Yesterday I installed OpenSuse 11.1. Not without glitches: the installer failed in two different places, presumably because of a scratch on the DVD, and when we’d burned a new DVD I had the same problem Boudewijn had with grub. Fortunately he knew from his own experience how to solve it, so now I have a pretty penguin-themed startup menu that I never actually use because I only ever want OpenSuSE, not Kubuntu 8 (or 7 for that matter) or <spit!> Vista (haven’t even tried if that works yet. When the installation failed, all the computer wanted to start was Vista, but I discouraged that as soon as I could and wouldn’t mind if it didn’t work, because the one Windows program I need runs perfectly under Wine, woohoo).

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I realise that I went to bed still trying to decide how to do something, but that doesn’t mean you had to keep the choice hanging over my head, literally, in a Javascript-type input box. It was quite distracting while I was helping salvage the crashed spaceship. I’m not sure when it went away, but it definitely wasn’t there when the cute little alien engineer (who called herself Catherine; I don’t believe for one moment that it was really her name) drove me to the station in the evacuee bus. In fact she liked driving the bus so much that she wanted to become a bus driver, “engineering,” she said, “is just something incidental”.

I ended up at the station at half past midnight, hungry, but all the shops were closing except one, where the shopkeeper gave me a glass of milk and some indifferent sushi. It was my own fault for not realising that the train I took would loop back and become the 2:40 to Amsterdam at that very same station, or I’d have had some of the interesting sushi with seaweed and sesame seeds, but I ended up with a basket full or chunks of salmon-coloured and salmon-flavoured rice. (I do want to try the raw salmon-coloured rice he also had, for making one’s own sushi, if it exists in the waking world!) The milk was excellent, though. And at least the sushi was free: the shopkeeper was giving away his leftovers to people taking the last train because otherwise he’d have had to throw it away.

This is the letter of which she said, in her letter to Athal, “there’s nothing in her letter that I haven’t said to you, except the kind of things I’d never say to you”. Well, in that case there’s a lot that she’d never say to him: things that make it PG-13 at least.

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She is writing to Moyri at last; including a small skillfully executed painting of flowers.

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Time: 1:40 (and 25 minutes for the 3rd and 6th Hour, during which people walked around doing things) Total: 6:20 (not counting the Hours)
Congregation: about 60; lots of children, some people from other parishes
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 men and 2 boys Choir: as large as it can be: 3 sopranos, 2 altos, 1 tenor and 2 basses.
Coordination: seamless
Tunefulness: very good
Knees: must have been okay because I didn’t notice
Voice: good
Strangeness: The fourteen-year-old acolyte was in red because he is too tall for any of the boys’ light-coloured sticharia, and not broad enough for any of the men’s gold ones (we have only two large white sticharia and the men were wearing them). The twelve-year-old was wearing the white sticharion made to his measure at Easter, which is now at least four inches too short.

Here is Archbishop Gabriel’s Christmas message (in English, with links to Russian, Dutch, Norwegian, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish and French). “A liturgical feast is not just a simple pious commemoration: it is an utterly concrete reality, transcending time, which is important for the salvation of each one of us.” —Amen, Vladyko.

Time: 2:35 Total: 4:40
Congregation: about 15, but most left after the Gospel and the blessing. I don’t know how many of those actually went on to the carol service in the Protestant church, which we’d started the service half an hour earlier for.
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 men and 1 boy. Choir: a full house! (2 sopranos, 2 altos, 1 tenor and 2 basses)
Coordination: mostly excellent
Tunefulness: good, especially the festive God is with us which Prima has a strong feeling of “I can do this!” about (and she can)
Knees: it wasn’t so much the knees acting up, but my left thigh and ankle, because after the Hours I slipped on some sand from the candle-stand cleaning and crashed to the floor. Nothing really hurt, but stiff and sore.
Voice: good
Strangeness: at the Litia, there’s a prayer asking for the intercession of a whole bunch of saints; when Fr T repeats it, he does it in Church Slavonic with a different bunch of saints, overlapping in part but not much.
Cuteness: the little girl who, realising that she wouldn’t get attention from her parents because they were both in the choir, snuggled up to her godmother. That’s what godparents are for, after all.

Here is an article about people in the United States who celebrate Christmas when it’s actually Christmas. (“The 12 days of Christmas begins, not ends, on Christmas Day.”) They’re mostly Protestants, celebrating “the arrival of the Magi at the manger in Bethlehem” when we celebrate the Theophany, but at least they do it the proper way. I wrote something to that effect once, mostly about Easter but Christmas comes into it as well.

Time: 2:05 Total: 2:05
Congregation: 4 (including the 2 children of someone in the choir)
Crew: Altar: Fr T (not actually in the altar) Choir: 3 (SAT)
Coordination: good enough, especially considering that this was the first time ever that we had this service.
Knees: normal
Voice: okay. I only got to read the 6th Hour, because there were five distinct bits (4 hours and Typika) and three of us taking turns reading, and I happened to be last.
Strangeness: we’d caught lots and lots of typos in the text (which was new, of course), and the only ones still there were in the Epistle of the 6th Hour. Three of them, and the last so hilarious that someone else had to take over from me because I was breaking down.

Every hour had one psalm that’s also in the non-Royal version and two different ones, making me pay attention more closely. What struck me most this time (it will probably be something else next time) was the cultural background: tribal, still almost barbaric. Particularly Psalm 44, which we usually have only isolated verses from. The king it describes, with his palace and his throng of women, is the material of a fantasy novel of a more mythical sort than I could write.

Here is a little thing in clumsy Javascript which picks a random pair out of the lists of Valdyan women’s and men’s names that I’ve given it. At least that’s what it does now; by the time you, dear reader, read this, it may have changed beyond recognition.

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It’s upon us again, and while it’s nice to see so many people in 19th-century clothing pass beneath our window I don’t want to go to the Bergkwartier, where it’s held. Too much waiting to get in: an hour and a half according to the local paper’s website, and there’s actually a kind of bridge that the people going in go under and the people going out go over, so I can believe that. Also, too much shuffling past pre-arranged events. While trying to reach the cheese shop I passed a gaggle of housemaids with brooms being placed in formation by someone who looked for all the world like a second-rate theatrical agent from a 1950s movie, cigar and all. The cheese shop wasn’t as busy as I’d feared; no more custom, according to the cheese men and women, than on a normal Saturday. Apparently, all the extra people in town don’t do their weekend shopping while they’re here.

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My favourite tree shrouded by mist. Here’s a bigger version of it in case anyone wants to use it as a background picture (I will, when I’ve cropped it to widescreen proportions).

The street is still being worked on, hence the wooden skirt the tree is wearing. It makes it wonderfully quiet (only residents are allowed through) and easy to cross at the bridge where it’s usually scary because cars tend to turn left without notice.

This is what the mist and the frost together did to a bit of spider-web on the bridge railing.

This other picture of it would be much cooler (not only cooler than it is, but also cooler than the other one) if the camera had wanted to focus on the right thing, confound it. Well, there’s a price to pay for carrying around a convenient little Praktica instead of a huge beast of a camera that can do everything.

After the Omnivore’s Hundred, Very Good Taste is at it again. I score a whopping 32, due to having spent two Christmases in England (one with a family who did all the traditional things, one with friends) and being in an international Orthodox parish, which takes care of all of Eastern Europe.

Here’s what to do:

1. Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2. Bold all the items you’ve tasted.
3. Place an asterisk after all the items you’ve cooked/prepared.
4. Optional: Cross out anything you never want to try, or add an exclamation mark after anything your really want to try.

You’re also welcome to post a link to your version of the list at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk.

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We have a nifty programmable phone that I’ve never managed to program, and two or three times this morning it rang at me very loudly in my hand, while I was trying to make a call, making me jump and shudder. Yes, phones do that to me, especially when it’s so close to my ear. I think I pressed the wrong button and hit “sound ring tone”, but I can’t be sure that it wasn’t someone trying to get hold of me.

This was in the course of spending literally the whole morning trying to phone the poulterer: three or four times redial every twenty minutes or so, trying to hit a gap in their engaged tone. Either everyone wants to order game or poultry for Christmas, or they had the phone off the hook. I didn’t think of going in person until it was too late to go in person, but I did realise eventually that they had a website (caution: some of it doesn’t like Konqueror, and a different some of it doesn’t like Firefox; I’d like to get my grubby little hands on the HTML) so probably also an email address. They did, and they promise on the site to answer mail in 24 hours, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they can’t be that fast at this time of year. But <phew>. Mail at least isn’t scary.

Thank you for making me laugh so much at the short curly-haired man who sat at the back-room table offering me “a complete business solution” including editing services. Editing, dear curly-haired man, is what my business is. And I did really mean it when I said “I’d like everybody to stay here”, also, or rather especially, the curly-haired man’s tall weedy sidekick called Atanasiy who was hovering in the kitchen door. If he’d wanted the toilet he should have said that and I’d have kept an eye on him, but I rather think he wanted to go upstairs to snoop, or perhaps to steal. And why did the curly-haired man ask whether “all three of us” (he had only seen Prima, not the other girls) stayed in every evening?

All that time, my other half was in the front room talking to the pension guy, and we had quite a good time (after I’d shooed the curly-haired man and Atanasiy out) having a drink with the pension guy and his wife. I don’t think we got the pension done, but that didn’t seem to be urgent.

Once again, I wonder whether I should put a disclaimer on my language pages: “Ilaini is an invented language. I’m not a professional linguist. This is play, not work. Please don’t try to use these pages as a scholarly source.” Because, more than ever, people are searching for “first and second person pronouns” in many variants.

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Eleventh week of Anshen, part I
Eleventh week of Anshen, part II

Lots of stuff is happening in the tail-end of the eleventh week, so Part III will come later.

From sciamanna; she mentioned it on IRC. I don’t have any one “my novel” at the moment —one fatally stalled, three in submisson-anxiety coma— but I’ll answer for A Voice from the North, colloquially known as “the Frozen North thing”.

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landaulet

It floated into my mind when I was half-awake at 5:45 or so, trying to ignore a headache and to visualise subtle shades of midnight blue because green made me queasy and red hurt too much. A parting shot of the dream engine, I suppose, at the tail-end of a jumble of stuff inspired by the Prisoner of Zenda movie we watched last night. A splendid movie: with effective deliberate over-the-topness and very true to the book.

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Here’s an update on the case of the teacher who confiscated Linux CDs, which I wrote about yesterday. It seems that she and her critic have come to an understanding.

Whenever I fast, my thyroid notices. It isn’t usually very active —that’s why I take synthetic thyroid hormone, and why I’d have died in my mid-thirties if I’d lived in the Middle Ages, or in Valdyas for that matter— but it does notice this kind of thing. I feel rotten for a few days and usually realise why on the second or third day. The first time it happened I ran to the doctor, who told me that all my blood-work was completely normal and congratulated me on my alertness. Apparently, my body doesn’t react to levels of <whatever> as such, but to the rather sudden return to normal as soon as the thyroid catches on.

This time it took my body five weeks, perhaps because I’m not keeping as strict a fast for Advent (lots of fish days this year!) as I usually do in Great Lent.

Anyway, it didn’t only make me feel rotten, it also made me hyperfocused, so when I set out to design a corporate website this morning and felt it had to have a mail form because mailto links are so unprofessional, I spent most of the rest of the day getting a mail form to work on my main web site, just for practice.

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Congratulations on being the first to cold-call my fledgling firm to propose a business solution. Unfortunately, I had to say “sorry, not interested”, and if you knew that the firm in question is at the moment €71,42 in the red you’d likely be “not interested” either. It’s true that I’ll be in the black again when the people I’ve just sent an invoice pay up, but I don’t expect to be more than a few hundred in the black any time soon.

Quite apart from that, I’ve been with Other Bank for thirty-mumble years and I see no reason to change. They’ve done some stupid things (does it really need a dozen notices to change the address of a family of five? do they really expect someone recently turned twelve, and addressed henceforth by you as Ms Initials Surname, to be interested in this great offer for a learn-to-play-with-money gadget aimed at seven-year-olds?) but they’ve never done anything bad to me on the banking front. If I do suddenly start earning great sums of money I may reconsider, and I may even end up with you (you seem to be an okay bank as such, and I understand all banks are a bit desperate at the moment), but your cold call did bump you to the bottom of the list.

I must concede, though, that you employ a higher class of call-center people than the run-of-the-mill ones who try to sell me double glazing or mortgages at 6:30 pm when I’m having dinner, even though I’m privately on the don’t-call list (note to self: find out if there is a business don’t-call list). That’s why I didn’t tell her “no, I’m unlikely to ever become interested in something that’s pushed over the phone”: she was far too nice and polite for that.

If this is true (and I’m afraid it is) it’s outrageous. Executive summary: teacher confiscates Linux CDs from student (US middle school, I think early teens) who was demonstrating and distributing to friends, and threatens with the law because “no software is free”. (Here’s a really sensible comment from a good teacher, by the way)

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…but designing a letterhead and an invoice form, setting up an accounts and hours-registration spreadsheet, and entering receipts and expenses and hours into the spreadsheet took me five hours in all. Which I entered on the hours-registration page of the spreadsheet under “firm: admin”, of course.

And now that I want to send an invoice I notice that there’s a (very small) bit of work that I could invoice as well, if I’d only done it; so I’m now going to do it so I can register my hours and write the invoice. I shouldn’t forget to send copies of the relevant tax documents either. Fortunately I thought of making the copies yesterday when I was copying other stuff anyway.

