Found Objects

There are lots of street magazines in the Netherlands, sold (and often produced) by homeless people, like The Big Issue in the United Kingdom and elsewhere: Z Magazine in Amsterdam, De Zelfkrant in Den Bosch, Haags Straatnieuws in The Hague, De Riepe (which is Groninger dialect for “The Sidewalk”) in the North, Straatjournaal in Haarlem (no website, but a big presence in the local news), Straatmagazine Leiden in Leiden, Straatmagazine in Rotterdam and Straatnieuws, the oldest street magazine of the Netherlands, in Utrecht, Amersfoort and Hilversum. In Arnhem, Nijmegen, Doetinchem and Apeldoorn there used to be Impuls, but it folded in July 2007 for lack of vendors; probably a good thing, because it means that fewer people are homeless.

Whenever I find myself in one of those towns I buy a copy. In Utrecht, if possible, from the same vendor every time, a friendly stick-thin man who stands at one of the exits of the station area. I don’t give money to beggars on principle, but if someone is making a real effort —whether playing music, drawing chalk sidewalk pictures or selling street magazines— I usually contribute.

Our town doesn’t have a street magazine, worse luck. Probably because nobody can set it up, or there are no starting funds, rather than for lack of people who could sell it, judging by the number of likely suspects I see in the streets. (This may be skewed by the fact that we live very close to the local homeless facility, but I think there are a few dozen at least.).

Instead, we have Het Daklozenwoord. It may look like a street magazine on first sight, but it doesn’t quite quack like one: it’s run by Eastern European gangs, it may be sold by people who are technically homeless, but as far as I (or at least my sources) can find out they don’t get to keep any of the proceeds. And the vendors I’ve met —a whole family of them, taking turns at the door of my usual supermarket— weren’t very friendly, but saying “Daaklozenkraant! Asseblief! Dankoewel!” in a whiny voice, ever more insistently, even to the same person who has said “no” three times in a row in the last five minutes. I wish those people would stick to making music; they do that too, and not at all badly.

And any guilt-induced impulse to give them the benefit of the doubt was quashed forever when I saw the only female member of that family —a girl of around twenty— carefully set her face to “pitiful” before taking up her pile of papers.

When life hands one lemons— or, more to the point, a generous helping of the Family Cold, one does not only make lemonade but also try to see things in a larger perspective. There’s a big universe out there. And I’ve just found out that the Astronomy Picture of the Day doesn’t break my RSS reader any more with overly wide pictures (they have thumbnails in the feed now), so I’ve subscribed again.

Reading random things while ironing, I also found someone who says at least some of what I was going to say (continuing what I’ve already said) when the cold caught up with me.

And here is an article explaining how not only actual practice, but also going over it in your imagination and sleeping on it helps to learn music faster.

Here endeth the linkspam in lieu of a post.

If I were an atheist, I’d want to call my blog “Athier than Thou”. And searching for that actually turns up some hits. (And it made me find Twenty Sided, which I like a lot.) No blog with that title, at least not one that’s easy to find, but it’s moot anyway because I’m so not an atheist.

After choir practice last night, some of us washed up the coffee cups and stood in the cold kitchen for twenty minutes afterwards arguing fine points of Trinitarian theology. It came from a discussion that started earlier when we were arguing fine points of text placement: these are the people who happen to be most passionate about, and most experienced at, fitting words to music. Some people think we’re a self-appointed “inner circle” but it’s more like a sloppy polygon located in no particular place that usually expresses itself as a triangle but can acquire extra sides whenever convenient.

Some people likely to read this (you know who you are) will now think I’m going to talk about choir politics, but they can rest assured that I’m not. I only want to say explicitly that this is one of the things I like most about my particular corner of the Orthodox Church: that it’s not only possible but normal to argue theology while washing up. It doesn’t need a context that’s specially set apart for it. We’re not only Christians on Sundays, not only in church, not in carefully set-aside “quiet time”, but always. There is no division, no fence between Christian stuff and just stuff. There is no Christian reservation.

