Ahaha 
I’m just glad to see somebody is keen and commenting 
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I’m fairly sure that @ChristopherFritz was right and that he’s just trailing off, which is a very common thing to do in Japanese. “Well, you see, I’ve been caught up in this strange case and I’ve been very busy and …”
The te-iru form would need another ending, such as いそがしてる or いそがしてて.
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It’s my fault for getting this week’s discussion started here, but could any further replies please be posted in the weekly thread:
Kitty Detectives! | Week 1 Discussion
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A question for everyone here for whom reading this book is a bit of detective work in itself: what tools and methods are you using to figure things out?
Sharing how we go about this with each other could help make things easier all around.
I’m using jisho mainly, but it works best if you already know how to parse the sentence. It is ok with verbs and can usually detect if the word you type in is the conjugated form of verb, but it won’t tell you the nuances of meaning of the conjugated form.
I’ve also recently started using ichi.moe (thanks to ChristopherFritz for the tip-off), which can break down phrases and sentences, telling you all the parts of speech with a brief meaning, though it is not infallible - it seems to have trouble with irregular verbs.
When desperate, I will even use Google translate - it’s fairly useless word for word, but can be illuminating on whole sentences (on p 8 it helped me figure out the ‘whether or not’ bit that I had not been able to parse myself).
So sleuths, how do you go about it? 
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In some cases, you can actually correct for this! After entering text and selecting the “Submit” button, the entered text appears below the input box. Select this for possible other parsings:
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Thanks for the above - I don’t imagine having found that function on my own.
It still wouldn’t have helped last night as I quietly screamed and growled at the computer and my book - it kept telling me that こな was ‘meal; flour’:
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Same, actually! Jisho, ichi.moe and in cases where I don’t have any clue at all - Google translate. And of course the vocab sheet and book club/thread as well as, for nyan nyan 2, the notes you’ve posted 
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Does anyone know of a Japanese-verb-conjugations-and-what-they-mean-in-English resource??
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Here are the resources I commonly use:
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As others have mentioned, I have yet to find a better online dictionary than jisho.org. Their inclusion of many common phrases as separate entries and the ability to use wildcards has proven extremely useful
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Children books tend to have a lot of onomatopoeic words. When I run into those and jisho doesn’t give me any clues, I usually turn to The Jaded Network. I used this extensively when I read Zenitendou with the Beginner’s book club because I’d run into onomatopoeic words every other sentence…
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When I seem to find meanings for all the words, but they don’t seem to mesh together, I start to suspect I might have run into a grammar construct I am not familiar with. In those cases, BunPro has a great search function that has helped me immensely in figuring out grammar. The only downside is that you need to create an account for this. Free accounts can do searches, though, so no need to pay anything.
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When Jisho fails me, I sometimes bite the bullet and check a J-J dictionary, mostly goo. I have rarely needed to do this, and it is sometimes a lot of extra work to parse the definition, but it is a helpful last resort.
I have mostly stopped checking Google Translate because quite a few times it sent me in a completely wrong direction and it was really frustrating.
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I haven’t used BunPro, but I thought it was just SRS flashcards - I hadn’t considered it having searchability, cheers! Would this then help me to understand the different meanings of a verb’s different conjugations??
Sadly, J-J dictionaries are beyond me for the time being, but I’ll add the link to my Japanese booksmarks for the future. 
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I’ve just learned from Bunpro that なければ means ‘must’ - thank you so much!!
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Yes, it’s main function is to reinforce your grammar with SRS, but it’s grammar search function is really nice. For example, suppose you run into a sentence that ends with 忘れてしまう. When you see a verb in て-form followed by something that has no kanji, you can start to suspect that it might be an specific grammar construct. So you go to BunPro and look for てしまう and:
You discover that it means “to do something by accident”. Clicking on the grammar point, BunPro gives you more details, and even links to free sites with further explanation (like Tae-Kim or Maggie Sensei and many others).
Hmmm while BunPro does have many conjugations as grammar points, I don’t feel it is the best resource if you want to concentrate specifically on conjugations. For that I think it is better to check either a grammar textbook, or maybe Tae-Kim’s grammar guide if you want a free alternative.
Aside from those, in case you haven’t seen this yet, jisho has an option to check all conjugations of a verb by clicking the “Show all inflections” option after searching for a verb:
After you have read the explanations of the different conjugations, something like Aeron Buchanan’s Verb Chart might be useful until you get completely used to them. It is a compact way to look up quickly how a specific conjugation looks like.
Yeah, I find them really intimidating still. Hopefully one day I’ll find it natural to resort to them directly, but it still feels very far away…
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That looks brilliant, thank you!
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This is going to be on the same level of a J-J dictionary lookup, but if you’re not certain of a meaning and the English meaning from Jisho isn’t clear, you can do a web search for the word followed by とは to get a simple definition.
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I’m not able to find this function - do I need to be logged in for this feature (I’ve only just seen that one can log in…)?
I am certain you can access that function without login in.
It should appear for any verb in the results.
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So this verb is being a pain in the derriere on more than one website…
Lesson learned - I will need to really break things down to basics (it works for 来る thanks!), once I learn what those are!
I’m probably way out of my depth, but as I managed to score a copy of this book at a Book Off last week, I’ll try and read along with you folks!
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Welcome! The week 1 discussion’s happening here.
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Thanks Rowena, I’ll go vote over on that thread!
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