Note to self: scan, and perhaps PDF, all documents that it might be useful to send copies of to clients; it saves a trip to the copy shop. Also, the firm needs a ring-binder, perhaps two.

Another note to self: set aside half a day a week to be my own secretary. It seems to be harder to be one’s own secretary than to be someone else’s, but I think it’s just harder to start from scratch than to go by procedures that already exist.

Back when I was using KNode (the current incarnation of which is sadly in no state to be any use at all, or I’d try out of loyalty) I asked people who wanted me to edit their texts to send me .rtf files, because KOffice’s import filters were, to say it politely, rotten.

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While I was doing choir mailing list maintenance —deleting spam, that is; this is the small list on which I know everybody personally, not the big sprawling list with lots of members who tend to forget which of their accounts they’ve subscribed from— I noticed several messages purporting to come from the list itself. Now the list never sends anything by itself, it’s just a forwarding service for members’ messages, so any message from the list rather than a person must be spam. I thought I’d save myself some trouble, so I added the list address to the “Discards” filter.

Apparently, it’s not a “discard silently” filter. Every message it throws away, it notifies me of. And I get it in my mailbox with several layers of wrappers.

1. The spam handler notices that the message is in HTML and has some other points-scoring characteristics, and marks it as spam. It encapsulates it and sends it on to koor@valdyas.org, which is handled by Mailman.
2. Mailman knows that I’ve told it to discard anything from koor@valdyas.org and obligingly does so, sending koor-owner (who is me) an auto-discard notification with the message encapsulated.
3. The spam handler catches the auto-discard notification and notices that it’s mostly in HTML etcetera, and marks it as spam. It encapsulates it and sends it to koor-owner, that is, me.
4. The spam handler catches the message and notices… well, yes, that, and marks it as spam. It encapsulates it and sends it on.

I don’t really understand the last embedding: it seems to have gone through the spam handler twice. But it’s not the first time I’ve had the extra layer of encapsulation. Four is extreme, though.

Tenth week of Anshen.

I was already tired when the session started and it didn’t get much better (and then in the afternoon I had to give a talk to kids at a church meeting, but that went okay, they were cooperative). Nice stuff, though. Pictures behind the cut.

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He’s really become a much milder man in Turenay. Exactly whose good influence that is I can’t say, but it’s probably a concerted effort by Ysella, Cora and Anshen.

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Here, too, babies trump spies.

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That Lyan didn’t say anything about the dandar was pure GM oversight, not any shortcoming of Lyan’s. [ETA:Or, as Raisse’s player said, perhaps he’ll want to wait until after Midsummer.] I hope I’ll remember next time so the queen won’t stop working with him!

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Ondernemingshuis, “Enterprise House”

The statue in front is “Ainsi soit-elle” by Maïté Duval. Here’s a larger picture of it.

Yesterday I went to Apeldoorn and registered with the trade chamber (Kamer van Koophandel).

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More .msv files, a pair this time, so I grumblingly started Vista and set out to convert them. Failure! The free version of Switch works for only X days, for a smallish value of X. They didn’t tell me that, only that it wasn’t full-featured (and it did have the one feature I wanted). Fortunately, my other half was at home and found Digital Voice Editor for me, which converts .msv to .mp3 under Wine though it complains volubly about not being able to play sound and having trouble with my operating system. Twenty times as fast —literally! less than a minute— as Switch too. Fortunately, Express Scribe under Wine doesn’t seem to to have expired. Otherwise I’d have to do it with Amarok which can’t slow fast-talking Malaysians down.

In other news, it turns out that for working freelance in the Netherlands one needs to be registered, and for registering as a freelancer one has to be a firm; so next Wednesday I’ll go to Apeldoorn and incorporate myself. I spent three hours this morning figuring out how to go about it, struggling through kilometers of red tape, and finally registering with the tax office. How the bleep do I know how many clients I’m going to have, when I’m just starting out? Do they really require me to have three or more clients in 2008 when I started in November and didn’t even know there was work waiting for me before October? How do I estimate what I’ll earn and which is worse, overestimating or underestimating?

At least, when I’m a firm, I’ll be able to buy tax-deductible headphones and a corporate bicycle.

Ninth week of Anshen (including part of the tenth week). It’s Part 20 already!

All the supermarkets are playing St.Nicholas songs instead of their usual muzak.

All the supermarkets appear to have the same tape sung by a very off-key children’s choir— no, they’re not very off-key, they’re subtly, annoyingly off-key, which is worse.

They’ve set all the songs to straight 4/4 time arrangements, even the ones that aren’t. That is even more annoying than the off-keyness: instead of this
[ETA: sheet music]

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A while ago I made custom 403, 404 and 410 pages for my web site, each with a background picture of the numbers in faint green. They worked when I put them up, but last week when I wanted to show one of the pages to someone (one never sees one’s own error pages, right?) the picture was gone. And from the other error pages too.

I didn’t remember having changed anything— not to those pages. Not to the relevant rules in the stylesheet either. I had changed some other stuff in the stylesheet, but poring over it with Kate’s excellent syntax highlighting would have uncovered the most elusive missing colon or curly bracket so it couldn’t very well have been that.

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What the celebrities use I wouldn’t know— the message, in triplicate, was spam and I threw all three of them away immediately. Probably a remedy for “ED dysfunction”. I never tire of pointing out that if a remedy for ED dysfunction works, it will leave you with functioning ED, and that’s probably not what people want to achieve. (Yes, I know that it’s probably a case for the Department of Redundancy Department, like Bengloarafurd Ford.)

But it did make me think. Celebrities don’t usually impress me, at least not the mere fact that someone is a celebrity. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the Netherlands called “BN’ers”, Bekende Nederlanders (Well-Known Dutchpeople) who seem to be known only for being well-known: TV starlets, featherweight singers, footballers’ girlfriends, all of whom I can joyfully ignore because I don’t follow the media much.

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From Jay. It has only a minimal overlap (food/snacks) with the four things meme I posted in December 2007.

I’m being elaborate on a meme that seems to call for brevity, but I don’t care.

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He wasn’t exactly late, but took a lot of game time coming!

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Raisse’s player writes:

Raisse blindly assumes that she is doing Moyri a favour by finding a replacement and that Moyri sees it the same way. If she ever thought about that consciously that may change. Probably because she is concerned for Moyri’s health and does not want her friend sacrificing it for her benefit.

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Someone sent me a .msv file to transcribe and edit. To start with, it wasn’t easy for them to send it— it took me hours of troubleshooting my KMail installation, and the mail server, and the spam handler, until I finally gave up and told them to send it to my gmail address. Only to find that in all probability they’d misunderstood Secunda on the phone and tried, three times, to send the file to my address with a letter missing. (The gmail message had the old message headers embedded in tiny letters, or I’d never have known.)

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Wednesday evening, 20:00, about to serve pumpkin and coconut soup.

Phone: Ring, ring! It’s the art-class teacher. “Am I right that you were going to sit tonight?” Me: “Isn’t that tomorrow?” Him: “Yes, but tonight as well.” Well, it wasn’t on my schedule (we still don’t know which of us made the mistake) but it’s only five minutes away, so I grabbed a piece of bread, admonished the family to save me some soup, and wasn’t much more than half an hour late for the lesson.

Only five people there, most of them old acquaintances; a bit of chaos from the chaotic start, but that wasn’t at all unpleasant. Only, when I got home I was too tired for anything except sipping a glass of wine and reading Golden Ashes (a great find from the 25-cent bin of one of the local second-hand bookshops). Oh, and eating pumpkin and coconut soup, of course.

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Seventh week of Anshen, part II. In which she gets chicken pox, poor girl, but not until she’s had her wedding party.

I approve wholeheartedly of the technique to get instantaneously to any place by dreaming of it and waking up there. But it did land me in Copenhagen with no cash at all and only 50 euros in the bank (which, usefully, I could see on the screen of my mobile phone, green on black like an old Hercules monitor). And when I discovered that it could be done with a web page too, and demonstrated that to someone, I ended up outside Copenhagen on the site of a news item, in a field, without a computer or any other means to get back except my own feet. This made me arrive after midnight and miss the last train.

Fortunately, the nice woman at the post office let me have 1,50 euros to phone my mother (who, in waking reality, died ten years ago this month) in exchange for about a foot of sticky tape— I gave her the rest of the roll, too, because I had nothing to cut it with.

I could conceivably have taken a plane home —the post office had some on offer— but the 50 euros sort of precluded that. When looking at plane schedules and prices I realised that the man and woman behind the counter, who I had been conversing with in a mixture of their barely adequate English and my (realistically) very inadequate Danish, were actually speaking Dutch with one another; as were the various gaudily dressed fat middle-aged women in the street, obviously well-to-do tourists.

I did get back eventually— by waking up again.

I swear on Queen Alyse’s grave that I didn’t know this.

Well, perhaps I did pick it up somewhere along the way when reading linguistics under the table in boring geography classes (or above the table in boring English classes; my teacher encouraged it as long as my grades stayed above 8-out-of-10 and what I read was in English) but it wasn’t a conscious choice, unlike orla “eagle” which I borrowed shamelessly from Church Slavonic because it analysed perfectly in Ilaini as “grand master bird” or “magic bird”.

But if I’d been aware of this connotation, I’d probably have gone out of my way to call him something else.

I’ve heard the Resurrection Gospels so often that I practically know them by heart, but now Prima stands next to me on the choir platform and that seems to make me notice different things. Today: clueless disciples.

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If Barack Obama wins the election —which I sincerely hope— he will be the first president of the United States who is younger than I am. That’s truly a sign of advancing age: that it’s not only doctors and police(wo)men who are younger than oneself, but also presidents of the United States. And when Queen Beatrix retires, the king as well.

On the upside, he will be the first president of the United States I’m conscious of who isn’t an old white man. Though technically Bill Clinton wasn’t old either: almost a year younger than Obama when he was elected. (This surprised me a bit when I looked it up.) But older than me, at the time, and undeniably white.

In fact, this post is in the first place an excuse to link to slacktivist’s post about bigotry and stupidity which everybody ought to read.

Seventh week of Anshen. Lots of work for Cora!

Another letter dictated to Kare— respecting his sensibilities at one point.

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Sixth week of Anshen.

She doesn’t have much time for her notebook any longer, being married and apprenticed, but she’s still trying to keep up.

An art class with a lot of beginners (and a few old hands). Some were real newbies. Beautiful things were made. The overall theme seemed to be ‘landscape’— even the sitting and standing positions got landscapey elements. Also, proud breasts, perhaps because I’d just had the all-clear letter from the mammogram people.

After the cut: full frontal, dorsal and lateral nudity. Net nannies, please leave here.

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Well, I know where this one lives; let’s see if his humans read my blog and claim their dozen cupcakes.

The sign on the door says “Black tomcat at the door? Please don’t ring the bell!” and yes, he was very insistent.

I don’t remember seeing a 503 in the wild before, but today I had this one from the local paper:

Bad Gateway
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
Apache/2.0.46 (Red Hat) Server at www.destentor.nl Port 80

Nice to know that the local paper uses Linux. And when I tried again some time later it wasn’t more forthcoming with the article, but it did give more information:

HTTP Status 503 - Too many incoming HTTP requests
type Status report
message Too many incoming HTTP requests
description The requested service (Too many incoming HTTP requests) is not currently available.
Apache Tomcat/5.0.28

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Also, there’s a new piece of notebook: the fifth week of Anshen. The first four weeks Cora was on holiday and wrote hardly anything at all.

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Still in Veray:

• End of 12th week of Timoine
• Beginning of 13th week of Timoine

From Penelope Trunk, via Jay.

Here be questions!

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79 words

What the site told me apart from giving me the badge was more informative:

318 points, so you achieved position 64188 of 844040 on the ranking list

You type 846 characters per minute
You have 79 correct words and
you have 3 wrong words

I used to be a very fast typist when I was temping as a student— about 600 cpm on an electric machine. And my laptop has a very nice keyboard, so I’m not surprised at having become faster.

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I saw yet another striped cat but it wouldn’t stop to be photographed. I actually know where both of these live (the one on the left had an address tag on her collar and the one on the right is the cat from the shop).

If you’re one of these cats’ humans, please send me mail with your street address to claim your dozen cupcakes. New flavour: orange chocolate.

Lots of people including Fr T being in Oxford for exchange with our sister parish, we had to do it ourselves. And “ourselves”, in the choir at least, were only Prima and me. I’d promised her she could sing if either there were only the two of us or other people turned up and agreed.

Congregation: 7 people at Vespers, briefly 8 at the beginning of Matins, 3 after the Gospel, 2 at the end. Not counting the very skimpy choir.
Crew: 2, fortunately both alto.
Coordination: Excellent! Prima read a prayer and a psalm (long; it was Psalm 88) very competently, and the unison Doxology actually went better than at the Afterfeast of the Dormition; perhaps because we’ve been practicing it a bit in the choir. I told Prima “this is really hard, though it doesn’t look it” so she was warned, and we carried it off adequately.
Voice: An annoying frog in my throat, especially when reading, but being able to sing the whole service at my natural pitch helped a lot.
Strangeness: from the end of the Canon until the end of the service, it was completely a family affair: me and all my daughters.

And this is the prettiest place within 2 minutes’ walk: a fenced-off alley leading to a storage shed that can’t be in use, or the ivy wouldn’t be so abundant.

