Found Objects

Not one but two first readers sent me rave reviews of what I can now reasonably call my second novel. My almost-finished second novel, that is. A handful of other people are still reading it, so my joy may yet be stamped out, but when I fixed a typo that someone had alerted me to I started reading right there, in the middle, and read on to the end (when I ought to have been in bed), and there was some really good writing there.

The advantage of sending something out to readers and waiting for comments is, of course, that I can keep myself from looking at it for a few weeks without guilt. If I’d decided not to look at it without having something to wait for I’d have felt uneasy about it, and perhaps opened the file and worried at it every once in a while, and Little Voice saying “it sucks! It all sucks! Tee hee!” wouldn’t have shut up.

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No, not the folk group, though they seem interesting.

Boudewijn is making backups of all our CDs, and putting old LPs on CD, making our whole musical history scroll past. There was a time in my teens when almost all I listened to was Alan Stivell (or here if you want to go straight to the English version without the cover page). And everything that was like it, such as Ar Skloferien and Gweltaz: Celtic music with political texts. And I was wistful —every teenager needs something to be wistful about— that I didn’t have any Celtic roots.

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I love the pieces of spam I keep getting that tell me to upgrade my mail software. Sometimes they’re blunt to the point of rudeness (“Get a better mailer.”), but today I got, not for the first time, one that was actually polite:

Your Email Client does not support MIME encoding. Please upgrade to MIME-enabled Email Client (almost every modern Email Client is MIME-capable).

In fact, my Email Client does support MIME encoding (it’s KMail). It’s just that I’ve turned it off.

The last instalment of the 2004 youth tournament. The kid missed two in a row, first because we were in Paris which is rather too far from Apeldoorn, then because it was November 21, the Presentation of the Mother of God, too much of a Sunday for either me or Boudewijn to miss church on.

I promised her the last meet even though it was on a Sunday, so we set off, with one cold, one book (mine wasn’t long enough, it ran out on the way home and I had to borrow The Princess Diaries from the kid) and two mandarin oranges each, to Almere where it also started.

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The girls brought home a Thing.

One Thing each, to be exact, packed in a gaudy orange carrier bag, together with a magnetic weekly planner and a Letter to the Parents. The Thing turns out to be a “gruitbox”, designed especially to bring your Fruit-and-Vegetables to school. There’s been a campaign going on for a year and a half, the letter says, to make kids eat more fruit and vegetables. To that effect the Fruit and Vegetables Board or whatever has been supplying fruit and vegetables to primary schools under the name of schoolgruiten. Gruiten is a portmanteau, a very ugly one in my opinion, of groenten (vegetables) and fruit. (Warning: the site requires Flash, Konqueror couldn’t cope with it but Firefox could)

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It was St. Andrew who put me on the track, really. I was cycling (I always get ideas on the bike) through town, thinking of the saint in whose honor we were having a fish day and wondering what troparion to sing: whether it was the general one for the apostles in the third tone, or he had one of his own (I found later that he does have one of his own, but half of it matches the one for SS. Peter and Paul). That made me wander off (I always wander off when I get ideas on the bike) to think what a good exercise it is, for instance for the children’s choir, to sing the same words to different tunes or different words to the same tune.

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Advent is upon us: we ate fish, one step up from the normal Tuesday wine-and-oil, in honour of St.Matthew the Evangelist on Tuesday the 16th. Squid, to be exact, the kilo of it that I had in the freezer to eat on a Sunday. I used my own adaptation of a recipe by Jane Grigson and stewed it in red wine with onions and tomatoes as I’ve written up on my recipes page.

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I find myself putting off going to the library. So much so that I keep my books too long almost every time and I’m charged overdue fees. I thought it was simple sloth, or my innate talent for procrastination, but today I realised that it’s the System.

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Disclaimer: I haven’t suddenly developed a case of multiple personality. This is fiction, okay?

There’s the Muse, of course. She’s usually about eleven, slight and red-haired, likely to lean over my shoulder and say “Well? What now? Come on, write it!” At least she used to be likely to do that. Lately she’s gone into an adolescent sulk. She probably misses Mary Gentle’s muse, who she went to the beach with last summer. I’ve been very stuck as a result of that (or perhaps as a result of various Real Life-type things). If she doesn’t come out soon, I’ll kick her; but it looks as if she’s rallying a bit, so I’ll give her until Saturday.

