Just after nine in the morning, nasty slushy weather, around freezing. As I come out of the supermarket with a box of groceries and am about to put it in my bike bag a small woman wheeling a shiny blue bike speaks to me.

Small woman: Excuse me, do you know whether the bike lanes are clear?

Me: Well, I used the main lane, I didn’t dare risk the bike lanes.

Small woman: What about the thoroughfares? Did they salt them?

Me: I’m sure they salted [road A] because that’s the way I came, but not the bike lanes. (In fact, an hour and a half earlier, when I had almost reached the swimming pool, I was overtaken by a huffing and grunting municipal snow-plough which not only swept and salted the main lane of the road but also threw any snow that was in its way on to the bike lane; no wonder it was impenetrable. But I didn’t tell the small woman that, because she clearly didn’t listen.)

Small woman: What about [road B]?

Me: I only saw the first part of that at the roundabout, but it was clear all right.

Small woman: As far as [apartment complex about a mile up that road]?

Me: I don’t know, I didn’t pass that way, I turned right at the roundabout. But the part I could see looked completely clear to me.

Small woman: You didn’t pass that way?

Me: No, I didn’t go everywhere!

Small woman: (genuinely surprised, it seems) You didn’t? (thinks) I was thinking of taking the bus instead.

Me: Yes, that’s a good idea, take the bus by all means!

Small woman: Oh, thank you, thank you!

While in the shower —this kind of thing always happens in the shower— it suddenly occurred to me that the next major station on the railway line in each of the four directions that trains can go from this town starts either with A or with Z. For people with a railway map of the Netherlands and some diligence, this fact alone is probably enough to figure out which town we live in, but as that’s not a secret and easy enough to find out by other means anyway, I don’t mind.

And when I thought some more about it, I realised that both stations on the east-west line start with A, and both stations on the north-south line with Z.

The smaller stations that not all trains stop at (and some of which are too new to be on the map I linked to) blur this elegance with letters like T, R and H, but that’s not to be helped.

Remember the silly traffic light? I passed it again, found it useless and confusing again, and decided to at least try to do something about it.

Saturday I asked our friendly neighbour the town councillor who to turn to, and got a name. Yesterday I sent mail to that person: “Dear Mr Traffic Man, Councillor X recommended you; here’s a photo, this is the situation; would it be a good idea to put up a sign allowing cyclists to turn right at the red light, as everybody is doing it already anyway?” This morning when I came back from swimming there was a message from the traffic coordinator (who Traffic Man had sent my mail to), saying “You’re completely right. I’ll order a sign and have it put up.”

Next time someone says in my hearing that people in the town offices don’t listen to the public, I’ll have a story to tell.

St Nicholas falls on a Sunday this year, and to give people the chance to celebrate the saint’s day’s eve (with presents — that’s where Santa Claus comes from, but the Dutch usually celebrate it on the actual day instead of moving it to Christmas) we had only Vespers instead of a whole vigil, and at four in the afternoon instead of in the evening. It seems to have worked.

Congregation: 13 adults, 3 teenagers (counting the eleven-year-old who stands with Secunda and Tertia these days), 4 smaller kids.
Crew: Altar: Fr T on his own. Choir: 5 women, with Fr T filling in as bass whenever he had nothing else to do.
Coordination: Excellent, though at one point it was useful that the choir tends to follow me, because I think I was the only person who sang the right thing (the sticheron melody of the first tone; all the others tried to sing it as a troparion)
Voice: Apart from an intermittent burr because a cold wants to seize me (but doesn’t get much purchase) okay.
Strangeness: It suddenly occurred to me that saying “in the same tone” signals that what follows is something different.

Well done in view of current affairs, that floating mosque. You might have weighted it better, though, because every new person inside made it list and lurch like a row-boat. We (I don’t remember who else apart from me, but a good handful of people) didn’t want to enter at first, but the imam (or whoever, with a long robe and a longish beard) did a very good job convincing us that we were welcome. Strangely, we had to stand with our backs to the action; I thought at the time that it was because we weren’t Muslims, but perhaps it was just that the action was at the back of the room. There was singing, which we had a textbook for: doggerel in short lines, which I don’t remember as being particularly religious, without any mention of God or Allah. All the same it was so Protestant in flavour that I half expected a Gospel reading to follow, but we got a tour of the building vessel instead (making it lurch again), a talk with the imam, and another song on the quay, with longer lines this time but just as much doggerel.

(I realise now that the details were probably so fuzzy, and presumably completely wrong, because I’ve never been in an actual mosque let alone to the service.)

The bike ride after that would have been uneventful if it hadn’t been for the steep and winding roads and the darts and cannonballs flying at us at every turn; probably from playing too much Bloons Tower Defense 3 last night.

Na, nu wissen se — nu is zu Ende. (Kurt Tucholsky)

I’m an orphan. It’s a strange feeling.

A friend of Prima’s who had helped hang up lamps and assemble Ikea furniture in my father’s new flat in May said on the bus home “you’ve got a way cool grandfather!” I can only agree.

He taught me to swim, to ride a bike, to use tools, to catch a ball (no mean feat, because I was as astigmatic as a child as I am now and didn’t see in 3D until I got glasses in my forties), to bake sponge cake, to appreciate German wine and indeed wine in general, and to think in a particular way that seems crooked but is actually straighter than the default. When I was eight or so he took me outside on a clear moonless night and said “now try to imagine what’s behind the stars!”