Beautiful balmy autumn weather, and Secunda and I decided to go through the little island park on our way home from the shops instead of the and more boring long way round. She spotted the chicks (with their mother, here is a larger picture) and I saw a duck that was more interestingly pretty than the standard pond ducks. It was youngish, full-sized but still without its pinions, and walked away quacking indignantly when I’d taken some pictures of it.

I’ve been hanging out on #kde-www for a while, and today we had a real meeting “to determine some future goals for the porting of kde.org and its sub domains over to a CMS system and also on the future of open collaboration services within the KDE online community”.

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It’s cruel of you to force me to make my mental image of Valdis conform to the map of Haarlem, even if you give me four gold rings (well, three; one was my own wedding ring, though I could take it off easily which isn’t the case with the real one) to represent various features of it. Especially as you, or rather your henchpeople, weren’t exactly clear about which side of the river railway in Haarlem you meant to project Valdis on. You of all entities should be aware that Valdis, unlike Haarlem, is on both sides of a river. That you did it just before waking made it extra cruel, because it pushed my ‘redo frantically’ button hard and made me wake up with a headache— or perhaps the headache was already lurking and that pushed the button.

That said, I was very pleased that a couple who I know only online turned out to be breathtakingly beautiful, especially in their wedding picture, and made me determined to have it printed large and glossy and made into a jigsaw puzzle to give them for their anniversary. On the other hand, I’m still puzzled by the charge of twenty-five cents on top of the three euros fifty I already paid for cutting the key to enhance it to +1, and why did the checkout girl giggle so?

ETA: dream captcha to keep your dreams free of spam.

I thought I’d run out of local cats to photograph, but this one was new for me (and also slightly new to the world: born last spring, I think).

If you’re this cat’s human and you’d like to taste my newest cupcake discovery (almond and date), please mail me your street address and I’ll deliver them.

Trying to get my custom 404 page to work (yes, it works now) once again, I ran once again into the thickets of the Apache server configuration. Try as I might I didn’t know how to get it to understand that, yes, I have a .htaccess file and yes, I do want you to read it and do what it says. I found myself running in the exact same circles as the first time around.

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Thirteenth week of Timoine, Part II and Part III.

Long, lazy summer days, not much happening but nice atmosphere and cute children.

Next time you serve me three different threads, do it in three nights, pretty please? I’d have liked to be able to keep my promise to the ghouls, because (for ghouls) they were very nice and civilised, but I had to call Lord Vurian to do it for me because I was on my way to Trier with Secunda on Secunda’s bicycle. Anyway, it wasn’t Trier at all, but a dream-version of Zeist, even though it had whopping big signs saying something Latin starting with C which I recognised as the name of a suburb of Trier. And I got only the merest glimpse of Mary’s new roleplaying system with a very eclectic questionnaire as character sheet, but, well, I had to go back and attend to the ghouls.

This Gospel reading has always made me angry, because of verses 29-30, “from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away”— that seemed like the worst imaginable injustice. But today the penny dropped: there is absolutely nobody who doesn’t have anything at all, only some people who refuse to recognise, and to use, what they do have.

I wanted to teach little kids’ church-school about it, but half of my pupils were going to Children’s Book Festival (which I approve of) so I put it off until next week.

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When everybody was writing letters she was griping that it was no use trying to get a letter to Iss-Peran, but Cora suggested that she write to her brother the king.

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I’ve been wanting search functionality for the website as well as the blog for a while, and I couldn’t get the blog search widget to work on other pages than blog pages— after all, I don’t know any Perl yet. I was just about to teach myself Perl in order to write a search widget when I happened to mention it in alt.html and someone suggested using Google Custom Search or Atomz.

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Last Sunday, when I had too much of a cold to go to church, the choir was only two sopranos and a tenor: neither of the basses could make it either. Last night, at choir practice, they not only told me they’d missed me, but demonstrated how: they’d had no fundament.

I’ve been told before that I “keep the choir together”, but I never believed it, just acknowledged it as a compliment, perhaps even a left-handed one: not much quality of my own, I’m just the glue. Now I know how. Even if I am just the glue, without that it’s in danger of falling apart. Not that I think I’m indispensable, they did do well enough without me and I don’t think many people noticed, but it’s a nice feeling to be really useful.

After that, we spent most of the practice session working out different ways to cope with incomplete choirs: the bass and I singing melody with the tenor a third above us (in an absolute sense a sixth below me, but it doesn’t sound that way), to which the choirmistress said “you’re doing better than we did!”, various configurations of three parts, ways to fix an awkward pitch that the priest hands to us. Enlightening, bracing, fun.

At last! It’s 4.1.2. And I like it a lot, in spite of all the grumbling after the cut; but the grumbling is mostly because I like it. If I hated it, I wouldn’t grumble, but stop trying to get used to it and go back to 3.5 instanter. And if I was indifferent, the little irritations wouldn’t irritate so much.

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He’s really spent his journey recovering. “Ilenay” is completely the creation of my other half (who wrote this); it’s perfect!

(I didn’t know the sword-breaking was intentional, by the way; I thought it was just a lucky, er, break)

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(Not sure whether to put this in ‘turenay’ where it originates, or in ‘valdis’ where it ends up, so it’s one category higher up)

This session was mostly to give some closure for Moryn, and to let Cora meet Ysella. It proved very effective, though Ysella (and/or her player) would have liked more time. Curse the Dutch Railways for making the last train go at 23:15.

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Raisse wanted Athal’s approval for getting to know the law professor better; after all, he is in the Guild of the Nameless. Athal approves whole-heartedly, but he does want to meet him in person and to that end will give an informal dinner party for all of the professors. Not that he doesn’t already know the four who were given to him, of course.

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In front of the clothes shop next to the little supermarket I went to because I didn’t want to get wet yet again, cold and all, I saw this:

(thanks, anonymous harpist!)

Playing Greensleeves and other tinkly music of that sort, very melodiously and with obvious dedication and enjoyment.

I stood listening for quite some time, put some money in her hat, and asked if I could take a picture to put on my blog. She said yes. Sadly, I forgot to ask her name.

If this is you and you happen to be reading this, or it’s not you but you happen to know how to contact her, could you drop me a line, please?

The cryptic title will become clear towards the end…

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Now, of course, I find that the design breaks anyway in Firefox because it doesn’t like non-floated and floated pictures side by side. And I don’t want to make the text and the picture one picture, because the text should stay in the middle of its box and the picture shouldn’t leave its position on the right.

And why the text heading shows up with a grey background is a mystery. [ETA: that mystery solved: somehow blosxom thought the heading of the previous article was part of the header; when I let the header inherit the body background, as it ought to, the text heading inherited the div background. Ah well.]

Back to the drawing board once again.

[ETA: made the text-like object float left as a kludge. Don’t make your window too narrow.]

Several people told me that the letters of the subheading were falling out of the header, especially with larger text and/or narrow windows. Making it specialised <h1> without bottom padding and <h2> without top padding instead of <h1> with <br> and a smaller-type <span> fixed part of the problem— Konqueror and Firefox keep <br>-ed text together, with the padding all around the whole thing, Safari puts padding between the lines too. But still the tail of the ‘g’, and especially of the ‘p’, crept into the article space. The header needed to be 200px high because of the picture, so I couldn’t very well let the padding take care of it.

“Make the text a picture too,” my other half suggested. I must admit that I’d thought of that, but I’m usually against pictures-of-text where actual text will do: I feel it’s something that bad (incompetent, not evil) or lazy web designers do. But after some thought I gave in: the heading is now a picture of the previous heading at its best, set on a background of the same colour (#d2cfd8, which I called “ingridgrijs” in kcoloredit), centered in its <div id=”header”> so it stays neatly in the middle on a wider screen. The overall design still breaks at large font sizes —the text runs into the sidebar— but I’ll fix that when I run out of other things to do.

(Also, if you don’t have URW Chancery or Zapf Chancery but rely on your generic cursive font for text headings, the font won’t match; sorry about that. I’ll fix that when font-embedding technology comes of age.

Art class at the Kunstlokaal yesterday, the first (for me) of a new season. I knew about half the students from previous years (Gilles, for one). Of the rest, one was new enough to be uncertain about the actual drawing, but fortunately not about me-in-the-nude. (Strange: I’m not self-conscious at all about being naked in front of a small crowd, but for undressing and dressing I’m glad of the screen; it seems that most models are like that.)

The task set was not just to make a ‘boring’ model-and-background drawing, but to think outside the box: add something unusual, tweak the setting, or make a cutout of only a small part. This last indirectly inspired my blog makeover.

Pictures (commented) after the cut.

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A plethora of cats this time. Two in the town centre (in fact in the same street), two in the “old shell”, the town’s pre-WWII expansion.

The orange tomcat ran up to me on my way to sit for the art class, saying “mrowowow!” and wanting to be petted, not to have his picture taken. Here are the previous efforts, unedited except for resizing:

			(click on the thumbnails for a larger picture)

I still want to bake cupcakes and bring them to your house and pet your cat! Please send me a mail message with your street address.

Here’s the new episode, taking place in Veray. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of all the NPC hangers-on, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.

It all started with the picture at the top right. One of the students in the art class I was sitting for made it, and as I was taking a photograph of it I thought “I want that as an avatar!” But, come to think of it, I don’t currently do much that I need an avatar for, so I’m using it for the blog. It looks much more like me than any photograph I can find: my back and shoulders are quite unmistakable. Thanks, Ingrid!

This morning, instead of going to church —because it was clear that the family cold had caught up with me, my throat didn’t want to sing and my head didn’t want the company of lots of people— I sat down and revamped the whole thing, as I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

I’m still working on a calendar (I do have a plugin that sort of works, but it refused to go back neatly to the page it came from so I got URLs like http://www.valdyas.org/foundobjects/index.cgi/2007/church/2006/, and generated single-article pages without the breadcrumb trail that I’d just been tweaking to look the way I wanted) and on an atom feed to keep the outdated rss 1.0 feed company. Also, I haven’t done the comments page yet, but <sob> I get hardly any comments anyway.

(And just now my other half shows me the page in Safari, where the sub-heading falls out of the header; back to the drawing board!) [ETA: fixed that —the fix is more elegant anyway]

Note: the blog is optimised for Konqueror only. It’s such a personal thing that I think I’m entitled. If you’re an IE user and you think it looks rotten, I recommend upgrading to Firefox; that doesn’t have as pretty a cursive font as Konqueror or Safari, but it was good enough when I looked at it.

For reference: Petrus en Paulus nieuws. If you want to follow what I’ve been doing you may want to open it in a new window, but that should be your choice, not mine.

A while ago the webmaster of another parish sent me, as webmistress of our parish, his changed link. I took the opportunity to check everything on the links page while I was working on it anyway. Several parishes, for some reason mostly in Belgium, turned out to have their website set up as a blog. At first it seemed strange, but it sort of grew on me, and eventually I thought “I can do that too!”

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Someone in Romania googled for ‘lionel rychie’ and, because I have a Useless Blob called Lionel (warning: he’s jumping up and down), and there’s someone called Rychie Korbes in Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, and valdyas.org has a whoppingly high page-rank, the third entry on the results page pointed to the Hans Brinker names deconstruction.

Which the person from Romania proceeded to let Google translate into Romanian.

I happen to be able to read a little Romanian— just enough to see that the English-Romanian Google translation is as hilarious as the Dutch-English one, but not enough to actually correct anything (as I’ve done with other pages of mine that I noticed people had had translated). The universal translator is a long way off yet.

Google does ask “Did you mean: lionel richie” which is probably what the person from Romania was looking for.

To get Rychie Veray (a town: Veray-on-the-Rycha) instead of Rychie Korbes (a girl probably called Rietje) one has to search for ‘lionel rychie veray’, and there’s only one hit for that— well, four if you let it show all the variants. Which is strange, because the Rychie Veray post is much more recent and has been read much more.

This, unlike the previous one, is the answer to the Queen’s letter. Here are the same events related in Cora’s notebook.

She spells “Ceti”, making it plausible that Valdyans will pronounce it with a palatalised /kj/ because /e/ in Ilaini is quite far forward and tends to have that effect; rather like Italian chiesa.

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Gospel of the 14th Sunday after Pentecost:

Matthew 22:1 And Jesus answered and spoke to them again by parables and said: “The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who arranged a marriage for his son, and sent out his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding; and they were not willing to come. Again, he sent out other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, “See, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and fatted cattle are killed, and all things are ready. Come to the wedding.”’ But they made light of it and went their ways, one to his own farm, another to his business. And the rest seized his servants, treated them spitefully, and killed them. But when the king heard about it, he was furious. And he sent out his armies, destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy. Therefore go into the highways, and as many as you find, invite to the wedding.’ So those servants went out into the highways and gathered together all whom they found, both bad and good. And the wedding hall was filled with guests.
11 “But when the king came in to see the guests, he saw a man there who did not have on a wedding garment. So he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
14 “For many are called, but few are chosen.”

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This letter was in a sealed wrapper with the following text in both Ilaini and trade Iss-Peranian:

To Alysei Athal astin Velain, king of Valdyas, in Valdis. Into his own hands only.

If you can open the seals on this letter leaving it intact and in a state to be read, you are either King Athal and perfectly justified to do so, or you are a spy of much more ability than is fitting for spies and you would do well to report to the King so he can take you into his service. I think, however, that the latter case will not occur.

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Cora —it’s fitting to spell her name as she’s taken to spelling it herself— wrote this before getting the queen’s letter.

