who only by moving can balance

Madhur Jaffrey's recipe, converted into units I find more convenient.

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Duolingo just finally for the first time in the entire time I've been using it accepted my Correct Potatoes Word!

-- okay let me back up.

German Duolingo is very... well, it's very Germany-flavoured. It's deeply dubious about perfectly reasonable terms from Austrian-flavoured German (I will grudgingly grant that it's just-about reasonable not to accept "vélo" as the German word for bicycle on the grounds that Swiss German Doesn't Count). On the one hand, they're frequently pretty responsive (e.g. the word I use for priest -- Pfarrer -- is now accepted as well as their default Priester, about which all I really have to say is ???) but apparently someone there has at least as much of a grudge about my potatoes word as I do about theirs, because, well.

Literal years! I have spent literally years typing in Erdapfel mulishly and then reporting that my answer should have been accepted before finally resentfully typing in Kartoffel! (Austrian German, like most of the rest of continental Europe and environs, had an extended You Know What's Sexy? French moment, so, yes, our potato-word is a calque of pomme de terre.)

So I did that again this evening, expecting to go through my usual sulky routine, and instead it just worked.

VICTORY IS MINE.

(For the princely sum of £15, no less.)

Boots are polished and out by the window, though, and probably very grateful for it they are too, given how long & how desperately they've needed a clean.

It is an interesting tension, for me, between not-my-religion and definitely-my-cultural-heritage, but observing Heiliger Nikolaus is a link to my grandmother and also an excuse to clean my shoes, so here we are, and in the morning I'll get up early to go to lab & they'll contain treats & I will pocket some of them to take with me.

Made it back from B&Q, on the bus, with: one (1) water butt stand (which is a problem of its own, because the water butt is i. 210l and ii. full while also iii. it is raining); one (1) Large Terracotta Pot, in which to put the fig (which it now is!); one (1) packet of three (3) pot feet (because there weren't any terracotta Unterlagen in an appropriate size) (oh huh apparently standard German for that one is Untersetzer, The Things One Learns); and one (1) receipt, WHICH WAS A BIT TOUCH AND GO FOR A WHILE THERE, because I made the mistake of going back to B&Q, and the promised training... had evidently... not... materialised... and so I ended up quoting both the law and head office at the supervisor in question at length...

... but alas, this time I did manage to eventually talk them into actually taking payment from my card, rather than ending up walking off without paying again, which means I'm going to have to get my act together to write another complaint letter, in which I demand compensation at least equal to the cost of the items purchased...

One of the things that Brits seem to find surprising or weird about how I go about managing a kitchen (other examples include vanilla sugar) is the Jar Of Breadcrumbs.

If you're baking your own bread, or buying non-sliced stuff, you'll be generating a lot of breadcrumbs. Let them go stale (sweep them onto a tray and leave them out for a day or so if you're that way inclined), then pop them in a jar.

Or ends of bread that are going stale before you can finish them: stick them through a food processor, or grate them, or let them go proper hard then put them in a bag and whack it with a rolling pin, and then pop them in a jar.

Or if you find you have bread that goes mouldy before it goes stale (this is more likely if you're keeping it in plastic, or in metal breadbins, or if it's longer-life stuff generally), before the point at which it goes mouldy, slice it up and toast it very lightly or bake it in an oven gently similarly, then apply the steps previous and stick it in a jar.

Okay, Alex, you may at this point very well be saying, but why? So! Herewith the list of things I use breadcrumbs for, probably to be added to as I remember:

• Apfelstrudel
  
• topping pasta bakes
  
• crumbing thing to fry in general (coat with flour, coat with beaten egg, coat with breadcrumbs, drop in hot oil; or in the case of sweet dumplings, fry them with butter and sugar then roll the cooked dumplings in the breadcrumbs)
  
• thickener in sauces/stews/dumplings

& you? & so on!

1. I got home to find a Terrifying Letter From The DWP... letting me know that my DLA's been autorenewed through to 2016 without me needing to do anything about it. :-)

2. I am now down to two half-written poems in the stack - one's a villanelle and will be hard; one might grow up to be a sonnet but is probably going to just be my usual style of thing.