His presents were above all practical in a subversive way: timber and carpentry tools for my seventh birthday, a net to catch sticklebacks and a tank to keep them in at eight, my first pocket-knife at nine (which led me to think that that’s the statutory age to have a pocket-knife, and to treat my daughters the same). When I left home he gave me a hundred guilders to buy kitchen things. I still have some of that set, after more than thirty years.

His last word was, characteristically, “No.” It was the answer to the nurse’s question “wouldn’t you rather get back into bed?” Alive until his death —no embarrassing half-life in sedation for him— and stubborn to the end.

This morning I cycled to the swimming pool through “best of November” weather, wind and rain and general nastiness, thinking I’d collect my reward by swimming in it. But no! There was a sign on the gate that you pass with your pass, stuck so that nobody could miss it: “Outdoor pool closed. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

As soon as I entered the indoor pool area (where the changing cubicles are) the chlorine fumes got to me, worse than usual, probably because there were more people in the water. I said to the woman who was sitting there supervising “that’s not an inconvenience, it’s a disaster!” It turned out that the coordinator had made a mistake in scheduling shifts, so that there was only this one woman supervising today, and apparently a surfeit of people tomorrow. Another regular outdoor swimmer said “the people who use the outdoor pool don’t need supervision!” — but if anything does happen, this woman will be liable, and it was perfectly reasonable not to take any risks.

I pondered swimming indoors, but I couldn’t face three-quarters of an hour in that stink and went home, not without misgivings. Missing one day won’t be disastrous for my fitness, but now I can’t say any more that I haven’t missed a single day, I’ll have to qualify it. I tell myself now that I should at least have tried and that the chlorine fumes can’t have been that bad. But the smell did make me queasy from just standing there; indeed worse than on a normal day and with no prospect of being out the other door in a moment.

The rain stopped the moment I was on the bike again (i.e. when I’d normally have been swimming) and didn’t start again until I left the supermarket with a bag of groceries too full to close. Go figure.

Yesterday on BBC News I read the story of a man who was abandoned and adopted as a baby and is now trying to find out what exactly happened. (One of the strangest things is that when the police arrived at the block of flats where he’d been found, several people were standing around him on the cold concrete floor and nobody had picked him up.)

A sentence struck my eye: “The social morays at the time looked down on unmarried mothers.” …morays? Aren’t those the eels with all the teeth?

When you swim in the sea
and an eel bites your knee,
that’s a moray.

But then these are social morays, so probably apt to be more judgmental.

They’ve changed it now, of course, rather a pity. But how could it have happened? I don’t suspect the spell checker (check: mine knows both ‘mores’ and ‘morays’). Either someone didn’t know how to spell ‘mores’ or, more likely and more hilarious, someone used dictation software, pronounced it correctly, and the program picked the wrong homophone.

This one was sitting on our next door neighbours’ [1] window sill and wanted scritches. Later, she sat on the window sill of the shop across the road and wanted more scritches.

[1] who are dog people, definitely not cat people.

(late October)

Across the road from where the other lot was, popping up almost a month later and in much greater number.

There were even some on the bike path.

Look what we found in the organic supermarket flour:

Linseed, with a side order of sunflower seeds. A girl found the first few and alerted me, so I could sift the flour before making fruit and nut prosphora willy-nilly. I didn’t tell the supermarket —in order not to cause them to recall it and waste a lot of good food— but apparently someone else did because the shelf is now ominously empty. In New Zealand, according to my friend who lives there, it would have been marked down with a warning.

You greatly pleased me when you made one of the nicest people I know a professor —of physics, I suppose, that’s her thing— and me her secretary. The only sour note was that her other secretary was the woman who was the proximate cause of my burnout when I worked with her in waking life, but as this time she worked mornings and I afternoons we only met coming and going and didn’t have to interact much. It also meant that opening and registering the mail fell to her, and composing letters and sending packages to me. And helping the professor dress for a function, which revealed that she not only had the perfect middle-aged figure that I aspire to (but may never attain) by swimming, but also lingerie to die for. I want my next bra to be dove-grey lace, too, with matching panties.

I didn’t get to see any actual evidence of physics, unless it was the decorated circle five inches across, kept in a flat tin like a film canister, that looked like solid gold and felt heavy enough for that as well. The other women who came in from time to time to talk to the professor —one of whom said of a man both of them apparently knew, “He keeps throwing lovers at me”— looked very much like middle-aged academics too, but vague as to branch of academia. The room was a dead giveaway, though: the long and extremely narrow room I worked in when I was the secretary of a professor of physics in waking life in the summer of 1980 or 1981.

Later we were at the function, which suddenly turned out to be a parish meal. Because I was the only person standing when everybody else was already seated, someone asked me to fill a water jug. I spent a lot of time filling all the water jugs; I especially liked the four-foot-high one in the shape of a trumpet flower that had a wheel at the bottom of the stem because it was too heavy to carry when full. Eventually I sat down and said “I haven’t had anything to eat yet,” but all that was left was a platter with two pieces of bread. Deeply symbolic, I suppose, but I wouldn’t know of what.

