I’d resigned myself to not having honeysuckle blossoms – with their attendant wonderful aroma – of my own this year. I was prepared to be content with the fact that both the honeysuckles I’ve got in the ground, the store-bought one and the one I coaxed into [...]]]> It’s not a cliché if it’s literally true, right?

I’d resigned myself to not having honeysuckle blossoms – with their attendant wonderful aroma – of my own this year. I was prepared to be content with the fact that both the honeysuckles I’ve got in the ground, the store-bought one and the one I coaxed into rooting myself from a clipping, seemed established and thriving. I had originally been going to buy one that already had flowers on it, but decided it didn’t look too healthy, and instead picked a more robust-appearing, but flowerless, plant.

Then Saturday afternoon I went out to check on the honeysuckles and discovered two yellow flowers toward the top of the storebought vine. They didn’t broadcast their smell very far, but they definitely had it – that honeysuckle scent I’ve longed for for such a long time.

It’s a big thing for me. I love the smell of honeysuckle; it’s probably my favorite scent. I’ve really wanted my own for years – the whole 21 years I’ve been in my house. I’ve tried in the past to grow them but despite the legendary hardiness of the plants mine died.

Now, having researched intently and done things right, mine grow. And I was rewarded with flowers. Flowers I never expected until next year. Yay!

I would’ve mentioned this earlier but I had no landline phone service over the weekend, hence no Internet. Fortunately, the repair guy arrived within two hours of my calling today and got me back in business. Of course this enables me to upset myself and waste my life online…

Speaking of which … I was looking at this Spanish-language blog on Agorism. I’m back to studying Spanish again, and as with the gardening (and, it pleases me to report, various other areas in my life) actually sticking it and making progress, however sporadic. Although my vocabulary isn’t huge, I read it pretty well; it’s my listening comprehension which lacks.

Anyway, I found an unfamiliar word, which wasn’t a great surprise. In Firefox I supposedly have a Spanish-English dictionary plug-in installed – which, unlike my English dictionary plug-in, I’ve never gotten to work. Anyway, in a transport of optimism, I highlighted the word and right-clicked it. Up came a context menu with an option to “translate.” This took me to a laundry list of choices – French to German, Japanese to English – and clicked on the “Spanish-English.” And up popped a definition in Babelfish!

Only … I wasn’t using Firefox. I was using Opera. Specifically the new 9.50, supposedly a significant upgrade.

Whoa! Did Opera do this before? I never realized it. I didn’t even have Javascript enabled (I usually use Opera to browse pages that don’t require Javascript and on which I mostly don’t care about graphics.) Anyway, this is great – exactly what I’ve been hoping for as an online language-learning adjunct. This’ll make it a lot easier to read articles in Spanish without totally losing my train of thought as I fumble through a dead-tree dictionary. Plus Babelfish handles different verb tenses (mostly; although it just choked on “tendrá.” Which I’m pretty sure means “will have,” but I wanted to check.)

So, cool. Now I can fritter my life away reading Spanish-language websites as well as English! Progress!

Oh – the shiny new Firefox 3.0 supposedly releases in a few hours. If the development team’s dreams of mass downloads are realized (allegedly 1.5 million users have vowed to DL the update on opening day) the Internet will slo-o-ow to a crawl. Or if, like me, you’re bound to it-for-dialup, an even greater and more aggravating crawl.

Personally, I plan to wait and see if any really picturesque or horrifying bugs have escaped beta testing before I DL. If you want to jump ahead on into the madness, though, go here.

And in the interests of fairness, you can snag Opera 9.50 here.

And if you don’t want to see really horrifying bugs, under no circumstances click here.