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The instructions from 9292ov.nl, the public transport journey planner, were clear enough (though we almost took the wrong train in Utrecht anyway; after all, the Intercity to Rotterdam used to stop in Gouda). The bus driver knew where the sports hall was, “right across that bridge”. And sure enough, there it was. Striped black and white, hence its name.

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When I was in Germany (via Koblenz) I took lots of photos with the intention of blogging about at least some of the things in the photos. And I made up lots of text in my head, but I didn’t have a laptop with me (on purpose; the expletive-deleted thing weighs seven pounds and the power unit another two, and I had to carry everything on my back). And writing on the Apple is.. well… uncomfortable.

I wrote the preceding entry, about the phone, almost the moment we were back from holiday (late July) but kept it until I’d have posted the holiday entries.

And now, of course, I don’t know what I wanted to write.

Perhaps some of it will trickle through, and I’ll post a retrospective…

Now I’ve finally given in and acquired a mobile phone, it turns out that Things are Against Me. My first was a hand-me-down that worked well enough until first the earpiece speaker, and then the internal memory gave up, and the friendly Turk who repairs phones for 15 euros couldn’t repair it. Then I tried the SIM card in an even older one, but that wouldn’t even start up without a code I didn’t have.

This is my new phone (well, not this one, obviously, but one exactly like it)

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We’ve rented a holiday house in Germany. In Steinbach-Hallenberg, in fact, a little town in the middle of nowhere^WThüringen in the former German Democratic Republic.

Now to get there. By train: it has a station, that’s one of the reasons we picked it. (Other reasons are that it’s in the middle of the woods, in hilly country, not really developed for tourism yet, and it has a beautiful ruined castle.)

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I went to vote for Europe. I’ve skipped European elections in the past, but this time there was the little matter of the software patents (scroll down until you find the article with the picture of the demonstration, I don’t know how to link to something that doesn’t have an intro), and the fact that more and more European regulations affect me directly. And then there are the silly regulations, like this one that tries to treat mountain climbers like construction workers, and regulations about food and other pieces of culture that make all of the EU more and more the same. And the lack of opposition against over-the-top US air travel security; one reason that wherever else I go, I won’t go to the United States soon unless I absolutely have to.

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I’ve run out of story in the main story at eighty-something thousand. Part of it isn’t really the main story, so I think it’s about seventy thousand all told.

Jilan has killed Lyan, though he doesn’t find out until later: he thinks he’s only knocked him out. I don’t want an interminable Beethoven ending complete with the Scouring of Ildis. I wrote some of the Beethoven stuff anyway, because I want it to exist in order to zap it in the revision. It also needs to exist as background and characterisation, of course.

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There’s soccer going on. I doubt I would even know — except for the thumps and cries from next door, the wall is thin and the TV is loud — if it weren’t for the decorations. Whole streets have suddenly sprouted bright orange and red-white-and-blue vegetation, an orgy of patriotism.

Now I don’t mind patriotism, I’m fond of the queen, I think flags are festive, I rather like red, white and blue and I have nothing against lions, but orange hurts my eyes and I detest soccer. More to the point, I detest soccer madness. And I resent the tacit assumption that one is interested. The fact that I have to defend my lack of interest and my ignorance. Let people play soccer all they want, but I wish they wouldn’t force it on us.

Not much has come of my resolution to take pictures of the tree on the first Sunday of every month. These were taken on the Thursday after Easter. It’s June when I write this and the tree is about due for a new picture in full summer dress, but in mid-spring it’s already impressive enough.

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Our priest being away, we had a substitute, a US army chaplain stationed in Belgium. The choirmistress didn’t honour my wish to sing the responses in English, so Father David spoke (or rather sang, in a pleasant high voice, with more tune to it than we’re used to) English and we sang in Dutch. Halfway through the vigil my reflexes kicked in (“speak what’s spoken to you”) and I sang one “Lord—” before catching myself at it and going back to “ontferm U”.