Those were splendid military planes and airships, especially the huge one that came very low in the centre (possibly of Roermond, I sort of recognised the city hall) to disgorge small red one-person aircraft. They were coming from several directions so you had me worried for a while until I realised that they were all just flying in patterns, not trying to fight each other or even get in each other’s way. My cousin the nun was right, though, when she said “it’s a pity those beautiful things are designed for killing people”.

Also, I’ll have you know that this is a Linzer torte, not this; that’s a slice of cheesecake. The coffee shop in the covered mall where my cousin and I fled the rain and the noise didn’t know either. My cousin did like it, fortunately, and I loved the sugared puff-pastry things I had— must make that!

Now I’m at it I must commend your offering of the night before, when you put a bit of lawn edged with flowers in the church so people who aren’t in the choir in waking life —mostly because they don’t sing, and even if they did sing they’d be unlikely to be in the choir: one is an acolyte and two others live too far away to come to choir practice— could start the Liturgy an hour before the normal time, because they were in church an hour early on account of forgetting the end of summer time. Fr T was so angry that he locked the connecting doors, conveniently situated about three meters closer to the altar than they normally are. I was left on the choir platform alone and confused, but somehow found myself outside a moment later. Naturally, I didn’t want to get in past the rogue choir, and I couldn’t get into my own house because I had church keys but no house keys, so I had to wait until Secunda and Tertia came out of the house, dressed to the nines (Secunda in a short green dress and thigh-high boots) and, more importantly, with keys.

I had so much dough left over that I made six more prosphora to bake later. I didn’t want to put them on the hot baking tray, so used the shallow rectangular Yorkshire-pudding tin as an emergency tray. Whether it was the upright sides of the tin, or the extra half-hour of rising outside the oven, or the ambient-temperature convection with the heat from the main batch, or…

Anyway, a rather spectacular fail. Proper prosphora look like this.

The Chamber of Commerce held a meeting for local entrepreneurs —not quite the right word, because it was for people who have a business and work in it, not just put up the money— with “how fit is your business” as its theme. My first thing of that kind. It was in the VIP lounge of the football stadium, that I wouldn’t ever have set foot in otherwise (and will never set foot in again if I can help it; the combination of dry air and bad acoustics gave me a two-day sore throat from talking, and the dim lighting and low ceiling made it a very uncomfortable place).

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Repost, because there’s a new really awesome version: the xkcd comic animated by Noam Raby and sung by Olga Nunes.

Discovery Channel loves the world (and for the video-challenged, here is the whole thing in text).

ETA: Here’s a Star Wars version. The galaxy is awesome!

ETA: And a Harry Potter version, too.

xkcd loves the Discovery Channel.

These people love xkcd.

It’s been around for some time, but I rediscovered it by accident and thought I’d share it in case you haven’t seen it yet. I love the blogosphere, too.

Rain at last, though it didn’t start raining properly until I was back on the bike. I almost turned back for more swimming, but the prospect of having to put on a wet swimsuit and use wet towels kept me from it.

But it was enjoyable anyway. Especially the large heavy raindrops bouncing back up from bubbles were pretty in the lamplight (I was very early so it was still dark).

One woman came out with her towel, started hanging it on the back of the seat as she does every day, only then realised it was raining and ran back inside to lay it on the bench there.

It’s actually less annoying to cycle in the rain after swimming in the rain. And my new(ish) jacket turns out to be waterproof, or at least water-resistant enough to keep my upper half dry until I got home.

I thought at first that this was a lamp for the road-builders to see by, but it turned out to be a lamp-post that someone must have driven into last night. When I came back an energy-watch man was sawing it into one-meter pieces of scrap metal and the road was too busy to take another picture.

Case: I have some files from folder A open in application X. I create a new file and want to save it. Where does the application suggest I save it? And if I want to open another file, what folder should the application give me to open from?

A well-behaved application should offer folder A in both cases, because that’s where all the rest of my work apparently is. It’s a sensible default— opening in A and saving to B does occur, but not as often as opening in A and saving to A. Kate does this, and goes even further in predicting correctly which folder I want; just now I opened a file and closed it in the folder where I want to save what I’m currently typing, and it got it right. Also, if I have a file from A open in one tab and a file from B in another, it gives me A when I hit ^o (for Open) in the A-file and B when I hit ^o in the B-file.

Not so OpenOffice. It stubbornly offers the last folder used, even if I already have a file from another folder open. But then it seems to open every file in its own instance, so that makes a weird kind of sense. Its options are hard to find —they reside in at least two different places in the menus— and harder to understand, so if it can be changed I haven’t found how.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t working on several different projects at the moment that all involve more layout than I can manage with just a text editor, and I don’t trust KOffice yet for critical business stuff.

Swimming at sunrise these last few days, and going from summer to winter time means I’ll get to do it again next month.

Air temperature: 0°C
Water temperature: about 22°C
In the water: about a dozen people, mostly middle-aged and older women with a sprinkling of old men. Are we really so much more hardy than our younger sisters? It’s not that swimming is something only older people do, because the indoor pool is full of young women (and other people of both sexes and all ages). A few days ago I heard a woman say that her sixteen-year-old daughter swims indoors because she has too little body fat to stay warm, but it can’t be only that, because several of the outdoor regulars are lean and one old woman is positively scrawny.

