I’ve been wanting to experiment with Wordpress for a while, and now that we have the new server it’s actually possible. It’s quite the opposite from the minimalist stuff I’ve been doing until now, and perhaps I’ll get tired of it (and either get a less maximalist theme or move back here), but for now it’s fun.

The new address is http://valdyas.org/fo3. Please update your links and feeds, because that’s where I’ll be hanging out in the foreseeable future. And please comment (there, not here) if you have an opinion and would like me to know it!

I’m on a mailing list for online surveys, and every now and again I’m invited to take part in one. This time someone didn’t fill in the blanks…

[INVITATION]

Here a gripping title

Dear participant, (this is probably the intended text after all)

(four times:) Here convince the respondent in one paragraph to take part in the survey.

Click to see full size!

That’s what you get when you buy a tin of water chestnuts. A tin of canned water chestnuts. Er, a can of canned water chestnuts.

In other news, I read the ingredient list of a package of ramen noodles in a shop and found “plantaardige groenten”, that is “vegetable vegetables” in Dutch. “Plantaardig” means vegetable as in animal, vegetable and mineral, “groenten” means vegetables as in meat and three veg. I didn’t buy it, though we’re temporary vegans, because the soup mix had salt and monosodium glutamate as its first-listed ingredients— in other words more MSG than veg. My other half makes much better vegan noodle soup. With vegetable vegetables, too.

There’s a definitely springlike tang in the air, the trees are producing little green leaves, the neighbours’ one-paving-stone front garden is producing snowdrops, and the streets are producing chalk arrows.

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Ceramics seems to have been your theme; either that or a hint of postapocalyptic fear that I didn’t think I was prone to. Well, I am prone to postapocalyptic fear, that’s why I don’t read that kind of SF, but I usually don’t have dreams about it.

This one wasn’t a nightmare, though, just a mildly intriguing and entertaining story, full of public transport as usual. We —I’m not completely sure for what value of “we”— were on a bus going up into the suburbs of some city, literally up because the city was in a valley (this is probably because a choirmate told me that the town he lives in is in a valley and the suburbs are on the surrounding hills). Suddenly I noticed that everything was completely deserted, though there were still bus stops that the bus stopped at. The buildings were structurally sound, but empty, and with all the windows broken, rather like the ruins of Detroit.

Where the ceramics came in is that when we left the neighbourhood, it turned out to be encased in a bell-shaped terracotta dome. It didn’t become clear whether that was to protect it from the world or to protect the world from it. Strangely, it should have kept out light as well, but I never noticed that while on the bus.

And then, after we got off the bus, there was this billboard that looked like a still picture but started moving as we passed it and became a clip of a middle-aged woman in khakis (I think she was a famous explorer) who explained that she’d stopped smoking, but missed cigars so much that she’d invented an electronic cigar. It was the size and colour of a panatella, but with a bulge in the middle that made it look like a snake that’s eaten a mouse, and made of hard close-textured earthenware. I could in fact feel the glassy sound it made when tapped. —aargh, there are no words for dream synaesthesia.

An alarming letter from the water company, telling me that I hadn’t paid my father’s water bill from 2010— which came to the grand sum of € 6,14. And if I didn’t pay it and the € 17,50 surcharge, say, yesterday, they’d have to disconnect him. Now disconnecting my father’s water supply wouldn’t be all that devastating, seeing that he died in November 2009 and the bill was apparently for the water we used to clean the house and flush the toilet while cleaning, but I wouldn’t want them to disconnect us (because we use the same company, and the address on the letter was ours) or the hapless innocent people who live in his flat now.

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Monday in the first week of Lent —first day of Lent, that is— and we’re pitched headlong into it with the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete. Now I happen to like Lenten services, some of the best music of the whole year for one, but the Canon always has me fuming. I realise that medicine is bitter, that it’s designed to make one uncomfortable, to take people by the shoulders and shake them up, but this is probably not the right way to shake me up, when I’m prone to being overly contrite already.

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Trains again, eh? It’s a good thing I don’t go for dream analysis or I’d think you were trying to tell me something. Well, something except amusing stories.

But that there is a platform 16 at Amsterdam Central (at least I think that’s what it was as it had the same shops) that doesn’t have stairs or a lift but only a large hatch with a sign “Beware of Tigers” was new to me. It was a normal platform once I got through the hatch, though, complete with normal passengers. I almost called the little black boy to order who was running at the very edge of the platform when I realised that who I thought it was is now a hulking teenager. But no sign of tigers, even in the largish baggage compartent of the train that was about to leave, full of humans.

The landscape from the train was not quite what I expected of just out of Amsterdam, sunny and southern-Germanish, but empty of people or signs of habitation except the opera singers in a meadow. They must have been rehearsing, because I don’t think an opera tenor will be performing with a filter-tipped cigarette between his lips. It didn’t seem to hurt his voice, though. I thought at the time that he must be Italian, though he had a long face and blond hair, but perhaps it was not only the language he was singing in but the fact that he was dressed in an operatic or 1930s-movieish version of Italian peasant dress, open-necked shirt with an open waistcoat over it and loose trousers. The soprano was in some dirndl-like dress that could have come from the same background.

Later, when I met the man who had written the book that the opera had been based on (called almost but not quite “Harold Pinter” and wearing a soft hat) he admitted to the Italian peasant dress but was quite ignorant of the cigarette or the blond hair.

Just found out that Firefox renders all my headings in some terrible kindergarten font instead of elegant Zapf Chancery. Trying to fix it now, but it may suffer from post-anaesthesia brainlessness.

At the beginning of December I got this splendid Advent calendar from tanaudel and joyfully coloured each day’s figure. Then it was Christmas and I didn’t have time for anything. Then I went to hospital and though I was out again the same day I haven’t had energy for anything until now.

(er, just to show how vague I am right now, I wanted to have a “click this to see full size” link here but I accidentally reduced the original scan to even smaller than this picture and saved the small pic over the large one)

I realised, when counting on my fingers, that the Twelve Days of Christmas don’t end on the 6th, but on the 5th of January. This figures, because the 6th is Theophany (Epiphany for you Westerners) and so no longer a day of Christmas, though Christmas and Theophany were the beginning and end of the same feast for the early Church.