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A friend of ours moved to Germany, just across the border. He can still come to church and sing in the choir: there are people in the parish who live in the Netherlands but are farther away.

His house has an orchard. Last year he had a glut of plums and brought bags full to choir practice to give to whoever wanted them (and I had a lot of yummy plum jam!) and this year it was apples.

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They sent a very fast messenger with it and it arrived just in time: she’s about to leave for Veray. Athal had fun preparing the kingly proclamation!

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The old black-and-white cat in the market wouldn’t part from my backpack. The young orange one in the new not-quite-finished shopping mall was eating someone’s discarded lunch.

I’ve never been able to distribute cupcakes for cats’ humans yet, but the offer is still valid: please send me mail with your street address.

… what if all those people who have been finding my web pages by searching for linguistic terms (“nouns and adjectives”, “noun classes”, “relative and reflexive pronouns”) really think it’s an official, scholarly linguistics site? About a language spoken by real live Earth humans? Should I put a disclaimer on every Ilaini page, making it clear that it’s an invented language?

It’s probably an effect of our absurdly high page-rank, which is itself an effect of my other half’s exploits in the KDE community. Whatever people search for that happens to be somewhere on our pages, valdyas.org is likely to turn up on at most the second page.

Eleventh week of Timoine, part II.

Sometimes Khora’s thinking is so alien to me, and yet so plausible, that it seems that all the Valdyans are wrong and should take a leaf out of her book. For instance, about the king’s and Aidan’s sister Ayneth:

She seems very strange to me: she told me she “sneaked away from Valdis” without even taking her leave of the King and Queen. Which also means she did not carry any letters for us! The princess has governed the Kingdoms for Athal when Athal was in Iss-Peran, and perhaps that has tired her out. Whether that is because woman should not govern, or whether it is because she has no husband, and the care of a country is big to carry when one does not have a husband or wife to share the burden with, I do not know.

(In fact she did take her leave of the King and Queen: as soon as she was sure that everything would go right without her she said to them “you can manage, can’t you? I’m off to Turenay, then”. They weren’t writing letters to anyone yet at the time, or she’d have carried them.)

And yes, she was fed up with the regency, and glad to be able to go where she was about to go when she was suddenly called to be regent. Otherwise she’d have gone with Radan, almost two years ago. Now she is indeed tired, not because women shouldn’t govern, or because she has no husband (or wife, indeed; she does have a lover, who is away to the war— it’s the baroness of Lenay); just because she’s nineteen, and was inexperienced when she started, and though she’s a good organiser, organising full-time for a year and a half does tend to wear one out. What she needs is a few solid weeks of no responsibility at all, after which she’ll be so bored that she is bound to think of some undertaking. Perhaps we can have her set up a mail system.

This spans two game sessions, split in the middle of the dinner party.

Here is the letter Serla found (PDF)

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We had to stop in the middle of a scene, but that was Moyri’s scene anyway (that’s why there’s no companion piece from Moyri yet: it will be two parts in one).

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Father T being in Paris with the younger acolytes so they get the chance to serve in the cathedral, we had Father M, our junior priest. He’s been trained in the Serbian church, but recently joined our exarchate and is serving as Fr T’s apprentice. He hasn’t often celebrated the Liturgy on his own yet, perhaps not ever before today.

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This letter was sent a few days after Khora’s and Aidan’s letters.

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Part 8, 11th week of Timoine.

I should really write some longer stuff in order not to look like a Twitter feed, but (quite apart from Real Life and roleplaying) I’m restyling the Ilaini grammar pages and that’s sort of labour-intensive. It does me teach lots of CSS: spiffy table-styles for all occasions.

Also, I’ve been trying to get search working on the webpage, but all I’ve been able to do is make an index, not access it once it was there. Ah well, first things first. In the meantime, if you want to find something, try adding site:valdyas.org/irina to an ordinary Google search.

Here’s part 7 (the first lot was 1 to 6):

Khora’s notebook: tenth week of Timoine.

ETA: now it works. At least it went to the index earlier, not to nowhere.

With the new web design it was easy to stick a statcounter on every page. I’m surprised that my website gets about three times as many hits as my blog (but that won’t keep me from blogging).

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Here is the notebook that Khora has been writing since she started working at the hospital in the second week after the Feast of Timoine. When she writes more, I’ll add it to that page (but notify of it here).

I’m not blogging about headscarves today, but if I were, I wish I’d written this post by Monica. (Except that she likes rock and reggae, and I like folk and renaissance and boogie-woogie; and that I suspect she covers her head full-time whereas I do it only in church)

Both Raisse and Moyri are so pregnant that the adventure has to come to their door…

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I applaud your efforts to emulate a full-blown dream server by giving me something so intricate that my brain parsed it as tabbed browsing.

One tab with adventures at the harbour, one with diplomacy in the palace, and one with a meal at a high-class restaurant, to change between at will.

The fourth tab, a little office to administer all that, was a brilliant idea of yours. Pity that that was the place where the alarm went off, too, so I never learnt whether we caught the villain, how successful the negotiations were, and what we had for dessert.

But well, one can’t have everything.

Prima and I took this one. Splendid weather, so we expected quite a lot of visitors, but only 42 came— we were tempted to stay open longer to catch another 8, but we had to admit we were both too tired. We’d been sensible enough to bring work: she her Latin and Greek and I my webpage redesign.

No strange questions this time, except from the man who, when I’d explained about the early history of our exarchate, asked “and what does the Pope think about that?” He honestly thought we were a breakaway branch of Rome. I said that the Pope could think whatever he liked, but it was none of our business, and I had to explain all over again (this time starting much earlier in history).

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These last few days the universe has been serving me birds, not cats. Pictures behind the cut.

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Note the photographer’s reflection in the one on the right. One in the town centre, one in a shopping street just outside it.

As before, there are cupcakes for these cats’ humans: all it needs is a mail message with your street address.

This was very hard for Aidan to write. The first draft had at least as many struck-out words as Khora’s letter, but he copied this one, wearing out his pen altogether. It’s a good thing goose-quills are cheaper than Iss-Peranian brushes!

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It’s no longer an old website with some new material, but a new website with some old material.

Today I did all the roleplaying writeups and some of the Ilaini stuff, strewed the site liberally with redirection pointers (not nearly enough, I fear; what I want is a couple of custom 404 pages but I can’t figure out how to make the apache server believe that) and made a sitemap with everything already updated or, like the Purplish Cooking Pages, not to be updated any time soon. Then I checked all the links and permissions in my local mirror and —wait for it— removed the old page before putting up the new to avoid duplication.

38 folders and 290 files instead of the previous 41 folders and 345 files. I did notice the discrepancy, but thought that some of the files had still been in their old place as well as in their new place.

Then I went to fix all the permissions that fish had apparently screwed up. And found that all my roleplaying writeups were gone, which I’d just been spending half a day working on, and worse, of which there was now not a single copy within my reach except on paper. Somewhere along the line I’d copied an incomplete version over a complete one.

But Google was my friend! I could salvage everything from its cache <whew>. Now I only have to do the restyling again and write a new index page, which is a doddle compared to what it could have been.

Or rather, she dictates to Aidan, because she’s overstretched herself and that wreaks havoc with her coordination.

That her mother is called Dushtan, like the king’s Síthi doctor, makes one think that there’s Síthi blood in Khora’s ancestry; either that or it’s one of those names that span half a world.

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If my grandfather was still alive, he’d be a hundred and twenty today. In fact he died in the summer of 1968 when I was ten and he just short of eighty.

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She’s writing to her friend’s father, who is a Síthi doctor turned fisherman after emigrating to Valdyas. The style is the best court Síthi she can manage. I’ve left all her spelling of names intact, as it’s caused by the nature of the Síthi script. ‘Maylle’ probably spells her own name ‘Maile’ (and, being a native of Ryshas, pronounces it [‘ma:le:], no diphthong there at all. It’s a very common name in all Valdyas, and the pronunciation varies in every region: someone from Essle would pronounce it rather like US, not UK, ‘Molly’). The kh in ‘Kheti’ may simply be a matter of a few hundred years of language change, ‘Keti’ being the modern form.

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I’ve started refurbishing my web pages at long last. Already done at the time of this post:

• home page
• FAQ (also with some new questions and answers)
• Valdyas index page
• the fun grammar-example pages:
• The old woman without a stick
• The people who didn’t go to the market
• The prince who turned into a frog

I’m learning a lot of new CSS tricks. And, if I may say so myself, it’s pretty. It does make me think that the blog is too blue, but I don’t want to think of a new style for it while I’m constantly making little tweaks to the style of the web pages.

These days, now that everybody in the house can understand English, we don’t watch English films with Dutch subtitles so often any more, but whenever we do there are always a couple that make me shake my head and say “I can do better!”

And I got a chance to do better: two videos made, and subtitled in English, by a friend who works at a university library in New Zealand.

It was fun, easier than I’d thought (dotsub has a good user interface, though it’s confusing that you get to the next input box with Enter, not with Tab) and I think they’re pretty decent. I want more! If anybody reading this has a video in English or German that needs a Dutch translation (or a video in Dutch that needs an English translation, for that matter) don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

(Note: Moyri’s posts are written by Boudewijn)

It was very good to see Moyri again— and I-the-GM wasn’t the only one who thought that. She’s very pregnant, though only six months gone; but she’s tiny and it’s twins. What makes her so easily tired and short of breath is likely to be an atrial septal defect, a “hole in the heart”.

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Another installment of Town Centre Cat Blogging. The one on the right is the image of Hendrik, except younger and thinner.

As before, if you happen to be one of these cats’ human, please send me a message with your street address and I’ll bake you a dozen cupcakes of your choice.

Again, it’s the other Raisse, grand master in charge of the Guild of Anshen in Turenay. She needs a runner, and she’s married to one, but he’s far away.

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Raisse’s last entry in this series. She is staying on for another arc, so we won’t have to miss her; Athal is back to NPC, and off to Aumen Síth about a year from now.

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Congregation: between 15 and 30 at various points in the service. Several people left during Matins when they realised there was no priest.
Crew: Nobody here but us chickens: 1 alto, 1 tenor and for slightly more than half the time 1 (mezzo-)soprano. Some of the singing went very well, especially after the soprano had turned up: notably the Beatitudes. That setting is in fact better without a bass than with one.
Coordination: good; joins between parts were seamless, intonation was decent.
Voice: adequate, except from the Doxology at the end of Matins until the Second Antiphon in Typika when someone was smoking outside in front of the open doors and the smoke found its way to the choir and immediately got on my throat.
Strangeness: Last week, just after the outbreak of war in Georgia, there were neither Georgians nor Russians in church; this week, now that things seem to have settled down a bit, there were both Georgians and Russians. I think they all stayed home last week to avoid embarrassment, because of course they have nothing against each other even though their countries are at war.

In Psalm 62 (Western 63), one of the Six Psalms at the beginning of Matins, verse 10 reads in our Dutch translation, translated again: “They will be subject to the violence of the sword; foxes will prey on them”; I’ve been thinking for weeks that it would be more likely to be “jackals” in the Middle East, and anyway foxes prefer fresh meat unless carrion is all they can get, so they’d be unlikely to prowl a battlefield. Today I looked up the verse in the New King James version, and indeed, “They shall fall by the sword; they shall be a portion for jackals.”

Here’s a list of a hundred things that Andrew of Very Good Taste thinks every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. My score is 62, and some of the things I haven’t tried are for lack of opportunity rather than lack of adventurousness.

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If you happen to be the human belonging to either of these cats, please send me a message with your street address and I’ll bake you a dozen cupcakes.

The little white cat in the window we saw today, looking down on the antique market and generally being very cute. Here’s a closer view:

Disclaimer: if you’ve come here from either of my relevant mailing lists —you know who you are— and you disagree, please argue here, not there. I don’t want to cause conflict in a safe venue. Also, I’m not seeking debate, I only want to put my thoughts in order and vent them.

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Being in love makes him poetic!

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It’s clear that Keti is used to much more flowery language than Ebru lets her write: she translates stock phrases literally.

‘Turenay’ happens to mean ‘bath-town’, called after the medicinal springs and bath-houses; ‘ver-’ means ‘dawn, morning’, ‘Solay’ (the Valdyan name of Aumen Síth) means ‘gold-town’.

The commander of the Order of the Sworn probably spells his name ‘Morin’ himself, but ‘Maurin’ is the way he’s likely to have pronounced it when he introduced himself, as he’s a native of Ryshas.

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Q: May I/we come in?
A: Yes, that’s why we put “Welcome” on the door in large friendly letters.

Q: Is there an entrance fee?
A: No, but you’re free to put something in the collection box.

In fact this isn’t such a frequently asked question, but some people do ask it. I don’t know how many people don’t come in because they’re afraid to ask. Perhaps we should put “free entrance” in small friendly letters under the large friendly letters saying “Welcome”. I wonder if we would get more in the collection box if we put “voluntary contribution” too.

Q: Do you still hold services here?
A: (usually after a suppressed giggle) Every Saturday night, every Sunday, on the eve of every great feast, occasionally on the day of a great feast but only in the school holidays because the priest has a day job as a physics teacher, and in Holy Week almost full-time from Wednesday night to Sunday afternoon.

This one never fails to baffle me. People seem to think that we’re a museum, or at least something obsolete, not an active, working, growing community.

Q: How large is your community? (looking at empty space with about half a dozen chairs along the walls)
A: There are a hundred people on the roll, and on a normal Sunday about sixty in the service.