It’s said that “all things are holy” and I can agree, but that doesn’t mean that everything is prim, prissy, prudish and possibly other things starting with ‘p’. It does mean that my whole life belongs to God, not just that part of it that happens to take place in church. It doesn’t mean, either, that I am necessarily good all the time: there is such a thing as sin. Allen Ginsberg’s expression of this thought is not mine, but he did get it right.

We went to bed at 2:45. Couldn’t stop when Raisse’s player was supposed to go and catch the last train, because it was in the middle of a storm; couldn’t stop when it was a reasonable bedtime (just past midnight) because it was in the middle of a battle. Finished about 1:50 but badly needed to wind down. Fortunately Raisse’s player had brought a bottle of whisky retrieved from a shipwreck (the story is in Dutch but starts with a blurb in English).

And I woke up at 6:37 from a dream in which we’d escaped the Khas only to end up in the hands of the Taleban.

(it’s really long, over 4500 words; I wish I could do that with ‘real’ writing, but then the events happen as I write them and with game writeups events have already happened and I feel like I’m hurrying to catch up)

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Picked it up somewhere; found it in different places.

Four films I could watch over and over:

The Three Musketeers (with Douglas Fairbanks)
Labyrinth
The Princess Bride
The Court Jester

Four favorite TV shows: (note: I haven’t watched TV at any length for over ten years)

Original Star Trek
Catweazle
Kunt u mij de weg naar Hamelen vertellen, meneer
Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Four favorite foods:

Cheese
Anything in aspic, especially ham rolls with horseradish
Guinea-fowl
Chocolate

Four websites I visit every day:

Glory to God for All Things
Slashfood
nu.nl
Boing Boing

Four places I would love to be:

London
The flat bit of Canada (failing that, eastern Groningen, preferably on a bus)
Anywhere at the seaside
Beverwijk, strangely enough, because that’s where I used to go whenever I needed a brain reboot when I was living in Haarlem

Four favorite colors:

#FFEBCD blanchedalmond (was my website background colour for years)
#8B0000 darkred
also, though all greens and most blues are off for my vision on a computer screen:
#53868B cadetblue4
#228B22 forestgreen

Four names I love but wouldn’t/couldn’t use for a kid:

(these are names we didn’t actually use for kids, though they were considered)

Sara(h) - felt too much like an old woman’s name
Rachel - it wouldn’t have done to call twins something with the same initial. But every year on the eve of the Sunday of the Fathers of the Old Testament, singing the sticheron in the sixth tone about Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel, I vaguely wish I’d known beforehand that I’d have three daughters (though Prima and Tertia are glad I didn’t, they like the names they’ve got).
Daniel - name for my first that didn’t make it. Also, for Younger Boy Twin, but they were both girls.
Jonathan - name for Primus but she turned out Prima; also name for Elder-or-Only Boy Twin, see above.

Four people to tag:

<points> You. And you. And you too. Oh, and you. If you feel called, don’t hesitate.

Ever seen a “please close the door” sign on a sliding door so you could only read the sign when the door was closed? This is the same thing, only with treacle.

Treacle comes in one-pound waxed cardboard cups. Under the lid there’s an inner cover, also of waxed cardboard, explaining how to hold the cup to prevent spilling treacle all over self and kitchen (“hold the cup like this, and not by the lid”). But you can only read it when you’ve already removed the lid, as seen in the bottom picture. Granted, the first time you remove the lid the inner cover is still on it, but if you hold it by the lid, and not as seen in the top picture, you’re bound to spill treacle on the floor.

It’s also got a grammatical oddity. “Deksel” can be grammatically epicene (de deksel) or neuter (het deksel); the legend along the edge says “Environment-friendly paper lid” in the epicene form, while the main text has “het deksel” in the neuter form.

But I do like the treacle jumping out of the cup in the how-not-to picture.

November 25, the feast of St. Katherine of Alexandria, happened to be on a Sunday so I moved the third-Sunday church school (six- and seven-year-olds) one week to accommodate Girl #2, whose name-day it was.

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Hard to find a title for this that doesn’t give the whole story away.

I wrote part of this in longhand on the train to Utrecht, six pages, four of which standing up.

