patch into my hot-weather pyjama trousers, where I put my thumb through at waist level -- they really are worn out) is presumably people watching 'the England match' going on in the USA, where it's currently about 8-9pm...

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Syrniki

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 22:58:00 GMT

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 :-)

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Drastic shortening

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:44:22 GMT

I spoke to my brother (one of the only two people who have read the entire manuscript) about my struggles with Arctic Raoul. His title suggestions: "Return of the Phantom"/"Revenge of the Phantom" :-p
Proposal to shorten the length: refocus the story on Raoul rather than Christine, as opposed to trying to balance the two, and omit all appearances of Philippe (on the not unreasonable grounds that a year or so after having read the book, he couldn't remember anything about him -- as opposed to, say, Lancard, or even Kulla the cow...)

Which would certainly drastically shorten the book( Read more... )

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The People's Emergency Briefing

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 05:32:37 GMT

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... )

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Level B1

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 06:28:33 GMT

Harvested the first flax and poppy seeds. Unfortunately the possible seedling yellow poppy has died of drought, although the chives in the same pot survived. I am not at all optimistic about the seedlings that might have been from the orange long-headed poppy, either.
( Watering )
Having (I suspect) been responsible for killing off the miniature rose, the ants have moved into *both* of the surviving strawberry pots and are busy excavating there, throwing up mounds of earth grains around the stems of the plants -- multiple nests? :-(
( my level of written Russian is apparently 'B1' )

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Captchas

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:20:23 GMT

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'...]

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Smelly

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:27:29 GMT

This is the worst possible weather in which to forget to put out the food recycling bin :-(
(Especially when it is bulging with melon rinds, broad bean pods, etc -- some weeks I don't generate much volume...)

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New big pots

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 21:04:38 GMT

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.

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Flowers all over the place

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:57:45 GMT

Just about everything is now in flower (including the coriander, oops!)
Even the Cumbrian yellow poppy turned out to have thrown up a fresh crop of flowers, probably as a result of the rain, though they are practically invisible behind the peas, rosehips, and field poppies that have grown up in front of them since earlier in the year -- photo at extreme arm's length :-)

We have a belated extra opium poppy, long after the others have been reduced to no more than ripening seedheads:

The first of the rudbeckias have opened, with many more to come, and the marigolds are starting to bloom, still in their striking red-and-gold stage before their colour evens out to a mature orange.

One of the nasturtiums has also opened( Read more... )

( Sweet peas )

( Cornflowers )

On the other hand I don't think anything has germinated from my belated sowing of the now-elderly "Flowers for Birds" buckwheat-shell mix, which I shook out pretty vigorously over the ( wildflower trough )

( Garlic )
(Seen here with measuring spoon for scale - click for full image)

Actually I think the larger of the two, assuming that was the one that was planted earlier and didn't get delayed by having to straighten itself out, was the clove from *last* year's bulb...

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A Black Sea health resort, and Tallinn

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 01:21:33 GMT

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... )

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Aramis at large

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:09:52 GMT

"Эй, моряк" -- why, hallo sailor :-D

( Read more... )

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Robinson Crusoe in Russia

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:17:57 GMT

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/

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Cheese custard

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:45:30 GMT

I was lucky enough to be given a couple of loaves of date-expired bread, plus a very-slightly mouldy-at-the-bottom packet of 9 assorted bread rolls, on which I pigged myself on the way home (it was nearly 3pm and I hadn't yet had any lunch -- and I am extremely fond of bread).

I cut up and froze the white loaf for future cooking and/or toasting purposes, and used a chunk of the brown to make an late-night improvised Cheese-Custard-cum-soufflé-in-a-tomato supper using my last egg, by combining two recipes in order to 'stuff' half a salad green pepper. ( Read more... )

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Period flavour

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:21:03 GMT

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...)

