Found Objects

“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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