—-

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Another shopping trip, this time with my blue Ikea trolley and differently blue plastic Other Supermarket crate tied to it with Filia Secunda’s defunct skipping-rope. Note to self: next time take an old towel to keep bottles from rattling.

At the checkout I said “now I’ll get a free apple pie!” because they were giving them away in honour of the opening if your bill came over 25 euros. But mine was a few euros short, as it was yesterday. When I said “pity, your prices are too low!” I got one anyway. Just the thing for teenagers who come home from school hungry on a Friday afternoon.

I’ll do some price comparison (compared, that is, to where I usually buy the same stuff):

No difference

Offley port (didn’t expect that, anyway)
Chimay Double beer (ditto)

About the same price, slightly different product

(these are mostly house-brands)

Puff pastry
House-brand crisps
Frozen spinach

Slightly cheaper

Grolsch lager
Lay’s crisps

Significantly cheaper

Valencia oranges (but they’re small; the big ones were more expensive)
Organic eggs (and they have boxes of 10, which neither of my other usual supermarkets have)

Things the others don’t have

Pfanner Green Apple
Red Rivella

Things I missed (i.e. that the others do have)

Organic frozen spinach (but that may be for lack of looking, I bought spinach on an impulse)
Organic onions (which I’ll ask for next time, so they’ll know there’s demand for it)

They have a lowest-price guarantee, so if I’d had a “More expensive” category I’d have been entitled to my money back.

And I told the service desk about yesterday’s post, so they’ll find this one too.

Latest news about the bread: the bread is good, very good. But there is indeed Stuff in it. I read the small print on a similar bag of white bread flour in the shop, to see if I could use it too, and found lots of ingredients that must be “bread improver”, so I looked at the bag of wholemeal again. In extremely small print, that I can read under supermarket strip lighting but a girl had to read to me at home, there is:

Integrale tarwebloem, dextrose, bonenmeel, mout, emulgator: lecitine, mono- en diglyceriden, meelverbeteraar: L-ascorbinezuur, enzymen: alfa-amylase, allergenen: gluten, peulvruchten, soja.

“Whole wheat flour”, yes, okay. It should have stopped there. If I’d wanted dextrose, bean flour (that’s probably what made it high-protein), malt (that’s probably what made it so dark), soy lecitin, mono- and diglycerides (don’t even know what those are), vitamin C and enzymes in my flour I could have added them. I feel cheated [1]. Or perhaps I feel as if I’ve been cheating.

[1] Not by the shop, they aren’t required to read and remember every tiny letter on each and every package. By the makers. They did list all the ingredients as the law requires, but they didn’t make it at all clear to the unsuspecting buyer, or the unsuspecting shop assistant for that matter, that it’s not flour and only flour.

There’s this new supermarket, Jumbo, which sits in the mega-shopping-mall that’s haltingly coming into being in the old army barracks in town. The supermarket isn’t actually in the barracks, (a) it’s too big for that and (b) that’s reserved for more upmarket shops, but in a screechingly ugly black cube built for it and the underground parking and the mega-cinema that hasn’t opened yet.

The opening was yesterday. I didn’t go because I hate noise (the Media Markt was also opening). But today, when I needed minced meat and fizzy water and wholemeal flour, I thought I’d have a look.

It advertises as “the cheapest supermarket that actually has everything” and yes, I think it does. It’s nearly as cheap as the cheap-and-nasty one and much less snooty than the current incarnation of the family-tradition expensive one, so I think it’s a keeper. Being the size of three other supermarkets, they have three times as much, rather like the Carrefour I went to in Belgium only without the non-food section.

They have things I thought had disappeared completely, like red Rivella, my favourite drink as a child. I immediately bought a bottle, of course. I still like it, though it’s sweeter than I remember, probably because my taste has changed. Never mind— at least it exists! I’m not a supertaster, but I can taste all artificial sweeteners and they all taste equally vile to me. (Not completely true: aspartame is vilest because it doesn’t manifest itself until swallowed and stays behind for hours.)

