The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

Yesterday I finally made the 2,000 day streak milestone on Duolingo.
I was supposed to do a quick Dreamwidth squiggle to mark the occasion but ended up crashing and hitting the sack instead. Just as well I had the morning off. Because I had churned out the day's quota of Nanowrimo words then, I did not have to feel guilty for an early bed time nor did I have to worry about making up quota next day because deficits have a habit of ballooning very very quickly in Nanoland. Unless you are a dedicated last minute sprinter, slacking off for even a couple of days can mean the difference between purple laurels and a sad blue unfinished line.


2,000 days ago back in early 2017 when I signed up for Duolingo, Petunia was still alive and quite a few of my leaf babies had not been born yet.

I had never heard of Duolingo until I came across a couple of people posting their New Year's resolutions.
Years ago I had the 100 items in 1,000 days bucket list but I no longer have the dedication for that.

So this woman said that her 2017 New Year's resolution was to learn French from scratch using Duolingo.
I googled this strange name and aside from the cute green owls and stuff, I was drawn in by the F word.

( Of Owls and Drama Llamas )

So I recommend Duo even with the army of annoying drama llamas. Not so much for what's one the box -a fun free way to learn a new language - but more its lessons in the dark art of learning good habits.

Izzie's been a busy serpent today. What began as the usual house work habit has turned into a veritable cleaning blitz.

Tuesday is the usual mop and wash day since I can sleep in on Wednesdays and the clothes get extra drying time in the morning.

But being the end of the month, as well reading all the meters and tossing all the sheets and clothes in the wash, I had the inspired idea of emptying all the bins too.

I guess it is the Oz equivalent of the Witches of the north sweeping all the snow off the Harz mountains on 30th April. The whole Walpurgisnacht thing does have a creepy Halloween feel to it. And of course being in the southern hemisphere, this day is our equivalent.
Of course it is also just a convenient excuse to celebrate Halloween and to fly the inner freak flag as often as possible.

This day also marks the end of Camp Nanowrimo and my other project for the month which was to give away or find a new home for at least one book per day. The point was less about the actual quantity of books but more the habit of doing it every single day. I managed a straight streak until the 13th when I brought an organic gardening book to leave behind at the annual garden festival but got so carried away with the weeds that I totally forgot to leave it behind

Of course, once the streak gets broken, it gets easier to fail the next time. So in spite of often nuking 4 or 5 books in one hit at local Little Library book nooks, I did miss 4 days for the month. sometimes a book that has been lurking around the Lair for 10 years suddenly looks very interesting and informative when it is time to say goodbye.

The new battle plan will involve abandoning that plan for May and June and to concentrate more on actually sorting the books in order to have a giant stash ready for July.
Making April, July and November as the main donation months ties in perfectly with serpent squiggling activities in Nanoland.

I am now past 700 days on a Duolingo streak but have long given up on trying to get in the top ten on the leader boards. Not only is it far too much effort to be bothered but a whole bunch of the evil purple apples added recently to some course are just totally dodgy. Well at least on the app they are. I have lost count of the number of times that a multiple choice question will turn up where the first answer is the correct one but unlike the other two is simply not clickable. If it happens at the beginning of a lesson, I just bail out straight away because the best way out of a hole is to stop digging. But it often happens at the very end of a lesson and that means the other 10 correct answers count for nothing at all because it is simply impossible to finish the lesson.

I was getting seriously peeved with this ridiculous time wasting when I had the inspired idea of doing the new Spanish lessons using the browser instead of the Duolingo app. Problem solved. Well so far.

So next month will be partly spent plotting and planning to find sneaky ways to create new habits for getting stuff done because it sure beats relying on will power.

I also need to post about the recent Freak street festival where I got to see the real Lizard Man. Never ever imagined that I would see him anywhere other than on youtube or the pages of National Geographic.

The Freaky Fringe is over and dearest Dudley Dursley has flown back home leaving me with the Lair all to myself again. So so glad not to have such sneering judgemental creatures lurking around anymore.

So slowly catching up on the little black Goblin books and did a quick kitchen blitz this evening. Was surprised to see just how much I could get done in about 20 minutes now that I have returned to the regular rituals of doing housework while listening to assorted programs on Radio National


This February like last is quickly becoming a giant blur. Due to so many distractions, been neglecting the all important rituals of filing up the Pensieve with memories to be sorted at a later date. The little green note books do not quite count since it is so difficult to search them at a later date. Memories stored in there rapidly degenerate into indecipherable scrawls.


