Orthodox Christians should write and paint and sing and dance. We should make
movies and television shows. We should make clothes and produce textiles as art
as well (the fullness of culture is itself too large to describe in a sentence,
a paragraph or even a book). And in all these activities, they will be
expressive of the fullness of our humanity without having to stick an icon on
everything to prove its Orthodoxy.
-- Father Stephen in Glory to God for All Things
This is a picture of Lionel, my Useless Blob.
He's really here, jumping up and down. To adopt your own Useless Blob, click on him.
![[christian fandom]](http://www.valdyas.org/~irina/blog/graphics/page/cf125x125.gif)
2007-09-17
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.
2007-09-16
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.
2007-09-14
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”.
2007-09-10
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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