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I have an embryonic business web page at irinarempt.eu. It has a standard footer as a server-side include, to be expanded with more relevant information later. For now it contains a small blurb and the last-modified date as <!--#echo var="LAST_MODIFIED" --> .

It works perfectly one level down (on both of my mail-form pages) where it reads

Optimised for Konqueror and Firefox | Last updated: October 12, 2009

but not on the main page, where the timefmt directive doesn’t seem to work, so it reads

Optimised for Konqueror and Firefox | Last updated: Monday, 12-Oct-2009 20:39:05 CEST

WTF? I copied the relevant line (<!--#include virtual="/include/footer.html" -->) from one file to another, so it can’t be a typo in the text; it can’t be a typo in the footer itself either, because it appears as it should in the mail forms. It’s reading the file, because the “Optimised” part does appear, and when I add something arbitrary to the include that appears on the offending main page as well. It’s only this directive that works in the subdirectory but not in the root:

<!--#config timefmt="%B %e, %Y" -->

This should give “October 12, 2009” and indeed does in the subdirectory.

Is there anything about timefmt that makes it not work in the document root? Am I missing something glaringly obvious? Should I give the main page a different footer and dispense with the server-side include there?

I should have taken the picture from the other side, I see now, because that’s stamped “Made in Czechoslovakia”. I don’t know if these things are being made in Czechia (or in Slovakia) these days. It does date it; this is an indestructible cast-iron meat grinder. I used it to grind a kilo of meat for the pork pie, but it’s also perfect for dried fruit when I want to make fruit jerky in Lent.

And still people are surprised that I don’t have a food processor. I should be telling them that I process my own food.

Autumn seems the perfect time for English cooking. Last Sunday my other half made perfect roast beef, this Sunday I made a pork pie.

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I promise I’ll stop spamming now…

But this was too strange to pass up, especially at 50 cents. It tasted like energy drink, so I let someone else drink it.

These are ecologically-conscious dishwasher tablets. So why can’t they package their regular dishwasher tablets neatly arranged in a small box like this, too, instead of throwing them haphazardly in a box three times the size so it’s two-thirds full of air? According to Prima, who is quite good at economics, because transporting air is still cheaper than getting a machine or a human to stack dishwasher tablets this neatly.

They work well, and they don’t contain phosphates or perfume, and they’re only marginally more expensive than the other kind, so I’m sticking with them. Also, the little box is very cute.

… but how do I get in?

Here’s the cat that tried to sample our roast beef. We used to call him and his sister “the Cats of Little Brain” because last summer, whenever they saw us on the roof terrace, they looked up longingly, mewing, without seeing the obvious way up; but this one seems to have figured it out.

At last I’ve cleared my folder of cat pictures! I’ve given up trying to bake cupcakes for humans belonging to any cats appearing here.

The scruffy-looking stray kitten only didn’t run away as it saw me because it really wanted to lick the last drops of chocolate milk from the tin. The haughty one next to it is called Keesje and lives in the same house as the black tomcat one shouldn’t ring the bell for, who turns out to be called Beau. There’s also a Kareltje, but I haven’t seen him yet.

No, I don’t have it, but my website does: I registered irinarempt.eu for corporate purposes and I’ve convinced our Apache server that it’s called that and to find it where in fact it is, at http://rempt.xs4all.nl/irina/zaak. And also at http://www.valdyas.org/irina/zaak, because valdyas.org is an alias for rempt.xs4all.nl (but the server has nothing to do with that, it’s administered elsewhere, in a place I haven’t gone yet). The web site isn’t much yet, slightly more than a placeholder, but at least it’s there.

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As you can see I’ve fixed the comments problem here, so I thought I’d go and add comments to Valdyis galsin as well. As soon as I opened the page template file I saw why I’d given up the last time around: comments are in fact enabled, but whatever I do I can’t get it to show on the page. It’s exactly the same syntax as here in Found Objects (in fact I copied and pasted it), all the files it might be looking for are the same, and it does read that bit of the page too because if I put some random text in place of the comments link it shows up all right.

WTF?

Any Blosxom gurus about who can shed light on the case? I admit that I’ve been tweaking the page template a bit more than with Found Objects (for one thing the postinfo is on the left side in a box of its own) but placement-by-stylesheet shouldn’t affect the commands inside the paragraph, should it?

And the previous time I tried to fix Valdyis galsin comments, I broke Found Objects comments. This time, apparently, it hasn’t happened yet. Let’s keep hoping.

I really shouldn’t read the supermarket magazine, Allerhande, because it doesn’t fail to make me shake my head in vexation.

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Two weeks and a day after handing in my application form, I was still without a swimming pass. In I went with yet another free ticket (“forgotten property” this time). Nice: 8 degrees air temperature, which made the water feel warmer than the 21 or 22 degrees it must have been. And quiet, as always on Thursdays, because some of the regulars come in later to help with school swimming lessons. I hardly noticed my cold— after all, it’s normal to have stinging eyes and a nose full of water in the pool.

