Eva

Caschy verlost hier aus Jubiläumsgründen allerhand technisches Spielzeug.

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Nice one!

English: Fluent (sadly with little opportunity to practise speaking). If this test can be trusted, my vocabulary exceeds that of many native speakers. I can understand a number of regional accents as well.

French: 7 years of it at school. Although I was very good at it, I've never acquired a large vocabulary and have not practised it at all for many years.

Latin: Enough for all university degrees that require a Latin certificate. Conjugations and declinations are completely forgotten, but enough vocabulary to identify and translate Latin components in words of other languages.

Italian: Took an intensive course. Couldn't form a correct sentence, but can understand basics. Probably mostly due to the French and Latin.

Spanish/Dutch/Scandinavian languages (except Finnish): Can make a few guesses at understanding spoken (in Spanish/Dutch) or written language due to my other languages.

Greek: Can't even read the alphabet, except for those letters one encounters in maths. Can however identify components of loanwords.

All of this looks a lot more educated than I feel.

Oh, and as for new languages: I've been thinking about trying something completely outside my European comfort zone if I ever have the time. Korean, perhaps? I tried to pick up a bit from one of the Koreans I studied with, but forgot all.

Came back from watching DH. I liked some things, others didn't make that much sense to me.

Let me just say something non-spoilery:

I want to be McGonagall when I am old.

I made the most amazing bread - I've decided to try and do my own baking. So, right now I have a bread that's about half wholemeal spelt, and half wholemeal rye. Apart from that, there's only salt and sourdough, which I made from scratch out of wholemeal rye and water, and a part of which lives in my fridge for the next time.

It's strange, really - for me, this is a step towards healthy living (and it's not as if bakery bread here was bad, compared to what counts as bread in other countries. I read about US bread being sweetened and artificially coloured... poor bread). But the kind of baking I'm doing was perfectly normal here only a few decades ago. Both my parents remember that the villages they grew up in had communal ovens, and if it was your day to bake, you went to the last people who had baked bread and got the sourdough from them. I'm sure that was lovely in times of plague and cholera.

Anyway, it's strange how much of what one tries to do today to protect the environment or to do something for one's health involves going back to the way things were done in the past, while at the same time we do things that no one could ever have imagined. I mean, here I am writing about baking bread in a way that will potentially enable people on the other side of the world to read about it.




A note on the LJ DDoS attacks (which despite all hysteria are not "hacking", and do not appear to endanger people's data): This Time article has some information. And I really wish people would stop talking about "the Russians" and their supposedly being responsible for the whole thing. There is no "the Russians" in this. There's SUP, the Russian site owners, there's the Russian bloggers who are apparently being targeted, there's the Russian government, there's the hackers, there's lots and lots of Russian users on the site, and yes, there's (at least some of) the spambots too. Most of these groups are completely different people, and some of them are deeply opposed to one another.

Some of the comments in News seem to imply that LJ would be a paradise if not for "the Russians". Quite apart from all LJ business consideration those more knowledgeable than I have written about - it seems as if some sections of the English-speaking LJ only need to see Cyrillic letters and conclude that user writing them cannot possibly be a real person who has the same rights to using the site as them. I also find the comments deeply telling that more or less imply that LJ should "put the Russians on their own servers", or that the political bloggers are a nuisance because they keep other people from enjoying their fandom activities. Apparently, LJ should support "freedom of speech" when it comes to writing explicit fanfic, but when it comes to giving people a platform to use express themselves in a place where that is difficult and even dangerous, those rights aren't all that important, because after all those people write funny.

It's xenophobia - and people aren't even realising they're doing it.

Great. Had a phone call with my car insurance and went to the police this afternoon, because someone scratched my car (as in intentionally scratching it with a sharp object, rather than accidentally while parking). This will doubtlessly provide me with quite some employment and entertainment until I get it all sorted out and repaired.

I can sort of understand theft. But what on earth do you get out of damaging someone else's property?

So, what is there?

For one thing, we have real, actual, winter. This should not come as an awful surprise, especially as we had one last year, too, but somehow it all breaks down. Planes can't fly, the airplane companies tell people to take the train, which prompts the Deutsche Bahn (railroad company) to tell people not to, spawning the singular newspaper headline "Deutsche Bahn counsels against traveling by train". It is true that train travel has become somewhat unpredictable. Having 90 minutes delay on a 23-minute journey is a bit excessive.

Of course, driving isn't much better. At least people are finally forced by law to get winter tires, rather than being able to say "Oh, I won't need them anyway" and then going sleighing on their summer tires when they realise that they actually would have needed them. But for one thing, people who ordered their first winter tires in November will have them delivered in February, and for another people here are entirely unable to drive on anything that even looks like it could be snow and/or frozen. As we have now reached the point where even experienced drivers like myself experience an occasional bit of sliding, things are interesting.

My parents are worried about the wild boars in their garden. My father tries to pretend that the traces aren't in fact by wild boar, but apparently the digging patterns are obvious. Apart from the destruction to the garden, they also don't want the animals to get used to coming near the house. If they come in spring, too, things can get quite dangerous, as the mothers will happily maul you if you come near their young. Apparently the hunt tenant (in Germany, areas of hunting ground are leased to individuals who then hunt there, often with others) does not really do any hunting ever.

This also is one of the reasons why there are always does in my parents' garden, eating everything. This morning, they sadly found a dead doe. They say it's really small (even for does, which are tiny), with a head not much bigger than a cat, so it's probably one born late that never had enough to eat and has now died of hunger and/or weakness. The hunt overseer or something was called concerning its removal, but seemed not particularly interested. His wife actually told them that a tax pertaining to the hunt had been raised, so they were not willing to do overmuch, and anyway, the doe had been run over, so they should contact the road authorities. It took some insistence to make clear to her that the animal had not in fact been hit by a car, but just fell over and died, which made it their responsibility. Last I heard it's still in the garden, but they'd like to get rid of it quickly partly because of the wild boar, which apparently eat anything that can't run away or climb. You'd think they live in the middle of nowhere... but they do, more or less.