I was thinking that my joy would be complete if they had wholemeal flour (I’d seen only bread mixes and plain flour) when I spotted a sign “if you don’t see it, ask us” so I asked. The nice young man pointed me to two-kilo sacks of Soubry Farine pour Pain Complet, which I’d seen in other shops but always thought was a mix, but it’s indeed normal-looking wholemeal flour and I’ll bake from it presently. Kudos!

ETA: It’s high-protein flour, which I thought was impossible to get in normal shops in this country. And it’s really coarse, yay! The dough needed a lot of kneading to become unsticky, rose spectacularly (probably because of all that kneading), and baked very dark. That’s an asset in itself: Expensive Supermarket wholemeal flour stays pale and Organic Outlet wholemeal flour, apart from being very fine, becomes grey. If the bread tastes as nice as it smells, more kudos!

My ex-employer deigned to pay me about half the travel allowance they still owed me (the other half is being taken care of) so I could afford to shop for boots. I love boots; I never buy any, because (a) they tend to be above my budget (it does make a difference that I’ve taken to wearing skirts more; that makes it less wasteful) and (b) I have difficult shaped feet, narrow heels and broad toes and muscular calves. But boots are in fashion so there are lots of them.

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I don’t want to buy software, not even at reduced price. I don’t use Windows. I use Linux; there’s no need for me to buy software.

Not being in the possession of a penis, a dick or a cock, I’m not interested in ways to enlarge it. Nor am I interested in ways to make or keep it as hard as a rock. Quite apart from the question whether that would be painful. Oh, and SS. Peter and Paul aren’t interested either, thank you very much.

Also, I’m not a customer of the Bank of America, or of any other bank in America. And if my own bank has anything to tell me, they do it by snail-mail and spell my name right.

And I’m against gambling on principle. There’s no need to offer me bigger and bigger bonuses in your online casinos.

Last but not least, the real-world pharmacy I use serves all my needs and I don’t need an online one in Canada.

Wow, that was powerful. I was getting a bit impatient with Athal because he was reluctant to use his abilities, but I think he’s over that now.

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Behind a cut as an afterthought to accommodate people who don’t like game writeups and read my blog for the other stuff. I promise to write some other stuff as well in the next few days!

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A tiny one-paragraph bit in our paper, but here’s a more elaborate article from the International Herald Tribune: Sweden is about to outlaw the teaching of religion outside religious-education lessons in private schools. In public schools there’s already no teaching of religion, I suppose.

It sounds like a refreshing change from the school my kids are in, where lots of things are taught in religious-education lessons, very few of them having much to do with religion. But that’s not the point: the point is, apparently, to protect students from fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalism, as the larger article makes clear and the tiny bit in the paper didn’t. Keeping people ignorant keeps them innocent? That’s never worked before. In fact, fundamentalism often springs from ignorance.

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Well, I hope. It’s too little to deconstruct, being only Domine Fili unigenite Jesu Christe from, I think, Mozart’s Krönungsmesse. Either the alto part or the first part that starts the fugue-like object (or perhaps they’re the same; I haven’t sung it for, count on fingers, about thirty years). I don’t know how it goes on. Well, obviously I do know the words, it’s the Gloria, but the tune escapes me.

I earwormed myself with it when the thirteen-year-old was doing vocatives in Latin. I wrote “Dominus Filius unigenitus Jesus Christus” on a piece of paper, with the vocatives under it: it’s got two different forms for the second declension (Domine/unigenite/Christe versus Fili) and also Jesu, which I thought was fourth declension but seems to be a straightforward borrowing from Greek.

I realise now that “Deus” doesn’t seem to have a separate vocative, but uses the nominative instead like other declensions.

And, apropos of the classics, I can’t help liking the vocative of “Master” in Greek: despota.

One of the most effective ways to get rid of an earworm is to analyse it to death. Here goes.

I’ve known this song for ages, from an obscure folk record, and I like to sing it because it does interesting things with tune and rhythm; I’ve always been slightly uneasy about the lyrics, especially the last verse.

First, I looked up the lyrics on the web to see if anybody else had already done it and found to my astonishment that it’s in (or perhaps from) Wim Sonneveld’s repertoire. Wim Sonneveld is, or rather was as he died in 1974, a famous Dutch entertainer, cabaret artist, singer, songwriter; not someone I’d associate with a song that sounds so much like a traditional folk song. But I read somewhere that it was first attested in 1730, so perhaps he didn’t write it but only sang it (in 1968).