Just as I was going out, the swimming coordinator (Jan D; all the men working there seem to be called Jan) called after me “Are you Mrs [horrible mangling of my last name]? Or [different horrible mangling of my last name]?” Me: “[my actual last name], yes.” It turned out that (a) they’d lost my form; (b) I did have a record in their database, but very incomplete, and they’d spelt my last name wrong as usual; (c) for some mysterious reason there was a picture of someone else in the record. So Jan called Computer Woman, who entered my name (spelt right this time), address, phone number, etcetera and took another picture. A blank pass was made to see that it could be done, and so I could see that the picture actually looked like me.

Then Jan handed me a form identical to the one I’d already filled in. “Why?” I asked. “The only thing I can’t tell you now is the bank account to get the subscription fee from. All the other stuff I’ve just told to your colleague and she’s entered it.” But this was for their files; apparently they have a whole archive of handwritten stuff instead of either proper backups or printouts of what they’ve got in their database. (No wonder things disappear!) That makes four times that I’m giving them my details. But tomorrow, when I hand it in, they’ll give me my pass. Whew.

ETA: Jan just called to say they’ve found my form at the other location. Just as I was looking up the account number. And, commendably, they’re making the pass valid from today, effectively giving me two weeks of free swimming to make up for the annoyance.

Today in the supermarket I overheard a young man, in his early twenties by the look of him, saying to his friends “I ate an apple the other day, for the first time in my life”.

I can imagine that people can grow to twenty without eating specific foods: growing up in a vegetarian family, for instance, and never tasting meat until adulthood if at all. Or growing up Jewish or Muslim and never trying pork. And many a friend of our daughters has had her first taste of Indonesian food, home-baked bread, artichokes, venison, squid, seitan, pizza made from scratch rather than being bought frozen, or even watermelon —all things we don’t think particularly exotic or outrageous— in our house. But apples! I buy them practically by the bushel (do apples come in bushels?) because the girls can go through a kilo in one single day.

Aren’t apples a childhood staple? Didn’t he ever get apple sauce with a children’s menu when he was small? Or did he, until now, only know bottled apple sauce and vaguely realise that apples are what it’s made of, as most people know bread is made from flour but don’t know what to do when faced with actual flour?

Unfortunately I didn’t catch what he thought of the apple. I hope he liked it.

I’m trying to build up from 30 to 40 laps this week —one kilometer— by doing two more each day. I’m not very inclined to actually count while swimming; I’d much rather daydream, chat to acquaintances when we pass in the water, plan what to cook, think up roleplaying adventures, in fact all the brain-on-idle things I do when sitting for art classes too. (Except that swimming is a lot easier on my muscles!)

So I thought of a trick. At the start this morning I wore four covered elastic bands (metal-free ponytail holders) on my left wrist and transferred one to the other side after each two laps, whenever I arrived on the side of the heptagonal [1] guard-house. When they were all on the right, I knew that I’d done eight laps. Next, move them to the left one by one for 16. Then the whole procedure again for 32.

[1] Really. I counted the sides four times, because I couldn’t believe it wasn’t 6 or 8.

Tomorrow, I’ll start with one band on the right and move it to the left for the first two laps. Wednesday two on the right, Thursday three, and on Friday I’ll have reached the kilometer and will celebrate by wearing one band in a different colour, because I’ve got only four purple ones.

I also seem to have increased my speed from a kilometer to almost a mile an hour— one 25-meter lap in exactly one minute.

It went swimmingly. 30 laps in the 25-meter basin in 45 minutes, making my average swimming speed (without much effort; that comes later) exactly 1 km/h. Prima was impressed, as I’d come down with a flu-like thing on Thursday night and only just risen from my sick-bed. This morning I was still slow and a bit wobbly, so I got started too late to catch the 7-to-9 laps-swimming slot, but there was another chance from 12 to 1. (This pool is only for ‘target groups’, probably to make it hard for anyone not in a target group to actually swim.)

The open-air pool was still open, so that was where I went. There were about a dozen people in the water already, all ages and sizes. The field seemed to be self-sorting for speed: the slow swimmers closest to the covered pool and the fast ones on the far side. I started out in the ‘somewhat faster than slow’ lane and ended up in the ‘about average’ lane, together with a man with a beard and a ponytail who looked for all the world like a UserFriendly sysadmin, a very small, very fat, very old woman with goggles, and a pair of fortyish women who talked finance, then gardening, then finance again while swimming. Everybody but those two was swimming in silence; quite a weird effect for me, used to swimming with the girls at free-for-all times.

I’d promised myself to do ten laps and then see if I was tired. It turned out that I was a little short of breath but my muscles didn’t protest, so I did another ten laps. Half a kilometer. I can go home now, I thought, but the old woman was still in the water (as well as the sysadmin and the finance women) and I didn’t really feel tired yet, so I kept at it, and at 26 I thought I might just as well go on to 30. After that, I got out, thinking I would warm up in the indoor pool, but as soon as I was on dry land I realised that the human body is very heavy out of the water, all the more so because I had really done those 750 meters. (Also, the indoor pool was fuller of people than the open-air one, and smelt much more of chlorine.) So that was that.

I’ll definitely go again, and if the chlorine doesn’t disagree with me horribly I’ll get a laps-swimming pass when I’ve used up my ten-times ticket. As I already surmised, exercise and fun.