Q: Do they bring their own chairs, or what? Sit on the floor?
A: It’s customary to stand, but if you can’t it’s okay to sit, that’s what the chairs are for.

Q: Aren’t your services terribly long?
A: Not terribly, no. About an hour and a half on Sunday morning and two hours on Saturday night. One gets used to it.

Q: Are you all Russian?
A: (Prima, English-rose complexion, red hair and freckles, completely deadpan:) No.

Q: Well, you must have some connection with Russia.
A: No, in fact most Dutch people here don’t.

Q: Well, how many people in the congregation are actually Dutch?
A: More than half, and the rest are from a dozen different countries: Russian, White Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Greek, Serbian, Azeri, Uzbek, Eritrean and Ethiopian.

This is not counting the English/French couple who are moving to France, and the Frisian who reads the Gospel in Frisian at the Easter service.

Q: But the Dutch people are all converts, aren’t they?
A: (Prima, fourteen:) I was baptised Orthodox as a baby and so were my sisters.

There are in fact some Dutch adults in the parish who have been Orthodox from birth, or at least baptism: the priest’s son and daughter, for instance, both in their twenties.

Q: I never knew there was a church here! How long has it been here?
A: For fifty years in this town, for eight years in this spot.

There are people who pass the church every day and have never noticed it, even though there’s a rather visible sign over the door.

Q: Who founded your church?
A: Russian emigrants who came to the West as children in the Revolution. Lots of people fled to Paris at that time and formed a Russian community. Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow told them “I’m compromised and I can’t lead you, turn to the Patriarch of Constantinople” and they did, and that resulted in our diocese. Some of them came to live and work here in the 1950s and started the church, but we don’t have any of their descendants in the parish at the moment.

Of the descendants I know some have left the church altogether and some have left our culturally Dutch and politically neutral parish for culturally and/or politically Russian parishes, but that’s none of the visitors’ business.

Q: Does the priest stand with his back to the people?
A: (going to stand in front of them, facing the altar) Am I standing with my back to you, or are we all facing the same way and I just happen to be in front?

This actually enlightens most of the people who ask the question; very interesting discussions have come from it.

Q: Do those stairs lead to the organ?
A: No, to the office and the library.

This never fails to baffle the asker. Not that we don’t have an organ, apparently, but that we have such mundane things as an office and a library upstairs.

Q: What are those cloths hanging over some of the icons for?
A: For decoration.

Q: Why are they on some icons and not on others?
A: Because those icons are on thicker wood so the cloths don’t fall off.

One person honestly thought that the icons with cloths were somehow of higher status than the ones without, but I don’t think so.

Q: Do you have some kind of patriarch? And does he serve here every Sunday?
A: Well, we would like the patriarch to visit and serve, but most Sundays it’s just the priest.

I think that people who ask that think that “patriarch” is the word we use for “priest”, but that doesn’t make it less funny. Poor Bartholomew, commuting to Deventer every Sunday!

Q: Is the patriarch a kind of pope?
A: No, the pope is a kind of patriarch.

Prima got that question; I’ll remember her answer. I like the variant I got once, “Do you believe in the pope?” to which I answered “Yes, the pope exists.” And then, of course, explained that the pope is a patriarch all right but happens not to be our patriarch.

And some personal questions:

Q: Do you (singular, not the church) actually believe in God?
A: Yes.

Q: But how do you know?
A: I don’t know, but things happened in my life that made it likely. It’s an emotional conviction, not a rational conviction.

And usually, this sparks the whole “if there is a God, how come there’s so much evil in the world?” debate, which can either lead to a really good discussion (as it did last time) or leave me frustrated and defensive because I’m called upon to explain all that.

Q: Do you (plural) see God as a man? (not “human being”, but “adult male”)
A: Not as such (quotes Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”) But God is the Creator and that’s usually seen as a male principle.

Q: But when God became incarnate (in various shades of theology-speak) He came as a man, right?
A: Yes; He had to be either a man or a woman because people usually only come in those two sorts, and in that time and place He could do so much more as a man.

Not very theologically sound —I don’t like to use the “in that time” argument— but it does the job and usually saves a whole screed of “don’t you feel short-changed as a woman in the church”. Though we get that question too, and can shock people by saying we aren’t protesting against it.

This was waiting for Athal on his return to Valdis. Fortunately, it seems to be the worst thing that happened in his absence.

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It felt very strange to be back in Valdyas, even though Sarabal is full of Síthi. It didn’t help that we were in Turenay rather earlier (in real time) than I’d expected and I had to take over almost unprepared.

Note: I don’t have much in the way of notes of this part; some of the facts may be inaccurate. If you were there and know better, don’t hesitate to tell me!

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Athal’s last entry —well, the first part of it, because it’s another long one and I know that at least three people are waiting to read it— because we’re back in Valdyas and I’ve taken over the campaign again. I’m unlikely to stop posting roleplaying writeups, my own and others’, but this story arc is finished.

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Note: this is the other Raisse, the one in Turenay who is the queen’s sort-of-godmother.

Raisse started out angry (and I typed the whole thing with angry keystrokes) but the writing made her mood change, I think very true to character.

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(or: what’s up with all those letters?)

We, that is my other half and I, are running a one-on-one side campaign following the adventures of Khora, to supplement the campaign with Athal and Raisse.

The first writeup of this branch happened to be Khora’s first letter, and it sort of grew from that. Now suddenly everybody and their dog is writing letters and not even we ourselves can keep track of who all those people are and who is related to whom, especially as the stock of names in Valdyas is small so every other person seems to be called Raisse or Jeran.

Note that King Athal has disbanded the House Eraday; everyone formerly of that house who is loyal to him does not have the house-name any more but is still counted noble. Athal has more or less promised to come back from Iss-Peran with another name for the house, but frankly he can’t think of anything.

I don’t pretend to be exhaustive, but only try to give a reference guide. Also, this is not a catalogue of people appearing in the actual campaign writeups; perhaps I’ll do that later.

On a sidenote: once again I wonder whether to start a separate blog for roleplaying writeups, but the last time I mentioned that I got a (small) deluge of (mostly non-roleplaying) readers urging me to keep everything here, so I’ll stop contemplating it now.

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All this (i.e. the side campaign with Khora, causing all these letters) is giving me lots of ideas for the next campaign arc. Radan doesn’t actually know much about the situation in Iss-Peran (at least not until Athal and Raisse arrive in Turenay), but he does have the right ideas.

For those readers who don’t lead part of their virtual lives in Valdyas, and for those who do as well, I’m working on a short “Who’s Who in Turenay and Elsewhere”.

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This young man is serious. Nicely different voice from Aidan’s!

Note: Khora spells ‘Kheti’ and Aidan spells ‘Cora’, but Arin’s spellings are actually correct (or, at least, most true to the original). ‘Albetire’ and ‘Albatire’ are valid variants.

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Next time Khora writes a letter (and it’s likely that she will) I’ll start adding “previous” and “next” links. Radan isn’t forthcoming —we haven’t seen him much, after all— but Arin astin Hayan is writing a letter to his father.

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It’s contagious! Perhaps even Radan will write his letter in public.

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Poor girl, afflicted with a grievous case of culture shock. If the people dealing with her read this letter, they’d probably be in danger of dying from culture shock too.

(Athal informs me that embarrassment is like seasickness in that you don’t actually die of it, you just wish you would)

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And her style is exquisite. Thanks, Boudewijn!

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This threw me a bit at the supermarket. It should look like this:

and not like this:

I don’t know why the company, or the supermarket, now has the export packaging; has the domestic market become too small? Or had they underestimated the domestic market and run out? (which is the other side of the same problem?) I don’t think they mean ‘Holland’ as in ‘North and South Holland’ as opposed to ‘Overijssel’; it says ‘Pays-Bas’ on the French side.

Anyway, it’s nice to know that it’s “Kosher for Passover and all year use”, even though that doesn’t concern us.

But fortunately, the contents were the same, or I’d have sent the company Very Angry Mail.

If I hadn’t seen them do it, I wouldn’t have known what had caused this.

This is part of the gate of our old house, where wasps have pared some of the weathered top layer of the wood away to make their paper nest. It makes an intriguing small scratchy noise when you actually happen to be there while they’re doing it.

Here’s a detail at full resolution:

It’s interesting that they do it only vertically; the rest of the fence is of the same wood, equally weathered, but with horizontal slats, and it doesn’t show any evidence of wasp-paring at all.

Time for another roundup of search terms.

(apropos of nothing, I seem to have about 30 regular readers)

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… that ‘dragon’ is the Dutch word for tarragon. But still.

Raisse is right that the title of baron isn’t hereditary: barons are appointed by the Crown. However, if a baron has an heir who seems to be suitable, that heir is appointed to the barony more often than not when the old baron dies or retires.

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We keep the church open every Saturday from the end of June until the end of August for the benefit of whoever wants to come in and have a look. Two volunteers per Saturday, and today it was my turn. Our “CHURCH OPEN” sign couldn’t face both sides that people were likely to come from at once, so I ran upstairs and printed a “CHURCH OPEN, Welcome!” sign to tape to the open door on the other side. Still, about half the people who came in asked “may I come in? may I have a look around?”

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The birds all came looking when I leant over the rail of the bridge with my camera, thinking I had food. When that wasn’t forthcoming they swam away. There were three grey cygnets and an off-white one, but I didn’t manage to get all of them in the viewer together.

Here’s Athal catching himself thinking like an Iss-Peranian, more than once. Fortunately, it’s likely that he’ll be on the next <shudder> ship home, and only because it wasn’t feasible to catch the one that was just leaving.

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She is so right about the tax revenues. And it turned out in the next session that it’s likely to actually work out that way, at least partially.

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I find myself rethinking scenes, seeing images from the films in my mind; even looking half-heartedly for widescreen wallpaper of any scene that appeals. But perhaps I’ll just have to get some pictures of random New Zealand landscape and make up my own stories in it.

Looking for other people’s experiences I came across The Purist, who seems to have seen exactly the same films that I have. The reviews are spot on, the parody summaries hilarious. And here is The NitPicker’s Guide to The Lord of the Rings, detailing changes between book and film. Especially the mail the NitPicker got, reproduced at the end, is instructive.

Here is a wiki article about a Purist Edit of The Two Towers: all Peter Jackson’s changes undone again. I may want to watch it some time, though I’m not such a purist; I appreciate that film is a very different medium from print, but I do question some of Peter Jackson’s choices. The rest of that wiki is worth perusing too.

Finally, here is a full synopsis, chapter by chapter of the book. Useful, especially if you’re trying to find a reference and know what the context was but not where in the book to search, as happened to me this morning.

Too many flashbacks. Too much cutting from one piece of action to another and back (I’m clearly not of the zap generation). Too much crawling up and sliding down mountains. Too much Gollum. Too much simpering by Arwen and, come to think of it, Éowyn. Too much Slow == Important. Interminable battles, interminable whitespace between events (people standing or sitting around and occasionally saying something), interminable horror scenes, interminable farewells. And still the head-to-one-side cuteness of Aragorn when he’s already been crowned king.

Yes, this is The Return of the King, of course. I watched it a few years ago on my own when I was ill, fast-forwarding most of the Gollum stretches and all of Shelob, joined by Secunda (who was also running a fever) for the coronation, and remembered mostly the good bits.

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I stayed up writing this last night but the network didn’t see the laptop and I didn’t feel like fixing that at 2:15 in the morning; ah well, gives me the chance to add a few things I came up with while in bed and in the shower.

We watched the Lord of the Rings films again— the first two in one evening as a school-holiday movie marathon; we have the third in the house as well but the other two are so long that The Two Towers ended well after midnight, and everybody was just plain too tired to face another one even if it does have the happy ending that the others so sadly lack.

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…only not just now. But I was carrying the old laptop I was using (which used to be Secunda’s, and my other half’s before that, and his employer’s before that, an ancient but still serviceable little Gateway) up the stairs because I’d just copied some files on to it —no network reception on the roof terrace with the almost equally ancient wireless card— when I slipped and had to let go of one corner to keep myself from pitching down, and that corner banged on the top step.

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Midsummer 2008, about 10 pm, looking west from our roof terrace. After a while the gold went away and it became spectacular greyscale, but I don’t think the poor little Praktica could have caught that and I didn’t think of borrowing Boudewijn’s much better camera.

The bats that live in our roof must hate June: it stays light so long that they can’t go outside until the swifts have eaten all the insects.

As a long-time fan of the book by Diana Wynne Jones I was very wary of the Miyazaki film. I’d never liked anime —correction, I’d never seen anime I liked— and though, according to Prima who’s been watching some anime lately, this film is not at all typical, the characters still had the huge eyes and little pursed mouths that I associate with anime I don’t like. But the friendly DVD merchant around the corner, who knows our tastes, was certain we’d like it. I’d heard a lot of good things about it on the Diana Wynne Jones mailing list too: that DWJ herself liked it a lot, for one.

Warning: the rest may contain mild spoilers.

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Was this really only one day? I think yes, though we slept for a few hours in the middle of it. It did end around midnight— the in-world day, that is, we ended neatly at 10:50.

Unresolved questions: what on earth was Selle’s message? It must have been important. And who was it that called Athal “priest of Timoine, Anshen and Mizran”? Sounds like the merchant-guild sisters, but I’m not sure.