Ever in search of distractions, I got a black book of Edgar Allen Poe stories from the city library. It's homework for a decadent second adventure in the old Girls school next Wednesday.
Loved the first trip there so much that I am going back for second helpings and hopefully there will be no distractions this time from a proper review of assorted gory details in this very spooky haunted location.

Of course I could simply download a selection of stories from the Gutenburg site which I did but for some reason I find ebooks just so much more distracting and harder to concentrate when reading unlike the old fashioned paper incarnations.

Today was also the annual ritual of the visit to the Writer's Festival. It used to run for 3 days but due to budget cuts is now down to 2 and due to other commitments I made it to only one of the days. Main attraction was to see the guest speaker Eddie Wu who is most famous as a maths teacher and looks barely older than 18. Apparently he is old enough to have 3 children of his own so I guess he must be really 28 or so.

It was strange how long forgotten chunks of last February just came back again today by being in the same place. The stand out guests of last year's festival was a Saudi woman Manal Al Sharif campaigning for the right for women to drive in her home country and Charles Massey the farmer who had written a book "The Call of the Reed Warbler" about how old farming practices have trashed the land and how listening to the land and the local Aboriginal people may offer a more productive and holistic form of farm and land management.
It's taken the settlers 230 years and some horrendous incidents of dead fish to realise that they really have stuffed up and to admit that they don't have all the answers after all.

The other distraction is Duolingo. I have been corrupted by the Cat and got tempted to game the system after recently updating but only the bare minimum necessary.

I am now just 4 lessons away from an all green Russian tree with no short cuts at all (I saved all those for the purple patches en Español). Mind you the segments on politics were suspiciously like a Russian election where nearly half the ballots were already prefilled.

Next goal is to go from all green to all red.

It must be just over a year ago now that I first signed up for Duolingo

Some random browsing on assorted productivity porn sites led me to a woman who had signed up to do 5 minutes of French a day using this bright shiny new language learning app.

Went for a peek and was pretty impressed. The idea of bite sized language snacks that could be fit in while waiting for the bus or sitting at a cafe seemed rather more alluring than the usual dreary 1 hour slugging through text books usually associated with language learning
This was the perfect opportunity to conduct an experiment. Of course it could never be double blind with control groups and all that proper official stuff designed to minimize confirmation bias. But choosing a language that I was interested in studying but had never attempted to learn before and setting the bar low with only one lesson per day - more if desired but not necessary, this seemed like an opportunity too good to miss

And so it must have been some time in April 2017 that I signed up for the Duolingo adventure.

I chose Spanish because it is a useful language to learn and is not too far outside of the serpent comfort zone. Years ago having attempted to learn Mandarin Chinese, came to the conclusion that learning to read and write would require far too much effort, the language itself while interesting from grammatical and word formation aspects, had such an annoying sing song grating whininess to it that it was like listening to jazz all day long.

I had dabbled in Arabic many moons ago so that was off the table aside from the fact that Duolingo did not have it on the menu back in April 2017. Not checked for progress since but there sure are some seriously obscure languages on the platform. Irish Gaelic, Czech and Hungarian. Even Welsh made it onto the list. Those are hardcore languages for folks with ancestry or intellectual curiosity. Not quite Klingon or Quenya but not too far off in terms of obscurity.

So after many months of slowly plodding and climbing up the tree, I decided it would be interesting to add Russian to the list which I did in September 2017. Strangely the app just added the 200 something day Spanish streak and treated both languages the same.

So kept on slowly plodding away nibbling the tasty fruits from the Duolingo tree until I finally got to the very last juicy apple from the 62 bunches on the Spanish Tree.

Then it was time to start all over again and go for the goal of getting them all to be bright shiny and golden at the same time. The most I ever managed at once was 20.
Day by day, if you don’t practise and polish those already nibbled apples, they lose their golden shine and turn back to red or green or sometimes blue.
So it is like running on a treadmill to keep up.
Eventually I worked out a strategy that instead of polishing up each skill as it lost its golden shine, and then constantly having to catch up on older ones fading away, it made more sense to do them in batches of 4 or 5, get them nearly polished and then do a quick blitz of the lot devoting only one lesson to each which would then be sufficient to get 5 golden bunches in one go.

That was until they changed the rules a few weeks ago.
Those 25 bright shiny precious rings had vanished and were replaced with crazy crowns. About 18 of them were adorned with the number 2 and the rest were all 1
Went googling for the new rules only to discover that each branch of fruit on this bright shiny new grafted tree now had a whole lot more apples and 5 crowns. But it takes longer and longer to jump from one to the next.

So I am glad that I did manage to finish one tree before they grafted all the crazy extra branches on to the rest of the trees in the orchard