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Jilan, my much put-upon protagonist, got this to eat and drink while in the dungeon. Until it dawned on me that “water en brood” is the Dutch way to say “bread and water”. I’d already thrown the paragraph at the iwrislomo mailing list as the day’s sample:

If I was the king’s enemy and I’d caught the king, I’d either kill him or try to use him, not keep him in the cellar on water and bread and thin cabbage soup.

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My British ispell insists on putting the ‘o’ in.

After an excess of Real Life (which Boudewijn already wrote about, so I don’t have to) I was so stuck that I started revising from the beginning, making the existing text conform to the plot in my head. On the 23rd of May, a Sunday, I came to the end of Chapter 23 late at night, then did one more chapter before going to bed, one more, one more… until I closed Chapter 43 and ran out of chapters.

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But we almost got stranded at Olst.

We were half an hour later than we’d planned, meaning that we only had to wait slightly over an hour for a train to take us to Zwolle; someone working on a fuse-box ten miles further on had accidentally cut a cord.

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Celebrating the Liturgy in the evening always makes me realize more than usual that we really do have a mystery religion. The Liturgy of the Presanctified already hints at it, but a full-blown Liturgy, like the one we had for the Annunciation, where the sanctifying is done right then and there, makes it very clear.

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Every year, around this time, the fourth or fifth week of Lent, I make kulich. Every year I forget that it really takes the whole day, even though I keep the day free for it. It’s not that it’s so much work, but that it comes in awkward chunks with too little time in between to really do something.

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Little kids’ church school today: three three-year-old girls. The four-year-olds have all turned five and belong in the next group now; the current crop of two-year-olds are still too little to listen.

Me: “Who is that on the icon?” (pointing to the Mother of God, on the right)

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Boudewijn’s asthma threatening to get the better of him, we’re having to find new homes for the cats. I sent out a “Help!” message to all of my friends and acquaintances within public transport distance, and got a useful response from only one: friends of his wanted Johanna, the black one.

I put a message on a “rehouse pets” site recommended by the local RSPCA equivalent and got a call from someone in Rotterdam who wanted the black one too, but they were willing to settle for the tortie, Leentje. We made arrangements.

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The kid had another fencing match, in Ermelo this time, quite close to Grandpa (who we visited afterwards). The first was in Almere. The second time, in our own town at that, she got ill on the Saturday and the match was on the Sunday, so she missed it. This was the third time. And she made up for missing the second: won seven out of her eight bouts.

And I took the best fencing picture in my life, at least my life until now; this is a cut from it, fit to advertise junior fencing. Mine is the one with the red pigtail. The other one is the boy who came to the match thinking that girls were no good, and was beaten 5 to 2 in the very first bout by my daughter. He was apparently so impressed that he promptly let the little seven-year-old girl in the set beat him as well.

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Going through my old bookmarks I found the FlyLady site, and as I’m doing the spring cleaning in four-hour installments (kitchen cupboards today, stove tomorrow) I was interested. I’d forgotten the sugariness, the cutesy abbreviations (trademarked, no less), the silly and sometimes downright stupid advice.

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I’ve really started wearing a headscarf for services. It wasn’t only an incident. It agrees with me. I’m still finding out when exactly to wear one: definitely for Liturgy, definitely not for ecumenical Vespers, but there’s a large grey area in between. It will probably take me another year to become completely clear on that.

I don’t have enough headscarves, at least not the right kind.

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We — the girls and I — spent part of Wednesday afternoon cleaning the candle-stands in the church. What we use to put lit candles in at the moment, pending renewal, are one large and two slightly smaller Turkish aluminium baking-tins, a similar tin but stained black, and two tins that look the same but turned out to be colanders, with a bottom full of holes, covered with a paper plate and a sheet of aluminium foil to keep the sand in.

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Hendrik was ill — first urinary tract infection, then bladder stones, then urinary tract infection again — and the vet gave him special diet food, in a tin. He usually isn’t all that fond of tinned food, he’d rather have kibble, but this is designed for sick cats so it’s extremely delectable. To all cats, not just to sick cats.

