dear reader,

i love you <3

glossing

i have to write a syntax assignment, and even though i have less than 500 words of normal text, i'm already on two and a half pages simply because of all the example sentences. i mean, for each Russian sentence, i need four lines (plus blank lines before and after)! there's the transliterated Russian sentence, with separated morphemes and movement gaps and stuff; there's the gloss; there's the English translation; and on top of that there's also the Russian sentence in the normal orthography, which is optional but which i include for my own sanity. because the transliteration with the morpheme separation is almost as illegible as the gloss.

also, this is probably like, an exercise in generativism, but i can't help ending the assignment with a bold claim that this stuff makes more sense from a usage-based perspective.

täsmäkäsi

i'm always extremely nervous about inflating my bike's tires. there's a very real possibility that i make things worse, and it's by no means certain that i'll be able to fix things in that event. (i've heard my uncle has, on multiple occasions, caused more damage to his bike while trying to fix it, in ways that made it more expensive to repair at the bike shop.)

this time i found a pump in three pieces in the bike cellar. i managed to reassemble it into a configuration in which it seemed to expel air in the correct manner, which i'm pretty proud of. however, i was defeated by the vents of my own bike: i couldn't figure out how to get air in. it seems stupid because i've managed to inflate my tires perfectly well in the past. maybe there was another piece missing from the mouth of the pump's tube...?

at least i don't think i made it worse, even though my precaution may have held me back from trying things that might have worked.