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Last night, while we were immersed in roleplaying, our ADSL connection stopped connecting. The girls noticed, but thought it was a dip of the kind we’ve been having all too frequently and it would be up again within minutes, but they were going to bed anyway so they didn’t try, or think of telling us. We didn’t notice until the other player had gone home and we wanted to wind down, check mail, talk to people on the other side of the world, and in my case make a start on writing the writeup. My other half tried to fix it, but it wasn’t one of the simple things (rcnetwork restart, try to ping, OK, works) so he said he’d try again in the morning and for all he knew it would be up again then.

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I had to keep Athal from commenting between the lines. Let one thing be clear: I don’t know if it had any actual effect that Raisse came to Athal’s aid, but even if it didn’t he’s glad she did, and so am I!

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So how would you feel if for years you’d been in the habit of doing something you thought was a good thing, absolutely saw the sense of, took pains to do right, taught your children to do, put up with discomfort in order to do…

… and then suddenly you’re told that you don’t have to do it any more, and not only that (so you could at least feel virtuous for keeping it up regardless) but it’s made impossible?

No, I’m not talking about the outdated practice of covering one’s head in church. I’m talking about the outdated practice of separating household waste into organic and miscellaneous. Which was the spiffy new thing, let’s see, a few decades ago.

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They were so good that we ran out almost immediately, and I had some strawberries left (the other ingredients are what I’m always stocked up on, anyway) so I made another lot.

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I was going to bake cupcakes. I had a lot of fresh strawberries.

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It’s not only a neat little city for the tourists. The moment we left the centre —first to go to church in a neighbourhood just outside it, later to walk to the Dampoort station to catch a train— we saw many more houses that were tumbledown, badly kept, neglected, than the occasional one in the centre. The point seems to be that if it’s not touristic, it’s not worth keeping up. I have a suspicion that St. Michael’s church, for instance, is kept poor by its obscurity: it’s not one of the Big Sights, though <plug> if you like churches it’s perhaps even better </plug>, much more churchy.

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In this unassuming clumsily-restored medieval hall lie the deepest roots of Valdyas.

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This is the sky over our roof terrace around 17:30 today. It’s now almost 22:00 and still not thundering, though it’s been getting steadily more oppressive since mid-day.

I started wearing a headscarf in church —and kept it up once I’d started— mainly because I wanted to have a visible, tangible sign that church was different from the world outside it. Altar folk have their vestments, and I could have something too. I could think of oodles of reasons not to have it, most of which I will refute in a moment, but the thing that most kept me from just going ahead and covering my head was that I didn’t want to be seen as a wannabe Russian.

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The break in the story doesn’t coincide completely with the break in the session; we stopped just before the allies came in and picked it up again from there. It wasn’t long after that until we gained too much momentum to stop. At one point I was worried whether I’d be able to write the writeup in first person, because I was far from sure that there would be a first person to write from the POV of. Only the baby prince has script immunity, after all.

Thanks go to Prima for scanning the drawing when technology failed me. Athal and I had no words for it. Also, I was too busy virtual-fighting to take notes and my (and Athal’s) memory of the events of the fight is likely to be quite imperfect.

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I had such a spiffy title for this, but it went away, confound it. Posting in two parts to stop myself thinking I need to finish writing it all in one go; next one (with action!) coming today or tomorrow.

The session was interrupted by Raisse’s player trying (without success) to catch the last train, and when he came back we decided to have “just half an hour more”— and it got out of hand so much that we went on to what is probably the climax of this story arc. The GM had planned for the events to happen, but perhaps not precisely now.

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(No pictures, because I lent the camera to Tertia. Two other people in her study group also had cameras. Next time it will be in my pocket.)

The second year had fieldwork day— divide into study groups of four to six people with ideally an adult supervisor, go to a designated place along the little stream that runs along the north side of town, take samples of water and soil, catch the fauna, observe the flora, draw the landscape, interview people about Nature Development, etcetera; all of this for double geography and biology credit.

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The bottle of natural rose water that we bought in Haarlem years ago was finally empty, and our quest to get it locally was unsuccessful (though now that I know the brand, I know where to try: the pharmacy section of the organic-food store). Also, we were out of Darjeeling and almost out of Oolong. And I wanted to go to the convent in The Hague and show the sisters the Life and Travels of Father Adrian web page to see if they agreed that it was ready to put online.

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There’s currently an exhibition in The Hague (which we won’t be able to go to for various reasons, but we bought the book) of paintings by the twin brothers David and Pieter Oyens, born in 1842 and active in the latter part of the 19th century. Our paper had a scathing review: the critic said more or less that the brothers’ work was hardly worth mentioning, and certainly not worth a whole exhibition, because they were conservative in their choice of subject matter and not interested in political or social commentary like the “great” painters of their time, for instance Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. For this critic, a painting that doesn’t bring something “real” (read: negative) to the viewer’s attention is of necessity a bad painting. Like lit-critters who insist on “realistic” fiction, meaning fiction that emphasises only the gritty dark sides of human nature.

I say, piffle.

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I’ve now had a counter on both Found Objects and the church pages for the whole month of April. I know our server must have stat-counting functionality somewhere too, but someone pointed me to Statcounter and that works, it can be invisible, it’s free and easy to use, so I’d rather be lazy and let something else gather the information for me.

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Following on immediately from “Ale and a warm bath”.

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Thanks, Raisse, for jotting down your thoughts at the end; I think we can do something with those. (And I’ve left your self-made spelling of the Iss-Peranians, though not of the Valdyans)

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Services sung: 9
Services to go: 0
Services at which I was the only alto: 3 1/2
Time: 0:32 Total: 3:52 Grand total: 19:47
Congregation: about 40, hard to count because many of them were very small
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 adult acolytes, 3 boys Choir: 8 (3 sopranos, 2 altos, 1 tenor, 2 basses)
Coordination: chaotic, but that’s normal for this service
Knees: excellent
Voice: adequate again, though I didn’t dare read the verses
Strangeness: The strangest thing about this service is that it’s the last, without having real closure: we expect to have something to go to in church tonight or at the latest tomorrow, but we’ll have to wait until Saturday!

Services sung: 8
Services to go: 1
Services at which I was the only alto: 3 1/2
Time: 3:20 (with a long procession!) Total: 3:20 Grand total: 19:15
Congregation: 150 or more at the procession, about 60 at the final blessing. Some left after Matins, some after the Gospel. People with small kids will probably turn up at Vespers.
Crew: Altar: priest, 3 adult acolytes (all of them!), 3 boys (the youngest my nine-year-old godson) Choir: 9 (4 sopranos, 2 altos, 2 tenors, 1 bass
Coordination: good enough
Knees: too busy to notice
Voice: in the circumstances, splendid. I thought I wouldn’t be able to sing at all, prayed hard and tried anyway, and about halfway through the service my voice was back to its usual Easter-night in-need-of-beer but still serviceable dryness. If our parish was a Greek parish, I’d have a silver larynx made (because I don’t think they sell those in the votive-junk shops) and hang it from the icon of the Resurrection, or of the Archangel Gabriel because that’s who I prayed to (I wanted to sing the megalinarion; there was nobody else present who knows that part).
Strangeness: When I looked out of the window at 11 pm the whole crowd of local Russians who come to church once a year (er, the kind of people I don’t like to associate with) were already standing in the street. They trailed at the end of the procession and stood just outside the church at Matins; I don’t know when they left but they were gone at the Gospel reading.

The Gospel was read in nine languages: Dutch, Russian, Macedonian, Georgian, Ge’ez, Greek (and the little Greek boy shouldn’t have sniggered at that), Frisian, English and French. Next year we’ll be without the English and French speakers because they’re moving to France in the summer, but perhaps we can get one of the Romanians to read.

Services sung: 7
Services to go: 2
Services at which I was the only alto: 3 1/2
Time: 3:00 Total: 5:30 Grand total: 15:55
Congregation: about 20 (in and out all the time; some people, especially with small kids, came only to see the church made white)
Crew: Altar: priest, 1 adult acolyte, 3 boys. One of the boys was very small, it was his first time to serve, his grandmother was very proud. Choir: 7 1/2 (3 sopranos, 1 1/2 alto, 2 tenors, 1 bass). I had to drop out halfway through, because I didn’t want people to think they could depend on me when I couldn’t even depend on myself.
Coordination: Okay. There was nobody in the church who took the initiative for the white-making so some of the choir had to start it, but after that it went swimmingly.
Knees: never thought of them.
Voice: horrid. I thought it was sort of okay and was getting better until I had to sing the glorifications, which are loud and high, and then it gave up completely. I stood in the nave for the rest of the service.
Strangeness: I’m very much not used to not being in the choir. The other alto did okay (though she couldn’t come to most of the practices, and it showed) so I had another bout of thinking that this was my punishment for pride. And I felt that there was not really a place for me, though nobody else seemed to think that so it was all right after all.

I must have been asleep on my feet at this service for the last ten years or so, because I noticed for the first time (at least it felt like the first time) that it’s already got a real Resurrection gospel from Matthew 28. We do turn the church from black to white between the Epistle and the Gospel, so it figures.

After the service there was the traditional rice and stewed fruit, but not many people came. Half the people who did come started lugging furniture for the Easter feast almost immediately, so it wasn’t a nice social gathering as it usually is on this day, especially as I still felt horrid and many other people weren’t feeling too well either. Ah well, Easter will clear everything up. I did buy a cheerful skirt (reversible mustard-yellow wraparound) in the market to wear tonight.

Services sung: 6
Services to go: 3
Services at which I was the only alto: 3 1/2
Time: 2:30 (with a procession!) Total: 2:30 Grand total: 12:55
Congregation: about 20 at the beginning, about 8 at the end.
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 boys, 2 men. Choir: 6-7 in varying composition: started out with 4 sopranos and one each of ATB, one soprano sang alto for a while, then went home and her husband came to sing bass, another soprano also went home, so we had 2 sopranos, 1 alto, 1 tenor and 2 basses.
Coordination: very good,
Knees: noticed right one about halfway through the service, not much bother.
Voice: better still but not up to scratch yet. During the Great Doxology I had the strange thought that my voice problems were God’s way to punish me for pride, or rather teach me humility, by getting me at my only strong point (or at least the only one I acknowledge as such), but it affects so many people apart from me that I didn’t want to believe that. Anyway, I don’t want to believe in the vindictive God that it would imply.
Strangeness: having a procession at about 10 in the evening while people are still sitting in restaurants, and other people are walking in the street, is… interesting.

Services sung: 5
Services to go: 4
Services at which I was the only alto: 3
Time: 1:20 Total: 6:23 Grand total: 10:25
Congregation: about 25
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 boys and 2 men Choir: 7 (2 of everything except basses)
Coordination: good enough
Knees: normal
Voice: slightly better than at the Hours, but still not good enough to sing the Alleluia verses.
Strangeness: it’s certainly strange to hear someone else sing something I’ve been doing for the last X years, for quite a large value of X. It was very good indeed, but quite different.

Services sung: 4
Services to go: 5
Services at which I was the only alto: 3
Time: 1:58 Total: 5:03 Grand total: 9:05
Congregation: 5-7
Crew: Altar: priest, 1 adult acolyte, 2 boys Choir: 5 (SSATB)
Coordination: excellent
Knees: didn’t notice them, so must have been okay
Voice: a whole tribe of frogs have taken up residence in my throat. Tried to read the First Hour, and later one verse, without much success. Reluctantly gave up the sung Alleluia verses at Vespers, because that’s very much the thing I do.
Strangeness: Every Royal Hour has three stichera with two verses in between (followed by prokeimenon and readings) except the ninth: that has two stichera but still two verses. We don’t know whether we should skip the verse or repeat the sticheron, so we do neither, leaving the second verse hanging in the air.

Also, nobody seemed to be able to sing a completely normal troparion in the second tone. Next year we’ll put it in the alternative second tone, much easier.

Writing this between services, waiting for eggs and prosphora and rye bread, things like that. If I don’t do it now I won’t do it until Easter Monday at the earliest, and it won’t be so fresh (and I know that some people are very eager to read it).

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This is the service with the 12 Passion Gospels.

Services sung: 3
Services to go: 6
Services at which I was the only alto: 2
Time: 3:05 Total: 3:05 Grand total: 7:07
Congregation: 7 (3 of which were offspring of people in the choir)
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 men and 2 boys. None of them were actually in the altar much. Choir: 7 (3 sopranos, 1 alto, 1 tenor and 2 basses; one bass left before the end of the service but not by much)
Coordination: Frankly, lousy. Everybody was good-natured about it, though. We appeared to have a subtly different book from the priest, and both the priest’s book and the choir book had errors and of course they were different errors. Also, we sang the wrong version of “Lord, have mercy” several times, and Choirmistress left the choir to venerate the cross confident that I could intone the chant for venerating the cross, but that’s the one thing I can’t intone cold. Now I have it as an earworm, of course. But at least this year we didn’t skip anything like we did last year.
Knees: Pretty decent.
Voice: Adequate, until it kind of broke near the end, and now I have a sore throat.
Strangeness: When we crossed the three meters from our front door to the church door it was drizzling; as soon as the first Gospel was read, rain started drumming on the skylight and didn’t stop until the third or fourth Gospel. Seeing that the first gospel is long (three and a half chapters of John) it was quite a lot of rain. It gave a strangely intense atmosphere to the readings.