3. Domestic bliss: doing the washing up while P curled up on the sofa with my complete works of Donaghy (he of Machines and Midriver), dipping in and out and reading me bits.

4. Swedennn. Snow and sunsets and AMINALS and RIDICULOUS FOOD (the ridiculous round thing with the whole in the middle, of which I have eaten approx my own bodyweight with butter and cloudberry jam over the past few days; ditto pepparkakor; ditto ajvar; I am a predictable human with predictable tastes) and exciting new food! Semla were not a thing I had previously consumed. (hahahahaha yes I win "simnel" is indeed finest wheat flour, semolina, which means semla is too, surprise)

5. Poking around etymonline.com after triangulating through all our mutual language; the -lic of garlic is in fact the same word as leek, and the Swedish for onion and (with modifiers) misc allium, and the German for misc allium. (Spem in allium, etc etc.) We were pleased.

6. Being helpful at my mother. :-) I mean, it is deeply weird to be grown-up enough to be helpful when it comes to casting an eye over CVs etc, but pleasant! Also she e-mailed me about pirates (and did not give me any updates on the rugby).

7. ... Elementary, though, okay. ELEMENTARY. SHOW.

8. Useful work done! Retweaked abstract (hopefully I'll be able to submit it tomorrow) for baby's first talk; did a quick blitz on an area I wasn't terribly clear on the specifics of and needed to be, wrote myself a summary, and have some questions for discussion with my supervisor; did an extremely sketchy first pass on the thesis outline I'm required to submit for my 21-month assessment, and slightly to my astonishment realised that it... continues to approximately make sense?

9. Mush. (SUCH TEENAGE.)

10. I am really really enjoying hair-adornment in the shape of tulmas courtesy of khalinche - they're beaded, and I reckon they're kind of like blue roses and P reckons they're kind of like a peacock and either way they make managing my hair marginally easier when it's hanging down in a braid, and are very very pleasing when I manage to arrange them either side of a bun. Sensory misc. Yes. :-)

Okay, this one is actually really easy: I pretty much don't have any thoughts on German cinema. Sorry!

The reason for this is that I find watching film of any description very intense, in terms of concentration and ability to perform audio-visual processing go. It's less bad for things where I'm familiar with the format and actors, which is how I manage to remain current with TV shows once I've got into them; it's less bad if I'm sat down to watch with someone who actively enjoys the material in question and is willing to sit down with me and be enthusiastic at me and tell me why they like it so much and be patient when I pause and go "wait, is this brown-haired white dude #72 or number #56?"

Which is to say: my knowledge of German cinema is only slightly worse than my (nearly non-existent) knowledge of Anglophone cinema. So, for context, I am pretty sure the last general-release Anglophone film I saw was Kill Your Darlings, okay, because queer poets + Daniel Radcliffe = Relevant To My Interests, and even that I only went to because I had company. (On which point, I would like to note again how impressed I am by the shot in KYD in which DR is on the opposite side of a stairwell from the camera, his torso's cut off the top of the image, his lower body's partially obscured by the railings, and he's fully clothed - and he manages, by means of wiggling one knee, to unambiguously communicate overwhelming mind-consuming lust. It is pretty impressive, okay.)

In this context: the last general-release German film I saw was Das Leben Der Anderen, and I adore it. I adore it sufficient that I have it on DVD; the only reason I don't show it to more friends is that my mum observed that it was cheaper from amazon.de including shipping than it would've been from amazon.co.uk, and failed to realise that this was because the .de version didn't have English subs. (Why haven't I seen more? Because it's harder, in this country, for me to find people who are willing to enthusiastically rec me German-language media and then watch it with me.) (The other difficulty is of course that the majority of spoken German is nothing like my home dialect or any of the varieties of German I get most exposure to, which means I'm also always contending with an unfamiliar accent, which means the audio-visual processing budget goes overdrawn more easily.)