I’d almost guilted myself into joining the gym to get into shape and shed a few pounds of flab. The only problem is that it would fall into my “do something” slot, instead of early music, and I was not eager to replace something fun by something very much not fun. Working out at the gym would probably make me feel good, afterwards, but I can’t imagine that what I’d have to do to achieve that there would be anything but tedious. Also, the health-type gym has a kind of medical atmosphere, and the regulars of the sports-type gym, who stand around smoking in front when I pass it, tend to be the kind of people I don’t feel comfortable around.

So then I was in Germany, and it was hot, and we went to the Freibad in Rübeland on someone’s recommendation. In the water I realised how much I love swimming. Over the next few days a plan hatched: I’d cycle to the swimming pool, swim laps for a while, and cycle back, twice or three times a week. Total-body workout and fun. Get a ten-times ticket first to see if the chlorine doesn’t make me sick (which is why I quit serious swimming as a child, but I think they use less now than forty years ago) and then a special laps-swimming pass (which costs less per month than the gym, too).

On Monday, I tested the bike ride: about twenty minutes. On Tuesday I checked the website of the swimming pool, swimsuit and towel already packed, to make sure of times and prices.

Gah. This week there’s the Zwemvierdaagse, a special event where you sign up for X laps each day for four days and get a medal when you complete it. And the other pool (farther away and not as nice) was closed for maintenance, because all their regulars were in the water in this pool anyway. I could have joined, it didn’t need pre-registration, but I don’t know my value of X yet and I do want to work up to it.

But next week I’ll be in the water, probably on Tuesday and Thursday.

Self, you shouldn’t let the fact that you haven’t posted any What I did on my holidays yet keep you from blogging about other things.

Note to others: Yes, I will blog about Germany. Only not all at once. I just happen not to be the What I did on my holidays type.

(found this while looking for something else and couldn’t resist posting it)

You know that I have three cards, one black on both sides, one red on both sides, the third with one black and one red side. I put them in an envelope (that you know was empty before). You pull out one card. The side you see is black. How much chance that the other side is also black?

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This seemed a completely useless traffic light until I was editing the picture.

It looked as if it didn’t make sense to make either cars or cyclists stop here unless it is for pedestrians, and the pedestrian crossing is request-only anyway (and very quiet at that). But now I see that it’s actually to protect cyclists going straight ahead, towards the bridge, from cars turning faintly right into the street that runs alongside the bridge until one has to turn either left or right at the river quay. As I’ve hardly ever done anything except turn faintly right into that street myself, I hadn’t noticed.

Not that it wouldn’t be a good idea to make right-turning cyclists exempt from the light: there’s plenty of room for them to the right of any cars.

Nice of you to subvert a standard “railway station and getting lost” dream by having the train to Paris take only about half an hour, and letting me find the church easily, close to the station. But it was strange to find a lay service in progress in a church that’s so riddled with priests in waking life. And the study session afterwards in French (it was Paris after all) was so daunting that I preferred to go into town and look around until it was time to meet my other half and go to the notary.

I did indeed pass the notary’s office, but it was closed, saying “it’s not here” and specifying where it was instead; but when we got there in the evening it turned out to be in the original place after all. The notary’s wife-cum-secretary spoke excellent Dutch with a charming accent, a very good thing because even in my dreams I can’t handle French legalese. I think I got a legacy of about fifty euros— probably enough to pay for the train ticket as it was only half an hour.

I was eleven and a half and already a geek. My parents bought a TV set just before the Moon landing— perhaps for it, I’d have to ask my father. My mother was, on hindsight, wacky. She got me out of bed in the middle of the night, “they’re going to walk on the moon!”

I’m eternally grateful. Seeing things while they happen, even remote, is always better than the report afterwards.

In November 1989 I was visiting my parents just as the Berlin Wall fell. My father and I watched it and said “we’re seeing history happen here!” In 1969 I was too young to realise that, I think, and though my father is much more geeky than my mother ever was he wasn’t geeky enough then to alert me to it.

I’ve always intended to get my daughters out of bed for the first Mars landing, but the way things are going now I think they’ll all have left home by then. But we have tried to teach them to appreciate real things, to recognise history when it happens, and to care about small steps just in case they turn out to be big leaps.

We went to Utrecht to celebrate our sixteenth wedding anniversary, and to buy books to take on holiday and bras at SandrabrA because that’s the only place we know of that has the right combination of very small girth and generous cup size for the teenagers (and sort-of-medium girth and generous cup size for me; I have a really well-fitting bra for the first time in my life, a rather strange sensation, not completely pleasant for now because underwiring takes a lot of getting used to but it does wonders for my figure). While we were there anyway, we thought we’d find a nice museum.

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Comments temporarily disabled while I figure out what went wrong. Not that anyone comments at all— or was it impossible earlier and I just didn’t realise?

Time: 2:25
Congregation: 20-40, people trickling in all the time. We started half an hour earlier than usual, so a whole lot came in at the normal time.
Crew: Altar: Fr T, adult acolyte, teenaged acolyte. Choir: All but one of us! (SSAAATB)
Coordination: okay
Tunefulness: faltering towards the end when it went from hot and stuffy to intolerably hot and stuffy
Knees: okay; ankles not so okay because a midge (or several midges) insisted on biting me on them.
Voice: started out all right but after a fit of coughing during the Doxology it didn’t recover until dosed with (excellent) Greek moonshine at the party.
Strangeness: In front of the ‘choir line’ it looked like a Greek church with all the women on the left and all the men on the right. On the level of the choir there was one man on the women’s side and five women (in the choir) on the men’s side, as well as a little girl sitting on the choir platform. Behind that it was completely mixed.