This used to be my favourite service of Holy Week, but tonight I noticed for the first time (consciously) that it’s a rag-bag of music without any unity. It offends my sense of liturgical propriety. Plain and simple stuff, blatant kitsch (even now that we’ve replaced some of the most blatant nineteenth-century Russian only-for-huge-choirs kitsch by simpler stuff), high drama (the minor-key tones, splendid but difficult, especially 4 but also 8; we can manage 7 now), not-so-plain but okay pieces, absolutely beautiful stuff (the exapostilarion, The Good Robber, and the thing I can’t intone for venerating the cross), and my pet hate, the ikos that makes the Mother of God look like a silly goose:

Beholding her own lamb led to the slaughter, Mary followed with the other women, in distress and crying out: Where do You go, my child? Why do You run so swift a course? Surely there is not another wedding in Cana to which You now hasten to change water into wine? Shall I come with You, my child, or shall I wait for You? Give me a word, for You are the Word. Do not pass me by in silence, for You kept me pure.

The Dutch version has “innocent” for “pure”, and that’s a very old-fashioned value of “innocent”.

And as an afterthought: I still think it’s silly to call out “Aposticha in the first tone” when all the aposticha, except the first and the last, are in the second tone.

Services sung: 2
Services to go: 7
Services at which I was the only alto: 1
Time: 2:10 Total: 4:02
Congregation: 12-16, people kept trickling in when the service had already started, with a small peak at 10:30 (that’s when people expect services to start)
Crew: Altar: priest, 1 adult acolyte, 2 experiences boys with too-short sticharia. As someone said over post-service coffee: “The problem is not that the sticharia are too short, but that our altar-boys grow too fast.” Choir: 5 (SSATB)
Coordination: Okay, apart from the usual glitches. Another service we haven’t practiced much. Choirmistress is too short to read the first line of “Son of God”, which we sing all the time, and if we’d practiced it we’d have known and made a more readable version.
Knees: okay. Must remember to bend them every once in a while, especially tonight, or I won’t be able to kneel to venerate the cross.
Voice: so-so at the beginning (the hay-fever had taken me by the throat) but getting better towards the end.
Strangeness: Realised somewhere during Vespers what this Holy Week is about. It’s about something else every year: last year it was about mastery, the year before about politics games. This year it seems to be about voluntary suffering and sacrifice: Christ goes to his ordeal with his eyes wide open, he knows exactly what’s happening and what’s going to happen, and still submits. This makes it worse, somehow, than if he’d really been an unwitting sacrificial lamb. I may expand this in a separate post when I’ve finished putting crosses on all those eggs.

Services sung: 1
Services to go: 8
Time: 1:52
Congregation: 20, give or take a few. Some came late, some left early; one was in the congregation first and in the choir later.
Crew: Altar: priest and 3 boys. There was barely enough work for one boy, but the other two, who came later, wanted to serve very much. Choir: 8 (4 sopranos, 2 altos, 1 tenor and 1 bass). There were actually two tenors present, but their voices are so different that they have a hard time singing the same part, so one sang the first part of the service and when he went home the other took over.
Coordination: For the first service of Holy Week, not bad. We did pitch one piece way too high (sang it three times; I managed only the first) and it was very clear that we’d practiced from the end this time, so we never got round to practicing this service at all.
Knees: decent.
Voice: considering the fact that I currently have my worst bout of hay fever since years (plane trees are in flower), perfectly reasonable.
Strangeness: The First Hour has an Old Testament reading (Jeremiah) preceded and followed by a prokeimenon. One would expect another reading, but it continues with the fixed part of the First Hour as if someone ripped a page from the book before copies were made of it.

There’s always a point in Holy Week when I suddenly realise that the machinery is in motion, and that I won’t stop until it stops. Usually it’s either in the middle of this service (like last year, sitting on the edge of the choir dais while someone was reading psalms) or in the middle of the Liturgy of Holy Thursday. This year it came before any service, in the afternoon, on the bike coming back from the supermarket. The mundane things that I do in Holy Week, everything that belongs to it except the services —strange shopping, special cooking— have come to count too.

Literally.

I have 160 red (well, kind of red; some of them didn’t take the dye as well as my skin did) Easter eggs waiting for crosses and the letters XB to be painted on.

In Holy Week, being Orthodox is full-time job. Our Australian house-guest remarked that I was “quietly” doing a lot of work for the church and wondered if we didn’t have a Ladies’ Guild. Fortunately not! If we had a Ladies’ Guild organising the volunteer work, I don’t think I’d want to volunteer. It’s much easier and less embarrassing to do the things I’m good at, informally, yes, quietly.

Also, there’s no “women’s work” in our parish: anything except altar work, which you have to be a man for, is anybody’s work. That, according to our Australian, is probably due to modern Dutch culture; in which case I approve of at least this bit of modern Dutch culture.

Les choses sont contre nous. Specifically, Filia Prima’s bicycle, which had a flat rear tire: someone’s idea of a joke, whether at school or just passing the school’s bike shed. She walked it home, passing two bike repair shops on the way, but was too angry to even think of leaving it there. Over the weekend we were busy and she didn’t need it —someone who lives in the city centre and doesn’t have to do the weekend shopping can easily forget that she has a bike at all— but this morning she suddenly found out that the tire was, indeed, still flat.

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Comments are working again; it was a permissions problem after all, but not where I’d looked for it. Boudewijn fixed it (thanks!). Of course, then I had to go and break something else, but I could fix that by myself.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program. No more tweaking or rearranging for a while, especially as Holy Week is about to descend on us, and we have house-guests now and will have more from Wednesday.

And the bag reads “biologische winterpeen” (organic winter carrot)…

Regular readers will probably have noticed the technical difficulties I’ve just been having. That slowed the writeup a lot: somehow I couldn’t set myself to it without a blog to post the result to. But now everything except comments seems to work again.

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Eduard wasn’t sure in which order things had happened, and wrote a back-to-front writeup (unchanged here); later, he realised that it was because he’d been making notes on the train home, freshest first.

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Today is Kulich Day, and this time I’m prepared for not getting anything substantial done. Well, apart from the kulich, of course. Though there’s not a full day’s work to occupy the hands it does occupy the brain.

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I had thirteen items on my shopping list this morning: wholemeal flour, two kinds of coffee, two kinds of vegetarian bread spread, 85% flour, a gel pen, corn plasters, beer, sweet potatoes, apples, walnuts and dried pineapple.

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Your Score: The Cheesehead

You scored 58 humour, 71 tolerance, and 78 culture!

You are Dutch, and if you’re not COME LIVE HERE! WE ARE YOUR SOULMATES!!! You have a great sense of humour and tolerance is pretty good too! A big plus for culture!

(spelling and punctuation corrected — apart from being a kaaskop, I can be pretty pedantic too)

We celebrated spring by giving ourselves a bit of pocket money and hitting the second-hand bookshops. Though we’re now living amid a surfeit of second-hand bookshops we hadn’t done that for, well, years. It took some getting used to— in the first few I still felt I had to buy useful books. I was cured of that by finding lots of things like “History of [thing I’m interested in]” —take it from the shelf— “in [country and/or period I’m not interested in at all]”.

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There were only nine people in the Liturgy of the Presanctified: the priest, his wife (choirmistress), their son (acolyte), my three daughters and I, and a couple we didn’t know, apparently a Greek or Serbian woman and her Dutch husband or fiancé. Even though it was a Friday, usually better attended than Wednesdays. Two people we had expected explictly hadn’t come after all, and none of the other regulars either; perhaps everybody thought they’d been to church enough already this week at the Vigil and Liturgy of the Annunciation on Monday and Tuesday.

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I don’t know whether there’s more Roggen or Weizen in this loaf, so I’ll call it a plain Mischbrot; German-style sourdough nevertheless. I figured out how to get the spectacular white crust: slicked it down with a wet hand, sifted ordinary white wheat flour over it (with a mesh tea ball, couldn’t find the little sieve, perhaps I threw it away because it was too worn) and pressed that well into the surface.

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I pass this bit of park several times a week and I’m used to geese sitting or walking in the road, but this time they walked faster, and one of them went “ka-PLECK ka-PLECK” in a weird way. Coming closer, I saw that it was not a goose at all, but a swan with a limp, presumably chasing the geese away from where its mate sat on eggs.

I took three pictures, but with getting the camera from my bag (while the swan got the geese well out of the threat zone) and a car trying to park off-camera on the left only the first was any good.

Location: Noordenbergsingel, Deventer. In the background is the railway bridge over the River IJssel.

This object, which has been outside our window since mid-October, was taken down last Tuesday. I could just catch it on Monday (western Easter Monday!) when there was an inch of snow on it. Two inches on the roof terrace, by the way.

All winter there have been dozens of these spread all through the town centre. The town authorities say they’re crowns, the local paper calls them jellyfish, we think they’re upside-down pumpkins. They’re extremely noisy when there’s any amount of wind; this one, about two meters below our bedroom window, has kept us awake in a storm. A few weeks ago, one fell down in one of the busiest shopping streets; fortunately it was Sunday and there were only a few pedestrians, none of whom got it on their head.

I’ve overhauled my categories. All the old posts are still there apart from two outdated announcements. With the right date, too, because I discovered cp -p. It may cause flooding of your RSS feed (though I hope preserving the dates will prevent that), for which I’m heartily sorry, but my blogging habits have changed and the old categories didn’t work for me any more.

Internal links will work again when I’ve overhauled those too; that may take a while. [ETA: now done, it was less work than I’d thought because I could at least semi-automate the searching]

If you’ve lost the link to a post and can’t find it even by searching, please pipe up and I’ll tell you where it is.

This is part 2 of the Hans Brinker review, with the names deconstruction.

If you’re actually using this page as a resource —I decided to split the blog post in two when I suddenly realised that some people might want to do that— please comment or mail to tell me if you’d prefer the names to be ordered thematically or alphabetically instead.

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I don’t know what prompted it [ETA: a daughter trying to keep a beer bottle from squirting by plugging it with her finger], but I read Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. And couldn’t stop reading it once I was underway, though it’s very dated (that figures; it was published in 1865) and it kept me wishing I had a time machine so I could go and be Mary Mapes Dodge’s copy editor, because she badly needed one. It’s surprisingly gripping.

Note that Hans Brinker is not the name of the boy with his finger in the dike. It’s a story-in-the-story in this book. That story is not, and never has been, something that every Dutch child knows; it’s only known in the Netherlands from translations and retellings of Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. I shudder to think that whole generations of children in the United States had most of their knowledge of the Netherlands from this book alone. No wonder so many tourists arrive with serious misconceptions.

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On Tuesday night, when I was away playing the recorder (still have an earworm of Scarlatti), the art class people called to ask whether I could sit on Thursday morning. I called their voicemail on Wednesday morning to say yes, and this morning I sat.

This time, the teacher herself joined in: in between giving advice to students, she made dozens of small one-minute sketches and let me choose one (thanks, Danielle!)

If you’re at all in the neighbourhood of Deventer (Netherlands; there also seems to be one in the US) and want art classes, I can definitely recommend the Kunstlokaal. And if you’re not in the neighbourhood, perhaps you might like to buy some of the work of Petrus Franciscus or Danielle van Strien. The site is in Dutch; if you’re having trouble with it, don’t hesitate to ask me.

Don’t send from hotmail if you can help it. I don’t know why my spam filter thought the header was forged (for all I know it was perfectly genuine) but I suspect (some of?) the hotmail gateways assign random IP addresses, without having an actual host with that address.

Also have an address without numbers if at all possible. The “likely spammer email” mentioned below was of the type “name2006”. This only got 0.4 points, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

If you can’t help sending from hotmail (for instance, as in this case, because your message is the change-of-address from hotmail to something else…) try to make it send plain text. My antispam software is very suspicious of HTML. I’ve already deleted my own filters that throw away all HTML to get rid of some of the false positives, but SpamAssassin is diligent.

I don’t know the reason for the 40% to 60% Bayesian spam probability. Perhaps because there was very little text, only “Hi, my old address is X, my new address is Y, thanks”. But that didn’t give any points, so never mind.

I did catch this one, but I can’t guarantee that I always will. I have SpamAssassin and the filters to avoid having to see every single message that comes in.

Thanks, Gilles!

I intended to go to the market and buy a blue skirt with my modelling fee, but this was thwarted by the fact that one of the students (Gilles Lescure; when he makes a name for himself, remember where you first read about him) made something that was so beautiful that I said “I wouldn’t mind framing that and hanging it on the bedroom wall.” “All right,” he said, “I’ll spray it with fixative for you.” And so he did, and so I did, spending about half the money on a frame and passe-partout. (Or rather, I framed it and my other half hung it.)

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There was too much wind for skating, otherwise this would have been the last writeup of the season written in the Skating Cafe (as most of the rest have been since October). I’ll miss my weekly hour of ambient noise that’s practically guaranteed to be nothing to do with me, so I can shut it out and be more focused than even in silence.

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Great Compline, in the first week of Lent, gets me in the mood immediately. After initial annoyance at the Great Canon —I already know I’m a sinner, I don’t want it rubbed in!— it starts to soak in instead. And about a hundred prostrations are good for the body as well as for the soul, at least my muscles say so. (Note to self: wear a skirt without sequins; the sequins are as black as the skirt so I didn’t realise they were there until I actually knelt on them, ouch)

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Except for the cat.

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This made me go back to Athal’s story for a correction: Raisse got a lion cub, of course, possibly offspring of the previous occupant of the lion skin. And Raisse is asking all the questions explicitly that Athal only asks in his mind, or when they come up in a conversation. It’s increasingly clear that he did really marry the right woman.

