daidoji_gisei: (Default)
The shooting pain in my right leg is gone as if it had never been. I'm grateful, but I'd be happier if I knew what caused it in the first place.

I've done an inventory of my stash of vegetable seeds and have determined that I probably shouldn't buy any more seeds this year. I probably still will, but at least I can now avoid getting a fifth packet of leaf mustard. There are a few things that I have, but would like some different varieties of (can one have too many kinds of radish? I think not!) and it would be nice to have a few more flowers this year.

The feed section of my TWSBI Vac 700 broke last night. Happily I noticed something was going wrong before the nib and feed fell out, releasing a ml of Black Swan in Australian Roses all over my notebook. So annoying. TWSBI is supposed to have great customer service so getting a replacement part shouldn't be difficult, but I'm a bit bummed that it happened at all.

Still creeping through stage 5 of my Latin text. I should be going faster, but I'm dealing with the terror of having to now keep track of both case and plurality of nouns. Apparently being a native speaker of English has made me a declension wimp.

Update

Feb. 6th, 2014 05:20 pm
daidoji_gisei: (Shall bones live?)
It's been hard for me to keep up with online things because I still haven't had a chance to get my computer fixed. (I know, I know, first world problems, I'm not supposed to complain about things because I don't live in a war zone.)

I'm behind in all of my crochet projects, mostly because I've been dividing my at-home time between catching up on housework and laboring ineffectually at various writing projects. I'm doubly grumpy about the writing thing today because I've been reminded that I'm Not A Real Writer because I'm not interested in staying up way past my bedtime to get my writing in. I'm sorry, but I don't have a cushy desk job were I can sit in front of a computer the next day and pretend like I'm working. I'm either doing physical production or dealing with Being A Manager Who Has to Supervise People and both of these things require me getting sleep the previous night. Also I do not have now and never have had a muse.

At least I'm still crawling ahead on Latin; I finished chapter 4 (finally!) yesterday and will be moving on to chapter 5, which apparently will introduce plurals. I think that when I get through this textbook (the Cambridge Latin Course is divided between 4 books) I should reward myself with some more ink. I haven't decided now many bottles a Latin textbook is worth, but I still have 7 chapters to go so I have time to make up my mind.

Work would be fine except that I am suffering from a Problem which is so stressful it's eating away at me even when I'm at home trying to relax and has me fantasizing about calling in sick so that I don't have to deal with it. The situation is not going to go away and I suspect it is going to get worse before it gets better--I'm just hoping I'm not the person who makes it worse.

Valentine's Day is coming, so I get to spend the next week being reminded that I'm fat, unattractive, middle-aged, and alone. Thank you, greeting card and floral industries, for all you have done to improve my life. I would be tempted to buy myself something to cheer myself up (which of course is the entire point of Valentine's Day) but I went ahead and ordered myself some Dragon's Eye last week, which takes care of my discretionary spending for the month. I do still need to order some seeds, but it's hard to make growing vegetables feel like a splurge.

Busy, busy

Jan. 22nd, 2014 04:45 pm
daidoji_gisei: (Default)
Still have to fix computer. It's being delayed by various things, like polar vortexes and sick employees and whatnot. Meanwhile I've been busy doing important things like cleaning my kitchen, doing laundry, and playing with the ereader my best friend got me for my birthday. I never particularly wanted one before, but having one now I admit it has a lot of advantages. The greatest one so far is that there are a lot of free ebooks out there, and now I have (and am reading through) a huge pile of very early Andre Norton. (Her earliest works came out in the late 40s. Who knew?)

Overall January is going well, though I've fallen behind in my Latin homework. (See: ereader, above.) As an experiment I set myself a food budget goal far lower than what the USDA allows for food stamps, and so far I'm meeting it. This is forcing me to use up the foodstuffs in my storage cupboards, which is my main motivation for the experiment. It's also making me cook more, because take-out eats up money fast, and this is helping me get back to healthy eating, so it's a good thing all around.

I finally missed my saving throw and ordered some of the BPAL Yule scents. I went with The First Soft Snow 2013 and The Garden In Winter because I'm curious on how they handle the concept of 'snow' in a scent, and Peacock Queen 2013 because so far it's my favorite of the LEs and I decided I wanted this year's rendition. I always save up to order at least three bottles at a time, because shipping is so expensive. Now I need to start saving again, because I'm on the waiting list for when Hymn comes back into stock. (It's one of my favorites, and my bottle is almost empty!) When I get my computer back I intend to go through my stock and put up a sell-list on the BPAL fan forum--I have a handful of LEs that I've tried several times, and they just don't work on me. (Which is to say, they develop fruity notes that I just cannot deal with. For some reason the Lunacies are prone to this, even the ones that don't have a fruit in their scent notes.)