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Five mail messages in one day, spread over three accounts, purporting to come from the Valdyas.org team and warning me that I was spreading spam and viruses, that I’d probably caught a trojan, and to use their free anti-virus tool or configure their free forwarding service.

That can’t be from us. For one thing, the Valdyas.org team is Boudewijn and me, and we never sent it. There is no such thing as “support@calcifer.valdyas.org”. If I had a virus (which seems unlikely on my Linux-only computer) the sysadmin, that is, my husband, would tell me, not send impersonal messages to each one of my accounts.

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Thinking I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb I wore a headscarf to the regular Sunday Liturgy as well. I hope by Easter everybody thinks it’s what I do. For now, it’s a kind of Lenten resolution: if I want to do something that is good (or at least non-bad) in itself, I should do it and not stand around wanting it.

My daughters giggled, and when I asked “do you think it’s silly?” one said “a little” and another asked “why do you do it?” When I answered “because I like it” she was satisfied.

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In the first week of Lent we have Great Compline with the Penitential Canon of St.Andrew of Crete. Usually twice: last year on Monday and Thursday, this year on Monday and Wednesday. We could theoretically have it four times but it’s hard enough on the choir to do it twice.

Last year, I dared wear a headscarf to this service for the first time. This year I did it again. It’s the only time when I’m confident enough not to think of what people will think.

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I’ve been stuck. I’ve been very stuck. Two days of zero words, a couple of days of a hundred and something, and then I wrote pure drivel for a few days merely to produce wordage and have something to fill in on the spreadsheet.

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My little brush with the Tax Office got an unexpected sequel. Today, a blue envelope dropped on the mat, giving me a sinking feeling (“oh, no, another tax thing”) but it was an apology for their mistaken demand. And it turned out that the uneasy feeling I had then was right all along: I don’t need to do anything, it will sort itself out.

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I fell in love with this tree years ago, when it still had all its branches. Though some were damaged by a storm last year and had to be brutally lopped off, I don’t love it any less for that.

When we got the digital camera I decided to take a picture of it every first Sunday of the month. Then I forgot to take the camera along every single first Sunday of the month since then until last Sunday, when we had a baptism and Rebecca wanted to take the camera to church anyway to take pictures of the font for her school speech.

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Trouw has a weekly comic, Het Dagboek van Anton Dingeman (Anton Dingeman’s Diary), a Day in the Life of a Civil Servant thing, ranging from boring to hilariously funny, with occasional peaks of high satire. Unfortunately, it’s not online.

Monday, January 19, was one of those high points. For copyright reasons, I can’t scan and display the whole thing, but I’ll give the text in translation.

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This is Lionel. He (or perhaps she, or it; I don’t know whether blobs have gender at all) is my useless blob. I’ve wanted to adopt a useless blob for a long time, but never had a place to put it. I may put him in a box in the sidebar when he falls off the page, but he’s all right here for now.

No, I don’t know why he’s called Lionel. That’s just his name.

You can adopt your own useless blob too: click on Lionel to go to spacefem.com (not a bad place to be anyway) and get one.

We let Naomi quit swimming class. She can swim — she has been able to swim expertly for months — but she can’t succeed in doing one thing that’s necessary to get a swimming certificate, namely, to swim nine meters underwater and go through a hole in a plastic sheet without surfacing in between.

Unlike things like breaststroke which you can be weak, good enough or excellent at, this is binary: you get two tries and if you don’t make it you’re screwed, even if you do everything else perfectly.

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Yes, there really is a cat in this picture.

A bit of tail and (I think) hind leg can be seen on the far left. It became easier when she moved along a bit and showed her eyes:

The red book with the dilapidated binding is my trusty 1970 Concise Oxford; the shelf, in fact, is my store of indispensable things. Though I could probably put the 2001 and 2002 church yearbooks downstairs again and use 2003 instead.

“I saw a mouse!” wasn’t what we expected Menna to say when she went to the cellar to get a new box of breakfast crackers. But she did see a mouse, running across the rusks-and-crackers shelf and disappearing behind the sugar. The first thing I did after the initial shock was to grab the nearest cat, who happened to be Leentje, and carry her down the cellar stairs — she didn’t want to go by herself, because she knows all too well it usually isn’t allowed. She sniffed everything, caught nothing, went to sit under the bottom shelf with her head sticking out and a smug expression on her face, and left a good amount of cat scent to chase any passing mice away.

