Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Probably because I didn't see anyone, and didn't go anywhere except around my neighbourhood looking for naminals. Admittedly today that was a 2hr mini-hike, but hey. I did call Shiny TWICE, and K once. Shiny has sewn masks. K has new feline housemates, and videos of said nosy ginger boys trying to get into Stellacat's food tray are a great amusement to me.

Work: Listened to MF's segment on BBC Word Service 'The Forum' last night while making dinner. She did very well, but I know some stuff she wanted to get in didn't make the final cut.

Language: I've now had two more lessons on acc/dat prepositions, and I now *understand* the difference when I read and can use the correct w-question words. Producing the correct case and indeed gender when speaking is still a bit hit and miss. I was trying to figure out why this is so HARD, when it was a cakewalk in OE and fairly easy in Latin, and then I realised: in OE I never had to do production exercises, and in Latin, only fill-in-the-gap written ones and i think some tiny 'write a sentence' exercises later on. That's wildly different from having to assemble all the moving parts of a sentence.

Fortuitously, I have been doing these wo/wohin lessons, and the topic is moving house. Fortuitous, for I am to go help J move house next weekend, and while I think her partner speaks English, her flatmates do not (they speak Russian, Arabic, some French and some German). Anyway, I will have an amusing story to tell come mid-august when I have a private lesson booked for the speaking-wrap-up of the 'moving house' unit.

I have a Dr appt this week with a doctor who speaks EITHER english or french but I don't know which. I don't have German class tomorrow, but i shall be doing language work: prepping speaking notes for My Medical History in French, with a rudimentary gloss in German (in case the doctor speaks on English and German). Do I go as far as trying to explain The Family Genetic Bag of Doom, I wonder? I haven't before, in Switzerland, but I might need to for the psych evaluation the week AFTER so perhaps I might as well prep it anyway.

Foods: I made a gratin yesterday and it was disappointing. The potatoes didn't cook through, and I put too much stock in so it was sloppy, and a lot of cheese stuck to the tinfoil.

Once again I have Too Many Leftovers and need to embark on several days of eating down the leftovers. This despite the fact that I still have fresh veg. At least I've eaten up all the peaches and only one had gone too manky to eat before I got to it.

Garten: I repotted the lavender; it has responded by drooping. Silly lavender. I have... faded the daisies? They WERE a rich red and now they're a dusty umber. Actually colour faded, not 'faded blooms' faded, which (I assume?) means wilted. I've hacked at the herbs to cut them back a bit; there are now boquets of herbs in my house. Also hacked back some of the little orange flowers to give the yellow possibly-lantana more space. All fairly tedious, but absorbing. Although I did not know when I took up flower gardening that I would spend so much time giving haircuts to plants.

Naminals: Yesterday I went on a short walk to look for goats (I had heard them on Firday); it turned out they were sheep (video evidence of sheep). I then meandered back to the Baumgarten complex, tried to read more of the signs about the Roman villa, and observed the chickens. I also met a very self-possessed tuxedo cat, who was staring down a poodle and winning. I believe this cat is the genius locorum.

Today I set off over the hills to Oberbottigen, via Niederbottigen and Buch. I did not see any farm cats, but I did see the emus from a distance. I tramped along a path through sugarbeet, which was helpfully so labelled by a big placard advertising the benefits of pesticide in sugarbeet production (I guess someone is proposing an anti-pesticide bill, because this farm had signs on its fields and its piggery explaining why a law against pesticide would be bad). Thence across some grassy fields of unknown purpose, and into a cornfield, where I excelled myself by falling flat on my face three times in 200 metres of grassed and rutted track. Eventually I made it into the wood, where I found a Good Stick. I came out above a tiny village called Buch, and turned for Oberbottigen on the road, and then home along the main road. I have kept the Good Stick, though; I intend to wash it down, dry it, and then sand it back, and take it with me on further expotitions, to reduce the number of times I fall flat on my face on even slightly uneven surfaces.

All up this took about two hours. As well as the emus I saw some cows, the pigs in the piggery, some horsies in the equestrian stables, and a llama in someone's side yard.

Internets: Instagram has locked both my accounts from liking or commenting or even putting captions on my own photos - but it seems like only when I use the mobile app? Turning on VPN on the phone didn't help, but switching to my desktop browser EVEN THOUGH IT'S USING MOBILE DATA did. Extremely weird.

I assume, since this isn't IP linked, it has something to do with my IFTTT scripts, which are all playing up anyway because gmail changed its rules again. Given the latest tumblr update ate some xkit functionalities I rely on AND since about a week before the latest update tumblr no longer recognises the 'show this photo in portrait' metadata from my camera, I have decided that my photo tumblr is now a dead blog. Spent some time twiddling email posting settings and speculumannorum will now be getting direct posts, via email. Annoyingly, one can't schedule emails when composing in gmail on one's phone, but one CAN at least post more than one photo at a time. And the weird line breaks that used to happen with gmail post-by-email seem to have gone away.