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This cost me one euro in the market. Small price for an educational experience.

I asked “what is it?” and the woman behind the stall said “well, a sort of pumpkin, only it’s Asian, they use it for soup.” Curious, I bought it, and as I was making leftover-rabbit soup anyway I thought I’d try it.

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On my way to go grocery shopping, I was waylaid by a very small knight in shining plastic armour. And an even smaller squire in a crenellated red doublet and an incongruous headscarf.

“Password”, they demanded. When I said “sorry, I don’t know it” the squire came up and whispered something in my ear, which I repeated, and they let me pass.

Only then did I notice that the knight was also wearing a headscarf, under her helmet.

I don’t know what these girls will be like in ten years, whether they’ll be wearing headscarves or wildly flowing hair or neat coiffured heads, but I hope that whatever it is, they’ll be doing it proudly and of their own free will. That they’ll be themselves, as they were when I met them today.

(On the way back I was waylaid by a tabby cat in almost the same spot. Cats are uncomplicated: they don’t want passwords, they want to be scritched behind the ears. And they don’t grow up to make choices.)

Brain duly rinsed. Not even at the station yet and I saw the first strange thing.

There was no puff of smoke, and anyway the shoes weren’t pointed, but still. They were about size 38, too small for me or any of my daughters, or I might have taken them.

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I’m only now finding some comments that somehow didn’t get through (though they did arrive); I’ll answer whatever seems relevant and disable comments again until I have time and/or a Blosxom expert to (help me) solve the problem. And other problems, like the navigation that’s badly off. If you happen to be a Blosxom expert, please speak up! Also, of course, if you’re not a Blosxom expert but simply have something to say about an entry.

Elizabeth: yes, two ovens, and I use both of them for bread (rise with hot air in the large oven while the small one heats up, then bake in the small one). And right now, the roast is in the large oven and the Yorkshire pudding about to go into the small one. I thought I’d be using the small oven more, because it’s cheaper and quicker to heat a small amount of space, but only the large oven has hot-air convection and that does all kinds of wonderful things to food, and it makes it possible to bake for a shorter time at a lower temperature, with the same or better results.

Sally: my father-in-law remembers that fixing your own electricity used to be illegal in the Netherlands too, until the nineteen-sixties or so. He once had a run-in with an inspector who told him, when he wired something in his house, “this may only be done by a certified electrician”. My FIL (well, then not even a father yet, I think) said “ah, do you want to see my papers, then?” because he happened to be a certified electrician. These days, anything beyond the meter is your own responsibility, though house owners may have to pay a fine for renting electrically unsafe property to someone.

Then it seems that various people tried to comment but didn’t succeed (they only caused lots of strangely nested undeletable folders to appear; Blosxom experts, help!) and several more said things like “you rock” and “great” and “I’m agree” (sic), but that may just be comment spam. If you’re real people after all, I don’t know who you are but thanks for the compliments.

Trying to find a train to Haarlem for tomorrow on the Dutch Railways planner, I noticed that they wanted to send me via Utrecht. Usually, that’s a detour —Deventer, Amsterdam and Haarlem lie more or less in a straight line east-west, with Utrecht well out of the way to the south— so I tried to go explicitly via Amsterdam. They sent me via Utrecht and Amsterdam. Lots of warnings about works on the line [*] but nothing between Deventer and Amsterdam, so I got curious.

[*] It was very heartening in Greece to see road works announced with “LITOURGIA”, making me realise that “liturgy” means “the work that has to be done to make everything run smoothly”, in a mundane context no less than in a spiritual one. Less heartening, though, to see “PROSFORA” in every other shop, meaning merely “special offer”.

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Athal is not very coherent about what happened and especially in what order things happened. Also, he’s squeamish about the children. I’m cautious myself: parts of this will be very brief.

——

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The first time after the summer that I have to turn on my bicycle light on an evening errand, and of course the tail-light battery is flat. Fortunately I remember that one of my daughters has the same type of light, and yes, hers works.