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It was Johanna, the black Cat of Little Brain, who brought it out of the cellar and put it in the middle of the living-room floor, but we suspect that it was actually Leentje who made the kill. A medium-sized greyish-tan house mouse, thoroughly dead. The Cat of Little Brain sat looking at it, and at me, with a look of “See? A mouse. What now?” on her face and didn’t growl or try to seize it when I abducted it in a dustpan.

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Ten-year-olds are much easier to throw parties for than six-year-olds: you take them to a film and provide coke and chips (and permission to turn the music up loud so they can teach each other to break-dance) afterwards. No organizing games, no sorting out squabbles; only sorting out the seating, because the birthday girl (second from left) had three friends and only two sides for friends to sit on, but that sorted itself out because one friend was also a friend of the birthday girl’s sister and was content with sitting next to her.

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I got a notice from the Tax Office saying that my tax rebate had been stopped because I’d handed in a tax return showing no income. Now under Dutch law, taxation starts negative; simplified in the extreme, if the tax on what you earn is less than 1827 euros they pay you the difference, and if it’s more you pay them the difference. As I expect to have no taxable income whatsoever in 2004 (unless someone buys my book, but I don’t actually expect that, not in 2004 anyway) I’d already been granted the tax rebate.

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I’d never have thought to have business in Almere, but that’s where the first fencing match in the youth tournament was. Naomi was in it, two days before her tenth birthday.

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Fifty thousand words in sight; stuck at 49.907 and out of inspiration for the final 93, so I’m goofing off by writing blog entries. Anyway, yesterday’s count was 1.543 and I’m way over my weekly target (to be reached on Wednesday) already.

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Or rather, I hate guessing. I was brought up not to peek at the ending of a book because “that would spoil it”, but I’m learning to indulge. If I know who killed Cock Robin I have more brain-power to find out how it was done, and how the author describes how it was done and how people react to it, and I enjoy the book much more. My first reading of a book is often just to know what happens, and if it’s good enough I tend to read it again immediately to really savour it.

Ruined Endings peeks at movies for all of us who’d rather be spoiled than uncertain. Some have the whole plot, most just the ending. Some of my favourites aren’t there (Willow and Labyrinth, for instance) but if I want to go and see something there’s probably a plot summary of it on the site already; it seems to list lots of new(ish) and popular films.

Ever since I carried Leentje down the cellar stairs to discourage any passing mice, she’s considered it her job to do that every morning. After wolfing down a few bites of fresh kibble, she runs to the cellar door, mews if it’s closed, rushes down the stairs when we open the door, sniffs everything and returns to sit on the second or third step from the bottom, watching.

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Found this in my inbox, with the warning “Note: This is an HTML message. For security reasons, only the raw HTML code is shown. If you trust the sender of this message then you can activate formatted HTML display for this message by clicking here.”

<FONT face=”Default Sans Serif, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif” size=2><div>Dag,</div><DIV>&nbsp;</DIV><DIV>Het volgende boek is voor u binnengekomen:</DIV><DIV>&nbsp;</DIV><DIV>- Voice problems of children</DIV><DIV>&nbsp;</DIV><DIV>U kunt het boek, binnen een week, afhalen aan de uitleenbalie van de Athenaeumbibliotheek.</DIV><DIV>&nbsp;</DIV><DIV>Met vriendelijke groet,</DIV><DIV>(name withheld) </DIV><DIV>Athenaeumbibliotheek</DIV></FONT>

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I wrote the same scene three times in a few days. That probably doesn’t seem unusual, but it is for me; when I was working on Terms of Service I never came back to edit something while still first-drafting, and I thought I shouldn’t do it because it killed the writing.

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Finally I’ve upgraded (downgraded? well, let’s call it sidegraded) to a real blog. What decided it was an event I wanted to write about when I didn’t have something to write in every category of old-style Found Objects.

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