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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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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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.