My anual eval was supposed to be Thursday, but it's been rescheduled to Friday. I don't have a problem with this except I hate and dread annual evals and this is another day to fret about it. Well, it can't be helped.
daidoji_gisei: "Because I'm worth it" (L'oreal)
I got an amazing number of packages in the mail this week. It wasn't due to any organized plan on my part, that's just the way things happened. A few weeks ago I had placed an order for some perfume from BPAL and then made myself forget about it, because hand-blended perfume oils take time and there's no sense being anxious about it. Then Helen's book showed up on Amazon about the time I started lusting over the Devil May Cry anime set and hey, free shipping! What's a fan girl to do? Finally there were the Latin books I bought from a friend in the L5R community--if it's a book written in a dead language, it can't be considered a frivolous purchase, right?

I've watched some of the anime, heroically resisted sitting down and rereading FANG GIRL, and tried on one of the free imps included in my perfume order. (Seance, see below.) I haven't done anything with the Latin books yet, but it will be awhile before I am up to reading a book written entirely in Latin, even if it is just Winnie the Pooh. I really want to reread FANG GIRL, but that needs to wait for the weekend, when I have time. It will be a reward for getting the kitchen clean.

Seance: A mysterious, enigmatic blend of dry, mellow rosewood, crushed rose leaf and the slightest touch of warm hazel. I could smell a bit of the hazel in the bottle, but thankfully it pretty much went away on drydown. I don't mind nut-scents the way I mind fruit-scents, but I really prefer to not have them getting in the way of my florals. On my skin it was a really nice, subdued rose scent. For about two hours, after which it pretty much disappeared. I was most disappointed, because I was wondering if this was going to be a rival to London for a non-LE rose scent but with a short lifespan it won't be of much use to me.
daidoji_gisei: (Default)
Yesterday after doing all the laundry that would fit on my drying racks and lots of dishes I settled down to some Latin study. (Who would have thought the day would come when I was studying a language for fun?) I had cleared most of Stage 4 when it occurred to me that while translating the book readings was good, eventually I'd have to work on translating English to Latin if I wanted real mastery of the language. This thought collided with my recent Devil May Cry viewing and produced this:
DANTE: ecce! id alas habet!
TRISH: id est non pulchra.

Read more... )
daidoji_gisei: (Default)
First, some BPAL notes from the weekend:
Yggdrasil: smelled nice and piney in vitro, but on me it was somewhere between being lost in a forest and being drenched with Pinesol. Alas.
Nero: Love this stuff! Something resinous--rosemary or pine, I can't tell--with some citrus and other things I can't tease out. I tried to look up the scent notes on the BPAL site and discovered it appears to have been discontinued. Sob! I'll have to track down the scent notes somewhere and figure out if it has a reasonable substitute somewhere.
Maiden: a confused floral with a subdued carnation note. I am depressed that this one didn't work on me, because I really need (ok, want) a good carnation perfume and this one, with notes of white tea, carnation and Damask rose, sounded perfect on paper.

Meanwhile, today I managed to be even lazier than I was yesterday. Given how little I did yesterday I'm not sure how I managed this and still had a pulse, but whatever. My high point was cracking open my Latin textbook and restarting my study of that dead and noble language. When I started translating one of the reading passages I was cheered at how much I remembered of the vocabulary of the previous stages. I think I still need to be doing daily rounds of my flashcards, however. And as the stages roll on, I need to figure out a criteria for deciding when I know a word well enough that I can take its card out of the rotation. (Because honestly, pater, mater and canis are not difficult to remember.)

It was cloudy on and off all day without raining. I am very bitter about this. The only good thing coming out of my garden this year is a crop of volunteer sunflowers, which I left in place earlier when it became apparent that I wasn't going to be planting anything in their place. They are pretty and the birds are loving the seeds, so at least someone is getting food out of that land. I need to dig out my bird identification book to figure out what that cute little yellow-and-olive green bird I've been seeing is. Some kind of finch, I imagine, but after that I'm ignorant.
daidoji_gisei: (Default)
Nancy est in tablino.
Nancy est in tablino scribit.
Nancy est laetus.


I am now halfway through the second stage of the first unit of the Cambridge Latin Course. I don't know why they call them stages instead of chapters, unless "stage" is the Latin equivalent of the English "chapter", which would be pretty neat. Eventually I will get around to investigating this.

The stages contain a couple of word lists (and their meanings), a few reading passages, some information on grammar, exercises, and an article that talks about life in ancient Rome. I don't know how all this is supposed to be used in the classroom, so I have settled on copying the word lists, followed by copying the reading passage sentence by sentence and writing the translation immediately below. (My fountain pens have suggested that I could write the Latin in one color and the English in another. So far I am ignoring them, but I fear.)

I now know a bunch of different Latin words for family members, places in a house, and having dinner. (cenam, dinner; cenat, to eat dinner, dines) I'm also starting to feel sorry for Grumio, the coquus, who seems to have his culina invaded on a regular basis. Also, the lady of the house apparently likes to stare at him when he's cleaning fish.

Oh, and I've had my first encounter with the accusative case. As English is a very low-inflection language, I am expecting a lot of despair over keeping track of all of Latin's inflections. But my goal is to be able to read Latin, and write it a little, so dictionaries will be a great help.

I'm not sure how successful I am going to be at this, given job, story team, garden, housework, Sekrit Writing Projects One and Two, but I'm having fun. And it will be of some use in SWP One, so I can claim it's research.

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