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Many repetitions

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:11:47 GMT

I think I've finally pretty much completed Lesson 16 in the 1990s "Colloquial Russian", on my third or fourth (?or fifth?) attempt -- unless it's just that I've been over those exercises so many times that I've now memorised the answers to those particular questions, all three pages of them...
I really thought I'd got it the first time, only to get completely floored when I actually hit the questions :-( And I know they are deliberately testing you on the most difficult/irregular verbs, and on things that have been covered in earlier lessons to help you not to forget them -- and that is why the exercises in this book are so good, apart from the minor issue that they don't give you the answers for obvious reasons of space -- but I don't remember ever being *quite* so stuck on a chapter before. ( Read more... )

I also finally managed, likewise on the fourth or fifth attempt, to complete listening to Smekhov's half-hour reading of the "Little Tales" from Konstantin Paustovsky without falling asleep -- chiefly by virtue of listening to the audiobook at 9 o'clock in the morning instead of while lying in bed well after midnight! ( Read more... )

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This woman leaves behind a suffering child

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:50:00 GMT

I discovered by chance yet another significant inconsistency between my French and English copies of "The Three Musketeers", where the old English translation appears to be of an edition containing material not present in the edition on which my newer French paperback copy was based.

Here there is at least one missing line of dialogue in the chapter dealing with Milady's attempts to avoid execution, where Athos makes the point (according to the Wikisource edition, where this is notably the final sentence on the page of the original scan, which implies that it may in consequence have been simply omitted *by accident* when typesetting at some point :-O) Voyez, cette femme a un enfant, et cependant elle n'a pas dit un mot de son enfant!

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Burn me!

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:11:44 GMT

It finally dawned upon me in the bath that the pink discomfort and itching on my forearms that I had assumed was thorn/nettle damage is actually sunburn from doing a pruning job while wearing short sleeves...! I have been so very, very careful for so many years to stay covered up that I didn't even recognise the symptoms any more :-p

(Although looking at the raised scratch marks across my inner arms and the ongoing tingling in my right-hand forefingers/palm where I grasped the cut nettles, I think it's probably six of one and half a dozen of the other. At any rate I have treated it with aloe vera gel, mainly for the cooling sensation, and am wearing my pyjama sleeves rolled up for the moment.)

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Flowers

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 20:11:56 GMT

The evening primroses have started to open:

And we have the first corn-marigold (slightly stained in the centre where the half-open bud ended up being full of water for several days of heavy rain!)

There is even some very straggly corn-chamomile, although it's suffering from being in a pot under a vigorous shoo-fly plant, so we now have a full roster of 'cornfield mix' (a.k.a. oldfashioned farm weeds :-p)

The local bees are loving the pink Linaria, which obligingly opens its lower petal when the insect's weight alights upon it; they are clearly honey-bees rather than wild bumble bees, so somewhere in the neighbourhood someone evidently has a hive that is foraging up on my roof :-D

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A second query

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:22:12 GMT

After spending a week rewriting my initial 'story pitch' in order to submit to an agent who actually requests a plot summary by default (with the result, as I realised, that the previous opening of my cover letter, good as it was, was in effect duplicating the opening paragraph of the plot summary), I have now managed to submit to a second London-based agent.... at this rate it will take me several more years to submit multiple queries!

Looking back at the Query Shark critiques, I suspect that after all my struggles the cover letter/query is far *too long* -- like the manuscript itself, which I ought to be dedicating all this effort into cutting down instead :-( On the other hand, while checking details I did find myself actively drawn into rereading chunks of my own novel, which was I think more than simply avoidance tactics, but a good sign as to the quality of the writing...

New opening:( Read more... )

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A good drenching

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:20:09 GMT

Everything has benefited from the rain after days on end of unseasonable and unbearable heat -- even the Christmas-present amaryllis that was busy having a 'holiday' out of doors ( Read more... )

The rudbeckias, marigolds and corn-marigolds all have flower buds on. Interestingly, one of the self-sown not-tomato seedlings has turned out not just to be a cornflower, but to be a pink cornflower -- presumably descended from the 'purple mix' of last year! I did save some of that seed, but haven't planted it myself as we seemed to have rather a lot of cornflowers already :-p

( Mesembryanthemums and orange poppy )

The beetroot and kale are also trying to flower, and I should probably be thinking about sowing replacements. Unfortunately I really don't have room!

( Rocket and lettuce )

The towel-tomatoes are producing plenty of little green fruits, and the one Roma tomato has put out its first flowers.

( Dwarf peas and sweet peas )

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