While I’m trying to pry her light off in the gloom a scruffy man passes and asks “Hey! What are you doing?” Not aggressive or belligerent, just curious and concerned.

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(in order not to forget, because if it’s not in the notes we’ll all forget it, and it may be important)

When Athal and Raisse were about to go to bed, Rovin came and announced that some more of the presents had arrived: two girls for the king’s pleasure, and for the eventuality that the king should have different tastes, also two boys. Very young, in order to avoid any risk that they’re spoilt already.

[now this is Athal thinking] What shall we do with them? Obviously I’m not going to use them for their intended purpose. Treat them as servants and pay them wages like the other slaves, I suppose, but not until the Khandihan has left in order not to embarrass him.

It rambles; perhaps it has factual errors. But Athal’s recollection is, understandably, blurry.

——

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To live in the centre of a provincial town.

An old unique house with idiosyncrasies that I have to work around (I’m good at that).

To be rid of the annoying neighbours and their whiny children.

A roof terrace. Admittedly it needs some work, but it will be a little paradise.

Real built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves as opposed to something almost-right that we rigged ourselves.

A shower I can stand up in.

Getting up without having to hurry because there are three girls on my tail (they have their own bathroom now).

A dedicated laundry room (though it has to double as store room, because we lack a cellar, an attic and a shed).

Wooden floors, i.e. made of floorboards.

This.

Still, I’m not jaded and I don’t think I’ll ever be. Just enjoying all of it.

But the house we bought came with a dishwasher. And I love the thing. I call it “the Clean Machine” in my thoughts.

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Okay, I’ve found a voice. It’s mostly Athal’s (hence first person), but a bit more detached than the bit I wrote in Dutch and got stalled on. I blame it on ascribe it to the character questionnaire. Also, it’s not in Dutch, so the whole world (well, almost) can read it if they like.

Technical announcement: comments seem to have stopped working again, so if you have something to say please do it by mail.

Story behind the cut so people who don’t like game writeups can easily skip it. I may post an executive summary of earlier events but that’s not what I want to write now.

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Trying to find a voice for writing up roleplaying sessions —I’m playing a former NPC now Boudewijn has taken over the campaign— I distracted myself into playing with character questionnaires. I now know that Alysei Athal astin Velain has a tenor voice, his eyes are nondescript brownish (from his father’s side; the slight build and thick dark red hair are from his mother’s), he’s fond of fruit, prefers beer to wine and the meat of birds to that of quadrupeds, and doesn’t care for fish much but will eat it when it’s on the table.

But there the trouble started. The first questionnaire was obviously made for characters in modern mainstream novels, not kings of Valdyas.

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In about a month we’re moving to a house in the town centre. An upstairs house on top of the Orthodox church. No garden, no shed, no yard, no cellar (that’s the church’s community room these days), not even a hall except a little bitty entrance that a huge green door opens into.

We have five bicycles.

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Some things that distracted me in church today, but didn’t distract from the glory of God, quite the contrary.

• When our priest read the Gospel, St. Lebuinus’ Church across the road rang the bells, probably because their service was just beginning. At the sermon, when the Gospel was explained, the bells rang again, probably because their second service was just beginning.
• At quiet moments during the Liturgy I could hear a blackbird singing. It’s very heartening to think that I’ll be able to hear that blackbird singing much more often when we move into the house above the church in about a month; the window I could hear it through this morning is in our roof terrace.
• A small spider was busy weaving a web between the choir music-stand and the lamp that sticks out from it. The regular page-turner being absent, I turned the pages, careful not to damage the web. The tremor seemed to trigger the spider’s something-in-my-web alarm, because it came running every time I turned a page, but there was nothing I could do about that. I didn’t draw attention to it, because I know that one person in the choir sees spiders as the embodiment of evil and wouldn’t have tolerated even this little peaceful one. At the end of the service, the spider had caught a tiny fly.

In my family, taming electricity for domestic use is handed down through the female line. My grandmother taught my mother to attach a new cord to a toaster. My mother taught me to wire a plug. And now I’ve taught one daughter, and promised to teach another, to install wall sockets and light switches.