Earlier this week I made Joy the Baker’s easy cinnamon roll muffins. I should have been alerted when she said

As much as I love the little devils (and I hate to say this) I hate to bake them. The problem is not the sweet yeast dough or the rolling or the slicing. I simply have no patience for the waiting that is required of me during the proofing, rolling, slicing and proofing again process. I realize this is totally unreasonable, but it’s just the truth.

I rarely mind waiting for bread dough, in fact only when I realise at 10 pm that there’s no bread in the house for the girls to take to school the following morning. But I was intrigued —I bake a lot of different cupcake-like objects, after all— so I tried.

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At the supermarket yesterday: a girl of about seven, all pink frills and pigtails. She was carrying something that looked like a digger made of construction kit and tried frantically to interest her mother in it: “look what I’ve made!” The mother kept making don’t-bother-me noises and finally killed the daughter’s enthusiasm completely with “That’s not a toy for girls, anyway!”

Grr.

I was tempted to Say Something but I didn’t trust my post-cold voice. (Also, I’m really a coward in that sort of thing, especially when I don’t have the girls with me to be brave in front of.) I’ve always thought of construction kit as a particularly gender-neutral toy, but then I grew up building Lego houses with my father. And for my fourth birthday, I asked for and got a sand lorry. It had a yellow cab and a red tilting skip and I remember it as whopping big, but that’s from a four-year-old’s perspective, of course.

I never attempted to force gender-neutrality on my girls— except avoiding pink like the plague when they were small. When they wanted girl things, they got girl things. (But also lots of Legos!) Nowadays they buy their own girl things, wear makeup, have school planners with frills and lace, but they’ll never be told (at least not by us) that something is not for girls. Even if they aren’t gonna be engineers.

In a way I wish it had been closer to Ada Lovelace Day so I could have interviewed the little engineer and taken pictures of her digger, but I don’t know how I could have explained it to her mother. I just hope she’ll be strong enough to stand up to the world, and not give up geekiness out of frustration.

So Tertia is off to sit her Cambridge First Certificate in English exams today. She went to the station at an ungodly hour to meet the rest of the class and take the 7:14 to Utrecht, where they’re likely to be the only teenagers in a hall full of adults. She was completely unfazed, only double-checking that she had her train ticket and her ID.

She’s determined to do better than Prima did last year. As Prima’s results were A across the board it’s impossible to do much better. Tertia doesn’t have Prima’s madcap fluency, but she may be somewhat more accurate and thoughtful in the written work, so she’s likely to do at least as well. (And, let’s face it, it would be unthinkable for a kid of ours not to do well in English.) I checked her Use of English practice paper (reported to be the hardest), found three mistakes in about 60 questions and called it “A minus”, but of course I don’t know the norm.

They’ve made it a competition: the loser will bake for the winner. Prima has promised cookies and Tertia her famous chocolate-covered chocolate cake. A win-win situation, either way. Secunda, meanwhile, is up next year because she got into a horrible schedule conflict and had to stop the lessons. More baked goods expected.

Click the picture or this caption to see the full size scan. Names and signatures obscured to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.

Prima brought home a note from the chemistry teacher, asking our permission for her to taste the beer she brewed in class. Sensible (though slight overkill), as almost everyone in that class is under 16, the legal beer-drinking age, and some parents might object.

The wording of the note, on the other hand… I said “it makes me want to take a red pen to it!” and Prima not only encouraged me, but suggested that I blog about it, too. (The 1 out of 10 mark and some of the punctuation are hers.)

On hindsight, I should probably have done it completely by the book, but I was having far too much fun scribbling “Number doesn’t match” (twice) and “Write out abbreviation” (twice), correcting run-on sentences and marking a buzz-phrase as “woolly”. Two things stood out even more than the rest of the mess: “The last subject of this school-year in chemistry had as its subject…” and “We ask your permission, by completing the form below, that your son or daughter [tastes the beer (s)he brewed]”. Who is completing the form? Apparently ‘we’, the sender of the letter, not ‘you’, the parent-or-guardian. And I couldn’t resist taking the red pen to the form itself: I don’t want my daughter to have to taste the result of his experiment.

If the teacher objects to the markup, Prima will tell him that I’m a professional editor and I’ll gladly offer my further services. I know that it’s not a science teacher’s job to produce great literature, but I think they do have an obligation to write adequate Dutch. When I complained to another science teacher last year about a syllabus, she said “I’m not responsible for that one, thank God”, with a grin that suggested that she’d read it and shaken her head over it.

I intend to rewrite the note completely— that’s why I scanned it in the first place, before Prima suggested blogging.

Closure, please. I admit that it was clever of me, if I may say so, to kick the burning spray-cans right out of the dream and wake myself up by that before they went BOOM!, but I’m still wondering whether they went off in the dream after all, and how big a BOOM! it was, and what happened to all the people.

Finally, I fully realise what a “cult classic” is, because now I’ve found some of my own. Warning: most of the links are to German-language pages and video clips. I’ll mark the language with a mouseover title.