I've got a fair bit of instagram crossposting to catch up, which might take a while, but there's photos from the camera scheduled for every day of this week.

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This has been a mundane update.

Most notable, I guess, for the fact that I now feel like it's okay to 'pop to the shops' for one thing or another.

Done Saturday: I don't really remember the order of events, but it definitely included the following:
- reading a couple of articles in the summer Meanjin (my autumn issue went astray, and the re-send may possibly make it here before the winter one if i'm lucky)
- fussing with plants, including emergency repotting of the rosemary as they blew off their ledge in a rainstorm
- called parents, all is well there. Showed off my FURNITURE.
- pasta with a very minimal accompaniment of sautéed onions, tomato, feta and basil: mainly to have a reason to cut the basil back.
- placed an iHerb order for more spices, since apparently that's how I can get things like 'allspice' in switzerland.
- German lesson
- went for a wander in the rain in the evening to replenish supplies of wine and haribo. Found the service station I had done my first toilet-paper stocking at back in March - I WONDERED where that was. The walk was nice, the purchases unnecessary.
- Installed tinder and promptly deactivated in horror upon discovering that it is an app designed for you to swipe yea or nay based on /photographs/ without detailed bios. In fact I'm not even sure the people it was showing me when I asked it to show me women were interested in women? Because it didn't ask ME who my target audience is.
- Resumed listening to Unwell. Accidentally listened to several episodes i'd already listened to but this time in reverse order. If Magnus was working out for me because each episode is (or was, until recently) its own self-contained plot, Unwell seems to work for the opposite reason: it has a plot, but the plot is so slow that each individual episode might as well have only been lightly fragranced with eau de plot. Some spooky, but very little tension.


Done Sunday:
- Started reading 'The Mercies' for an online book club. Read sixty pages! That makes it the first fiction to actually hold my attention consistently for a very, very long time. It's reminding me of Burial Rites, in a very good way, although not QUITE as impeccable historically (or maybe it's that I know more about the early 17th century than I do the early 19th in northern Europe). It has already passed my personal 'sausage test', with a catching-killing-and-gutting of large seafish sequence.
- started writing a letter to Shiny, because if i send emails of random things I thought of and think they'd find interesting then they'll feel pressure to write proper responses.
- went for a run. Took a different route, found a patch of woodland on a not too steep hilltop with navigable paths. Am still repeating wk 3 of C25k. Considering ditching it for simply one-song-on-one-song-off intervals: as happened last time, the jump from wk 3 to 4 is Daunting.
- Playreading with wildeabandon et al. Alan Bennet's Habeas Corpus, which was... definitely a play. That we read. Very rapid-fire farce. This is only my second encounter with Alan Bennet: do ALL his play's involve what would, in contemporary UK parlance, be called Safeguarding Issues? Is that just his Thing?
- Another episode or two of Unwell.

Done Today:
- listened to half an episode of Carbone14 and then realised I don't know enough about Martinique to keep up.
- called Friend R in Scotland, who is as well as anyone who went into voluntary isolation when Italy shut down and isn't coming out any time soon can be.
- two pomos worth of reading on the RdR, discovered stuff that really SHOULD have been in my PhD, and am suspicious of the translator. But reading in the english first and THEN the french means this time i'm a. noticing the humour and b. not skimming over the stuff that is relevant to my final argument but wasn't relevant to what i THOUGHT i was doing in 2014.
- further progress on the EM stage violence book
- German class. I like the praeterite.
- Payday. Did assorted financial juggling. Found a medical bill I hadn't expected: turns out I get charged a lot extra if in my 'nod and smile' mode in the pharmacy I accidentally said yes I want the brand name med and not the generic.
- More shopping. Placed an Underworks order: one women's compression vest, and since I was there, pettipants and a sports bra. Placed an order to restock my gunpowder tea supplies from the same online store I used last time. Went down to the big shopping centre. In the supermarket-florist picked up a watering can and some spray bottles. Did not get a 24cm pot, annoyingly.
- attempted to refill psych meds but apparently I don't have any more repeats (fortunately I have some from Aus left and an appointment soon). Did fill my cantonally-issued 'in case of nuclear disaster take these' potassium tablets order.
- answered an email, and contacted MF for Advice on how to proceed with the thing about which I have been sending emails
- laundry
- arranged the small floor mats in the reading nook
- Another episode of Unwell. Less of The Mercies than i'd hoped, but some.

Several things on T'Internet At Large have been upsetting me, but ho hum, that's what the internet does.

You may note that sewing is not in this list. It ought to be, but didn't happen.

I have successfully re-potted tomato plants. One of the pots sort of exploded on me, but I have succeeded!

Also I am attempting to grow a sweet chilli seedling in the bottom of a milk carton.