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(thanks, you-know-who-you-are, for the title)

Starting today, it’s Great Lent. Here’s Father Stephen explaining why we fast much more clearly than I can.

The week before Lent is Cheesefare Week, maslenica, Butter Week as it’s called in Dutch (well, the English translation of what we call it in Dutch; shut up, Little Voice), when we eat up all our cheese and butter and eggs and fish. It’s become a tradition in our parish to have a community meal of bliny, little Russian-style buckwheat pancakes, with fish and butter and cream. Though this seems to be Russian folklore, it’s actually a fusion thing: most of the local Russians, and of the people who have been to Russia, haven’t encountered it in that form.

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I was very late in acquiring a mobile phone. First, we got one free with our bank account, which we shared (the person on the train had the phone to call home when the train was late). Then, my father-in-law gave me his old one, which broke down after a few months. I’d gotten used to it, so I bought just about the cheapest I could get.

A few years later all my daughters were buying phones, and the screen of mine was getting a bit dim and the battery tired, so I got this Nokia 2600 because I loved the way it looked and I could get it with a prepaid SIM card from a decent provider.

There are much more spiffy phones on the market now, and I’m not sure whether I want to stay with Nokia now they’ve sold their soul to the devil, but I still think this is the perfect shape for a phone.

(this post alone, I predict, will get all of my blog banned by various net nannies)

Every now and again I earn some pocket money by sitting still in the nude for two hours, in various positions. Modelling for a life-drawing class, that is, in case your dirty mind had switched on already. I have “my” art classes, run by a couple who are both artists, and people can join at different times during the year so there are always some old hands and some beginners. One of the things I like best is the evaluation at the end where I can see what all those people made of the body on the couch.

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Except that I don’t understand half of it, but the percentages make sense. And I’m in good company, at least the ones I’ve heard of.

I’ve taken the liberty to correct a few typos (mostly misspelled names) and take the ad out of the credits link.

(long exposition, with pictures, after the cut)

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I’m writing this to combat other frustration with bureaucracy that I don’t want to write about yet. Disclaimer: all of these cases are based on things that happened to people I know, but the facts have been melted down and recast. If you think you recognise yourself or your own, please don’t mail me saying “but it didn’t happen exactly like that!” because, well, that’s the point.

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Bless curse bless you, Kiya, for pointing me to Hitherby Dragons.

Right up there with Fredric Brown and R.A. Lafferty.

Reading too much of it in one go makes me think that the world really is like that.

Yesterday I woke up at 4:15 from a nightmare. I don’t remember what it was about —perhaps fortunately— but I couldn’t get back to sleep, and after tossing and turning for another hour I admitted that I wouldn’t ever get comfortable and got up. Amazing that being comfortable in bed is a whole-body experience, but being uncomfortable in bed is a detailed experience: every little bit has its separate discomfort.

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We’d been promised a session that wasn’t all Guild work, and lo! it came to pass. Instead, we got culture shock, and intrigue, and more culture shock, and a doddering old man who can hardly be dangerous any more even if he probably was when he was younger, and a temple that was all too octagonal. And Raisse got a very large and fierce kitten. Oh, and did I mention culture shock?

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Raisse had the harder part this time. I had to keep Athal from putting his comments in the text in parentheses; it was all things like “oh, so that’s what happened!” anyway.

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This is labelled (1) because I intend to post more: every time it occurs to me, a picture of an object I like and the story behind it.

My grandfather made this for my mother when she married in 1954. I inherited it in 1998. The two spoons on the left came with the rack, as well as the two spoons-with-a-hole in the back row on the right (one pointed, one round). It’s clear that I don’t use the spoons-with-a-hole as much as the rest; only for cake batter (so slightly more lately) and some sauces. I bought the three round spoons on the right in the front row when I moved out of my parents’ house in 1979. The two oval spoons (third from left in the front row and the one behind it) I bought to fill up the rack because most of my mother’s spoons smelt too much of cigarette smoke and I had to throw them away.

It’s always been on my mother’s wall and on my wall, except for a few years in the house before the last when we had no place to put it. It wasn’t easy to hang it up: these tiles sit on a sheet of wall-finishing board on top of what felt like drywall to the drill, which is half an inch or so in front of a sixteenth-century wall I didn’t want to touch. So I had to drill very carefully, swapping drill bits twice: the crack between the tiles was soft, the wall-finishing board tough, the drywall soft again. But it’s now firmly on my kitchen wall, where it belongs.

A while ago some people on the rec.arts.sf.composition newsgroup tossed the idea around to have a dedicated IRC channel where people could drop in and out to talk about writing (and, as writers do, about cats, chocolate, and just about anything else), to shout out wordcounts without littering the newsgroup, and to ask “what’s that word again?” in someone’s general direction and get an answer immediately so it doesn’t stop the flow.

This disappeared into the general Usenet nowhere for a while, until it came up again just when I happened to have time, so I went and set it up. It’s been up for two weeks now and it’s started working as intended. People drop in and out and talk about anything that happens to be relevant or interesting (though, at the moment, very much about bread-baking; the other hardcore baker and I have already got two other people to take it up), shout out wordcounts, ask for words and toss around plot ideas.

Some people feared that the IRC channel would take the interesting discussion out of the newsgroup, but that seems not to be happening: the chat is mostly social and practical, immediate, whereas the more thoughtful discussion is still in the newsgroup, and even comes back to the newsgroup from the channel (“that’s a good idea, shall I post it or do you want to?”)

It’s not exclusive, though it’s ex-directory: if you don’t do Usenet, but read this and think you’ll fit in with a loose group of …er… idiosyncratic writers, don’t hesitate to drop in. It’s #rasfc on irc.freenode.net, and if you mention my name (I’m irina_r there) someone will know where you’re coming from.

But they were too pretty to leave in the shop, especially at half-price.

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Because there was no handy bus to where I wanted to go. Also, it was splendid weather for a bike ride, sunny and crisp but not too cold.

Or, alternatively, I decided on the bike because that’s where I happened to be when I made the decision to write what I’m writing now, rather than in a seat near the front of the No. 5 bus to Colmschate.

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We did it right. My other half said that if he’d been a really nasty GM, he’d have made the ‘weak links’ break and/or betray us, but we were doing so well at that point that it would have complicated matters needlessly. Enough complications as it was. I-the-player was thinking ‘autistic’ for parasat (locked up in oneself unable to communicate) but Athal didn’t have the word, and probably not even the concept. Anyway, it seems to be something subtly different that neither I nor Athal has a word for.

I’m still baffled at the ephebe-like appearance of Timoine: the last time he appeared he was a seven-year-old redhead, gap-toothed smile and all. It’s like being tripped by the dream engine (which, instead of Athal’s nightmares, delivered more cats, though not green-striped like the night before).

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Tenor: Up?
Me: I’m already up.
Tenor: I’ll sing alto.
Choirmistress: <nods>

Even some people in the choir looked boggled. But it was perfectly clear: this was at the end of Matins when the pitch is usually very low, and people are more comfortable if they take the next part up. Altos (there was only the one of me) sing the melody which sopranos usually have, sopranos the third above that tenors usually have, and tenors (there was only the one of him) take the alto part. Poor basses, who can’t go up, but they can sing the lowest notes an octave higher.

This usually goes seamlessly, but we had a large sprawling choir with some people who don’t come to evening services often so it had to be confirmed.

That I was “already up” was because at that point I tend to be so tired that I don’t get the alto part right: it’s got lots of fourth-up jumps, like the beginning of “Away in a Manger”, and I overshoot that by a quarter-tone at least and raise the whole choir because, confound it, people are used to me being in tune and follow me. So I play it safe and sing the easier melody, which has the added benefit of being so high that I don’t have much room to be sharp.

…or a really small elephant?

This is Rhynchocyon udzungwensis, the grey-faced sengi, a giant elephant-shrew. According to Galen Rathbun who discovered it, it is “the first new species of giant elephant-shrew to be discovered in more than 126 years”.

It weighs almost a pound and a half and is easily the size of a rabbit. I wouldn’t want to find that in my stew.

A gentleman dining at Crewe
Found quite a large mouse in his stew.
Said the waiter “Don’t shout
And wave it about,
Or the rest will be wanting one, too.”

It’s actually more closely related to normal elephants than to normal mice.

No icon this time, but a painting by Rembrandt, because it’s hard (perhaps impossible) to find an icon of the Prophetess Anna by herself rather than as an extra at the Presentation.

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It’s the Feast of the Presentation today. We were practicing the stichera and the canon for weeks beforehand, so that gave me time to think about the actual words. Especially the canon in the third tone, which has “every male who opens the womb” to the most earworm-prone part of the tune. It made me wonder, among other things, what happens if the firstborn is a girl: don’t girls count at all, so the womb isn’t considered open and her younger brother is regarded as the firstborn? It’s even more intriguing because I have only daughters myself, but fortunately I don’t live in Old Testament times.

Luke 2:22 Now when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were completed, they brought Him to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord 23 (as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every male who opens the womb shall be called holy to the LORD”), 24 and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the law of the Lord, “A pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.”

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I’m glad Raisse is so voluble because I have no notes of most of this. Also, it turns out that Raisse’s experience is so different from Athal’s that I couldn’t have expressed it properly anyway, even with notes.

(Athal informs me that the next time the Khas leader offers him his life, he will go ahead and take it. Hmm.)

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I watch other people’s shopping carts at the checkout. I think most people do; most people i know, in fact, at least as far as the subject has come up. I make up families and events on the basis of shopping carts: this woman has at least two kids, one small and one very small; this man is on his own and likes to cook; these people are having a party.

Usually there’s some overlap, or at least something I also tend to buy. Sometimes the person in front’s cart contains something I’ve forgotten so I can run and get it. But today, the woman in front of me had nothing in her cart that would ever have been in mine, and not only because I prefer different brands or different flavours: all light, ready-made, pre-seasoned. In fact no ingredients, only products. Even the non-food items were alien, though I don’t remember what they were.

For the record, mine was shallots, olive oil, phyllo dough (see, I do buy some ready-made stuff, I’m not such a purist that I make everything from scratch), a cucumber, a bell pepper, frozen chives, red wine, chocolate, organic-waste bags, toilet paper, bathroom cleaner and washing soda.

This is long; it was hard; I may have made some mistakes because I stopped taking notes after Raisse had gone to see the Khas. Also, it doesn’t really end because all the endings I wrote were cheesy. The story, and Athal’s dilemma, isn’t finished yet anyway.

Athal has discovered a tendency for culture relativism in himself, which is perhaps a bit modern of him (or me); also, he’s hesitatingly putting into practice what one of his mentors taught him, “sometimes it’s braver to admit that the other guy is right”.

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Another one of Raisse’s. She asks at the end “I wonder how he’ll react when I let him read this”. Well, in fact, she made a king cry.

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A slow start after the holidays. We started off doing administrivia —translating what we’ve been learning since we left Valdis into skill points— and Athal turned out to have picked up three points of Iss-Peranian, enough to talk like a pirate tourist phrasebook. Also, more warcraft than he thought he had as well as yet another point of seal-making skill (from breaking the protection on Erday), causing him to remark that there are probably very few people in the world who can get through his seals. To make a seal that the Nameless can’t get through, and keep it up, takes a lot more.

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Is it hopelessly naive of me to think of the square root of x as “the number that x is the square of” and that, consequently, 2(sqrt 3) * (sqrt 3) is 2*3, that is, 6? Why does my daughters’ math book want them to calculate it as 2(sqrt 9) first? Granted, that also comes out 6, but why the extra step?

Also, don’t they teach them that the square of a+b (can’t do proper math notation) is (a squared) + 2ab + (b squared)? When I drew the square-with-rectangles that I was taught decades ago to visualise it, the girl who was struggling with the problem didn’t understand the visualisation any better than she understood the problem itself, and insisted that it was only (a squared) + (b squared).

Filia Prima says it’s the math book, and our friend who is tutoring her (because she got interested in how a math book can make mathematics so much more complicated) tends to agree.

There are eleven people in our house at the moment, speaking three different native languages (Dutch, Swedish and German) and using English as common language (well, the adults, the teenaged girls and to some extent the ten-year-old Swedish boy). It makes for interesting confusion: starting a sentence in German and finishing it in English, strange errors like “inheritage”, or “copy cuffs” for “coffee cups”. I find myself speaking German to my daughters without noticing, or English to my other half but he usually doesn’t notice either.

The four-year-old German boy is completely unperturbed by all of this. He corrects our errors (“der Schwanz!”) or puts his head to one side like a bird when he can’t understand something because we use the wrong vowels. It’s extremely good for my German, because I have to speak carefully and correctly. I’ll miss him when he’s gone home (in a few hours now), though I’m glad I don’t have a four-year-old of my own any more, because they’re exhausting even if they’re that cute.

Some decades ago I had a boyfriend who had a sign on his door:

We speak German
On parle anglais
Wir sprechen französisch

which is exactly how I feel now, except that any French I speak is accidental. (He also had a sign “BELLEN SIE BITTE” and when I came to his house for the first time I made his day by doing what it said, rather than what it seemed to say. But he was an inveterate atheist and I jilted him because of that.)

I woke up with a stiff shoulder yesterday morning, having dreamt about (or rather as) Athal; don’t know which was cause or effect. But that reminded me that I still had Raisse’s story lying around (thanks, Eduard!). I’m reproducing it in full here (with some minor copy-editing of names and such) because the server keeps winking in and out of existence.

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