Much more recently than that I have seen some indie shorts, a mix of English-origin and German-origin focussing on queer subcultures; I was less-than-impressed, but that was content- rather than language-specific.

Because of all of the above (processing issues leading to very low consumption rates) I don't actually have much by way of opinions on the technical aspects; I will notice if someone is acting particularly well (Orphan Black!) or particularly lovely things being done with camera and lighting work; but in general this is an area in which I know really very little.

Okay, so this one is (~surprise~) a bit fraught for me, because a lot of my culture-of-origin identity is very bound up with Mitteleuropäischer expressions of Catholicism, so I end up feeling a lot more adrift with the whole atheist thing than is wholly comfortable.

All of which said, my traditional stuff is:

• you make a wreath from misc evergreen from your garden (or, in the more specific sense, misc evergreen you've nicked from a Cambridge college's gardens); you place your Advent candle in the middle of it, and add a candle round the edge for each Sunday of Advent in the appropriate colors as they happen. Advent is very much a time of preparation & reflection: to think about what one has done and what one has failed to do, and all that.
  
• the 6th of December, Heiliger Nikolaus: on the evening of the 5th, you polish your shoes and leave them lined up neatly beneath a window, and awake to find (if you've been good!) that Nikolaus has been by in the night and filled them with goodies, traditionally nuts & clementines & chocolate coins. (My mother normally manages to source chocolate Schilling - when that was relevant - and these days usually gets her hands on chocolate Euro. Me, I noticed that M&S were selling chocolate brussels sprouts and thought it would be worth it for the laugh). If you have not then instead the Krampus chases you with switches...
  
• on the other side of the family, my father gets Very Definite about making mince pies in the week running up to Christmas; he normally makes a round twelve dozen, as I recall, glazed with water+sugar (because my baby brother is lactose intolerant). He makes the pastry - standard unsweetened shortcrust - but usually buys in the mincemeat; I am still working through the batch I made a couple of years ago, during The Winter Of My Discontent.
  
• (My mother makes fruitcake and steamed puddings a little while in advance; she makes the marzipan and royal icing, and in deference to my tastes leaves the glacé cherries out.)
  
• Otherwise, preparation waits until Christmas Eve: present wrapping and bringing in (and decorating) the tree (which lives in the garden), and setting up the crib, and so on. (The Wise Men then advance from the far side of the tableau to the stable over the course of the twelve days.) We listen to the King's Carol Service because my father, bizarrely, insists; my mother staples the Christmas cards to lengths of ribbon and hangs them from the walls; we get out the Strohsterne etc.

... and then we are into The Day Itself, which involves Church and arguments and I am kiiiiiind of intending to run back to London to spend the day with a bunch of heathens this year before heading back on Boxing Day.

The point of language is to communicate; if communication's been achieved, everything else is window-dressing and point-scoring. Who defines "accuracy" and "what (forms of) nuance matter)s(" is a case of privilege. Rich white folk not caring to understand Englishes (written or spoken) other than "Standard English" also means that communication loses accuracy and nuance, but oddly rich white folk (of which I am one!) don't seem, by and large, to be as worried about that. Taking the time to understand multiple Englishes (or multiple forms of any language) doesn't impoverish us - it makes our engagement with language richer.

See, e.g., linguistics blog Languagehat on the topic; I feel I should clarify that I'm Cambridge-educated and upper-middle class and I speak RP - but English is my second language and I speak a really weird hybrid of dialects in my first language, that combines the "standard" form of the language as legislated in the largest country in which it's spoken with forms of dialect that were definitely spoken in one very specific geographic area in the 1950s, but might well not have been since then. In my first language, spelling things the way I do is absolutely a political statement and will be interpreted as such, even though what it is in practice is "that's how my grandmother taught me to write". Just because the politicisation of Standard English is largely invisible to people for whom it is their first or primary language doesn't mean that the choice to use it (never mind attempts to enforce it) aren't political.

(Questions about the specifics I'm referring to re German etc welcome from you lot!)