True, it was my father-in-law who did all the wiring in our new attic and left the ends securely bundled up and tucked away for me and, as it turned out, the thirteen-year-old to screw the sockets and switches on after each girl had painted the walls of her own room. Next time I’ll find out how to do wiring, too. Electricity, as the thirteen-year-old has already noticed in school, is interesting and easy.

The best part was, of course, to reconnect the mains when everything was in place, and flip the switch, and see the light come on.

And it’s not nearly finished yet, but I’m satisfied (for now) with how it looks: my new web site section, the Purplish Cooking Pages. There’s a grand total of seven recipes there, and I’m slowly adding more links to interesting sites, but it’s ready to face the world. Bon appétit (no, not this one).

A few weeks ago I planned to teach a church-school class about the Tower of Babel with the group that’s doing the Old Testament, in sequence, very slowly (one story a month). As it happened nobody in the right age group turned up, but it did make me read up on Genesis 11:

Now the whole earth had one language and one speech.

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My current earworm is the Easter Stichera. Better than some more inane earworms I’ve had lately, but annoying all the same, exactly because it’s one of my favourite pieces of music for Easter. It does have the advantage that I pay more attention to individual words and phrases than when I’m singing them in the choir.

This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
A Pascha of delight, Pascha, the Lord’s Pascha, an all-venerable Pascha has dawned for us, Pascha. Let us embrace one another with joy. O Pascha, ransom from sorrow! Today Christ shone forth from a tomb as from a bridal chamber, and filled the women with joy, saying, ‘Proclaim it to the Apostles’.

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I know someone who, like us, doesn’t have TV, but unlike us she doesn’t read newspapers either. She says it’s a very restful existence. She may be right, but I couldn’t do that: when I go without news for a few weeks, for instance on holiday, I do crave a paper. I often buy a foreign paper when I’m abroad, both to read the local language and see what people in that country find interesting and important.

There seems to be more and more silliness in the papers, though. And on online news sites too. Perhaps it’s only because I’ve been reading more critically lately.

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Here is a very clear article about the date of Easter. It’s in French; I intend to translate it, but first into Dutch for the benefit of people in the parish. If you want a copy of the Dutch translation too, please tell me! Comments ought to work now.

We seem to have a (literally) astronomical error this year: if Easter had been calculated completely properly it would have been on the 6th of May.

This is the beginning of the prayer before Communion:

I believe, O Lord, and I confess, that thou art truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, who didst come into the world to save sinners, of whom I am first.

I’ve always felt a little uneasy about that. I have a tendency to be overly contrite anyway, which is the reason that for several years I didn’t go to explicitly penitential servies at all: if I did go to one, it left me in a blue funk for days. I can handle that now, but the words still sting, every Liturgy, when I say that prayer.

But today I realised, not for the first time but I haven’t been able to put it into words before, that “sinners, of whom I am first” is to be taken literally. Not “first” as in “first among the Apostles” like Saints Peter and Paul, or “first among bishops” like the Archbishop of Constantinople, but the first sinner I encounter when I look around me.

And then, of course, I don’t have to look any further. Other people’s sins aren’t my responsibility. Of course, when an action of mine makes someone sin, that is my responsibility, but only my own action, not theirs.

I can imagine —I know, in fact— that there are sins much worse than mine; for instance, I’ve never murdered anyone. But that’s none of my business. My piffling sins may not be significant in the large picture but they do stand between me and God, which is what matters and what needs to be cleared up.

Here is a very good blog post about the Liturgy of the Presanctified.

First Friday. I read the story of the Fall, one of my favourite bits of Genesis:

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(A blog-as-I-go spree)

Wednesday night: There’s a snow front coming. The Dutch Railways decide to preventively cancel some trains, especially in the West. We snigger at them being fazed by a little normal winter weather.

Thursday morning: Foggy. Temperature around zero Celsius. I go to work. Trains completely normal, but they still say they’re going to cancel some after 9:00. We’re still laughing at the so-called weather alarm.

