Well, as you know, feelings can be deceptive!
Whenever I see grammar, even just grammar terminology, my brain tries to find a place to hide. This is literally true… I get a bit dizzy and unfocused. Reading through a post like yours is such hard work for me, my entire body and brain resists it, so, believe me, in my eyes, you’re nothing short of a genius! Thank you so much for posting!
Poor old man. Just because he’s helping people find their inner Picasso, he’s now being accused of lying, assault, stealing and had some random woman (and a very smug cat) violate his privacy by walking into his garden and digging through his trash 
look at that hat and tell me he’s innocent
phew, doing the work of week two and three on one day wasn’t a great idea - I feel like my head will explode any time now - BUT I have caught up with you! And I really wanted to know how the story would continue ^^
As all questions I had while reading are already answered, I just want to say that I had to chuckle at 先手必勝 (p. 31) - sometimes Kanji are so logical
“first hand sure victory” 
brilliant!
We definitely are! This is so exciting 
Looking forward to reading together with you again next week 
Yay, you made it! 
and with a whole weekend to spare - probably didn’t need to explode your head after all
I always love seeing someone creep up by the progression of their likes 
I have two questions about page 26:
あたしは ものかげにかくれ、ようすをうかがった。
I’ve seen this happen a lot, where there’s just a masu stem (かくれ). How am I supposed to interpret that?
なんの形しら？
I gather the sentence means something along the lines of “what shape is this?”, but what does しら mean exactly?
Using the stem of a verb at the end of a sentence or phrase allows you to connect several sentences, pretty much in the same way as the て-form of verbs can. Using the stem of the verb is more formal and mostly used in literary settings. (bunpro link, Tae-Kim link)
You have a small typo here, it is 形かしら, not 形しら. In case you are not familiar with it かしら means something like “I wonder”, usually used by females.
自信 = self-confidence, so I read it as more of “I have confidence (in my own deductive abilities, so I’m going to act on them, now).”
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense! These differences in formality/register in Japanese almost make it like you’re learning two or three languages sometimes.
D’oh, that’s what I get from not working from the original book but from my notes 
Pages 26 and 27
I parsed the first sentence slightly differently. Instead of reading it as あたしは物陰に隠れ(る)、様子を伺った, I had the last verb as 窺った, “to peep (through); to peek; to examine (esp. covertly)”, i.e. I hid myself [e.g. in the shadows] and surreptitiously watched for anything suspicious.
This page, read alongside 27, is a nice example of how some transitive / intransitive verb pairs change their sound (here, 見付ける vs 見付かる). I thought that was pretty cool.
I went with 様子を伺う because when I typed ようすをうかがった into ichi.moe it gave it back to me as a single set phrase. Again, kanji would be so helpful…
Yes, that must be funny to watch 
I’ve not seen a definitive answer to this and I’m struggling with it too. The way the particles are used makes no sense to me.
助けを – direct object
よぶに – purpose
も – ‘even’?
あたりに – purpose?
人かげは – topic
ない – verb
There are not even any people to reach for the purpose of calling for help? Or am I stretching the meaning of あたり too far there?
あたり = vicinity (You’ll see this in WaniKani at level 7.)
に = at; in (location particle)
“in the vicinity”, or simply “nearby” works for English.
Ahhh, I was thinking along the lines of 当たる. The more I read hiragana, the more I start to appreciate kanji
I feel if someone wrote a list of “milestones” in learning Japanese, one of those milestones would be the transition from “Why does Japanese need kanji?” to “Why didn’t they use kanji here?!”
What I’m confused by is the two も’s in that sentence:
「そんな、 証拠もない 話しをされても こまるなあ。」
I reckon the first one could be an intensifying も: ‘such a story for which there isn’t even any evidence’.
But why the second も? I doubt it’s an ‘also’ も and I also don’t see why you’d need two intensifiers in one sentence.
As far as I understand, what is happening here is that when you find a verb in て-form followed by も, this converts the verb to an “even if” construction. This is actually listed by jisho in the 4th meaning for も:
So, if we want to be literal, 話しをされても would be “even if / although I am told that theory/story”. If we combine this with the rest of the sentence we’d get “Even if I am told such a no-evidence theory, it is troublesome”.
Attempting a more natural English, I’d go for something like “Even if you tell me such a theory, it is problematic for me since there’s no evidence”
