It’s the Sunday before Christmas. It’s usually not so immediately before Christmas as this year, which makes for a strange succession of days, as if we’re having a Holy Sunday the way we have Holy Saturday before Easter. But it’s a normal Sunday before Christmas regardless, celebrating the Fathers of the Old Testament, and the Gospel reading is Matthew 1:

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The setting: the city park, large sloped lawns with occasional trees.

The cast:

Human #1: male, sporty business type, jacket over open-necked shirt, carrying a white tennis ball. Accompanied by…
Dog #1: large long-legged young black love-to-run type, male (aggressively so).
Human #2: male, middle-aged, dressed nondescriptly, wielding a ball-thrower with a yellow tennis ball. Accompanied by…
Dog #2: laid-back elderly retriever, probably eunuch.

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…you make lemonade. When life hands you crumbs…

Eleven years ago today, two of my three daughters were born. Yesterday I endeavoured to bake them a cake each. They’re not of an age to want themed cakes any more, but they still get to choose.

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The story was stalled, requiring research— it ends with a fight in a church, and I even know which church: the church of the Beheading of St.John the Baptist in the Zuidbuurt in Zoeterwoude. It burnt down in 1964, perfect for the story: I can cause that.

Anyway, I wanted a day off before starting the new job on Tuesday.

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Coming out of the shower this morning I heard <bzzzzz> <bzzzzz> <sizzle> over my head. Her Majesty was back, or one of her daughters. The <sizzle> happened when she hit the ceiling lamp, thinking it was Outside.

I wanted to do something about her; being stark naked in a small room with a wasp, however groggy, isn’t my idea of comfortable. I dried myself in a hurry, opened the window and took my clothes to the landing to dress, turning off the light. When I came back she was sitting on a packet of washing powder, which I moved as close to the open window as I could, and yes, she took off into the (admittedly grey) sky, looking as pleased as I’ve ever seen a wasp look.

There was also a medium-sized spider weaving a web on the ceiling, probably hoping to catch the housefly that came in when I was letting Her Majesty out but promptly flew out again.

And the crocuses are in flower, and the tulips are doing their best. Winter really seems to be over at last.

Taken by Rebecca sometime last month when there suddenly was snow in the morning. The cat in question was probably the youngish ginger tom we call Tinklepuss because of his bell.

Pardon my ranting.

Geert Wilders, leader of the Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) has published his party program. In it, he proposes to revoke Article 1 of the Dutch Constitution: [1]

All persons in the Netherlands shall be treated equally in equal circumstances. Discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief, political opinion, race or sex or on other grounds whatsoever shall not be permitted.

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I took this (and five others which didn’t come out as pretty as this one) on December 16, leaning dangerously out of Rebecca’s bedroom window. It was a full double rainbow at that point, but the old Canon doesn’t have a wide-angle lens and the rainbow was changing too fast to risk the panorama function, which I’ve never tried properly.

Note the slightly lighter sky outside the outer rainbow and the much lighter sky inside the inner rainbow. If it hadn’t shown in the picture I’d probably have thought that it was an optical illusion, and if the sky on the inside hadn’t been much lighter (the effect in reality was even stronger than in the photograph) I’d have seen it as a band of darker sky between the two rainbows.

Having been without a computer for two weeks, I had to catch up on mailing-list management. Four mailing lists; two messages on one list from someone who forgot to subscribe with his other address before posting; all the rest, about two hundred held messages in all, were spam. Ninety-nine percent of the spam in my personal mailbox is spirited away by my various anti-spam tools, so I don’t see the really interesting subject lines, such as these:

We’ve students from all works of life. Apparently, they’re not very advanced students yet, or English isn’t what they’re studying.

Your academic qualification expired. Even if I had one, how can it expire? And even if it can, how would they know?

The UPS van stopping in front of our house made me gleefully abandon my ironing this morning. More like the UPS lorry, really: it was on the huge side of substantial and, like all UPS vans, gothically black with gold lettering. I hope the neighbours were watching. It brought not one but two Dells, which Boudewijn has already blogged about extensively (also in other articles in that vicinity; just keep reading).

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