9:45 The radio says that there’s heavy snow in the south already. I look up a news site and find that it’s worse in Belgium. Professor comes in and says he’s leaving early because otherwise he may not get home (he lives in Belgium). We advise him to leave right away and I hurriedly finish a letter he wants to sign before he does. My colleague (who has to cross a steepish bridge in a car) and I decide to leave as soon as there’s substantial snow. Other people, who live in town, stay.

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… but it’s now explicitly so. I found this on Rafa Minuesa’s blog.

By using this icon on my website I am stating…

1. That I am opposed to the use of corporate advertising on blogs.

2. That I feel the use of corporate advertising on blogs devalues the medium.

3. That I do not accept money in return for advertising space on my blog.

signed,

Irina

The wackiest translation job I ever had was to translate user manuals for consumer goods into Dutch. It was wacky because the originals were in Engrish. I went to my employer and asked “do you want a faithful translation or working instructions?” and he wanted working instructions, of course. I was glad that it wasn’t an engineering manual and I knew how all those things actually worked; what I did was write the whole thing myself.

One thing I remember word for word is a line from the instructions for a toaster: “You can now set the knob according to your flavour.” That means, probably, that if you taste like strawberry you should set it to 1, but if you happen to taste like vanilla you should set it to 2.

And recently I read Language Log and found a pointer to this: (the picture is a link; the rest of that site is hilarious too)

The first-years volunteered to show the prospective first-years around on the school Open Day, so they had to be at school at 4:30 having already eaten. And what’s the proper meal to have in the afternoon? Tea.

All that and a huge pot of Darjeeling.

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Ridiculously early by Orthodox standards (April 8; earliest it can be is April 4), and still quite early by Western standards. So the supermarket I still call my favourite, though that may change once they’ve finished refurbishing my usual instance of it with, among other abominations, a “cook-and-choose island” right where you come in, where you can buy what is basically a meal kit for two adults and two children; useless, not only because I prefer to make my own choices, but also because I have too many children to fit their marketing concept. And anyway, they’re teenagers, so they Grow. And Eat. Ah well.

… what was I saying? Oh yes, the supermarket has chocolate Easter eggs on the shelves. In January. One of the teenagers tells me that another shop already had some last week. Not that I object to chocolate Easter eggs; on the contrary, I’d probably buy and eat some now if it wasn’t for the fact that I, you know, celebrate Easter.

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I intended to make a Ginger Cake of Extraordinary Sharpness, but it turned out as a pleasant ordinary ginger cake, even though I used eight times as much powdered ginger as it said in the recipe, as well as a whole (albeit small) jar of very finely chopped stem ginger that wasn’t in the recipe. Next time I’ll use twelve times as much, probably three ounces, and chop my own stem ginger, coarsely.

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Years ago, we discovered Bolletje Eindeloos cinnamon biscuits. Thin hard biscuits sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, nice enough to be more-ish, plain enough for fast days, handy to take to work or school because they come in three separate compartments of five biscuits each to a pack.

We all liked them a lot. I didn’t buy many, or often— I could get some whenever I liked, anyway.

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16 bananas, 5 kiwifruit, 5 mangoes, 32 satsumas, 1 orange, 14 apples and 2 persimmons (not counting the persimmon that was being eaten as we took the picture).

Estimated time until so much is eaten that we’ll have to buy more: 4 days. Number of people in the household: 5 (one of whom is absent until Saturday night).

The mangoes, the bananas and the persimmons are very ripe. The rest is just normally ripe. I intend to make banana muffins and possibly mango sherbet ice.

Another trip into the West, not for research this time but, on the pretext of buying tea in Haarlem, to solve my POV and plot problems on the train. A trip Away From it All to get some uninterrupted writing and thinking time, not really alone but at least without people who want something of me.

The POV problem proved easy —a matter of moving one paragraph from the second scene to the first and tweaking a word or two—, the plot problem is still intractable, but the space opera romp I started a few days ago when stalled, because that was something I could do, acquired 71 words, all moving the story forward. One darling I’ll never kill, from an earlier scene: “engineer-scaring gorgeous”.

ETA, in the Skating Cafe: my plot problem has just solved itself. All it needed was for me to delete six words and move a speech tag to the middle of an utterance.

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