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No paper this morning. Trying to tell the paper that on their Improved Service Page (which needed re-registration, a bit of a hassle with my cold-clogged sinuses) had this result:

I was about to mail them the screenshot instead when it occurred to me to try with Firefox instead of Konqueror, which worked perfectly. Now who do I send a bug report— the Konqueror maintainers, or the paper because they ought to make it work in all browsers, or both?

All of the above, I think. Also indignant.

European elections aren’t supposed to be about national issues, but of course many people vote as if they are. And many people haven’t been voting with their head, or their heart, but with their underbelly and their knees. Perhaps being upset about the results is also a kneejerk reaction, but so be it.

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Someone —not the post— delivered two bailiff’s writs to our house, addressed to the Turkish mutual-help association and the Kurdish ditto. I’m not the [whatever] mutual-help association, but that’s far from obvious for someone who doesn’t know this part of town well: they used to reside in a building that’s currently being renovated, about a hundred meters up the street. Their address was No. 11 Something Street, and ours is No. 11 Short Something Street. On top of that, our house is immediately obvious as it’s in a little square (well, triangle), and theirs, big though it is, lurks in the middle of a narrow street. Also, the fact that our house is literally on top of the clearly-marked Russian Orthodox Church could have led the delivery person to think “ah, foreigners, yes, here it is”, never thinking any further. It used to happen a lot more often, and I used to deliver mail to the right place every now and again, but I know that the [whatever] mutual-help associations aren’t using the building any more. In fact I suspect that they have ceased to exist.

I was about to return-to-sender when I noticed that “sender” had ten different addresses, printed in 5-point 30% grey type on the back of the envelope. I didn’t want to do that to an innocent postie, and I didn’t want to stick rather a lot of postage on an envelope big enough to stuff the two big heavy letters in. So I called the number, the same for all addresses— first time ever that I’ve called an 088 number. First time ever, too, that a phone queue has told me “You are next” after “One person waiting ahead of you”— I’ve always wondered whether that one person was in fact me or really the person ahead of me. After that, though, I got a veritable sampler of on-hold noises, about four minutes, until a human came on the line.

I told her what had happened and gave her my address and the address on the envelope, stressing that they were different addresses, because an actual bailiff at the door would scare me witless, even if I can prove that I’m not the Turkish and Kurdish mutual-help associations so I don’t have to pay their overdue bills. She noted it all down and said I could do whatever I wanted with the writs, so I tore them to pieces and put them in the recycling box.

Not before I’d read one, though: it was a summons to pay Chamber of Commerce dues. I rather think the Turkish and Kurdish mutual-help associations forgot to tell the Chamber of Commerce that they don’t exist any more.

Either someone’s idea of a joke, or a hilarious attempt at prudery!

ETA: Europa, of course. Not only my favourite statue in the town park, but also very close to my ideal of female beauty.

View from our living-room window:

It was even more crowded before I got out the camera. When I took the picture two cyclists and most of the school kids had already gone away, and the blue lorry on the right backed up a bit. On the other hand, the representative of a posh German handbag company (with the black car) had appeared.

After the success of 2008 Fieldwork Day I wanted to do it again. And again, it was a success.

Tertia was on one of my teams though I’d asked for all-boys teams or, failing that, teams without any of my daughters. “Is that so?” Geography Teacher said when I alerted him, “let’s try to swap.” But the only reasonable swap would have given me the same locations as last year— and Secunda. So we left it the way it was.

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After a night with a series of small but annoying nightmares (in which various people did things to me they would never do in real life, but oh so convincing) the dream engine served me an idea that I’d like to put into practice sometime. Well, after trying to get into an already overcrowded lobby with keys that didn’t fit, fully expecting to get lost because the building was called “Labyrinth”.

It’s a sort of treasure hunt, perhaps inspired by the Quest Box (themed puzzle/educational town walk) that the local masonic order rents out. It needs a place of manageable size— all of a largish village, the centre of a provincial town, one section of a city with different facilities. Participants get a booklet with all available locations: shops, institutions, offices, art studios, museums, churches: any place with people who can cooperate. They also get a slip of paper with the numbers of three random locations. Mine went up to 300 at least, though I’m sure there were no more than fifty or so in all, so perhaps the numbering was a bit haphazard (or, I realise now, locations were numbered according to type: shops 1 to 99, […], health institutions 201 to 299). The idea is to go to each of your assigned locations and do something appropriate: solve a puzzle, lend a hand, find out something, play a game, paint a picture, depending on what the place is for. After completing the task you get a small object (that you can keep, I think; though there was a puzzling instruction in the booklet saying that if you wanted to keep the objects you paid proportionately less than the 11 euros the treasure hunt cost).

After that I woke up and resolved to finish the dream, so the rest is not very clear: for one thing I don’t really know what happened after you had all three of your objects. Perhaps the point was to make sense of them in combination. I do know that I got a painted styrofoam claw at the game shop, which was number 26, but not what I did for it. At the maternity hospital (number 293) I got a thick bright blue booklet with lots of facts about the hospital and a bookmark on the page I needed for the task, but I didn’t get round to the actual task because they offered me a job editing their documentation (including the booklet; possibly because I spotted mistakes).

I think it’s a game for a specific day, the Nth annniversary of the town, something like that. At least, there were dozens of people doing it on their own or in little groups, and I can’t imagine that it would be so popular that so many would be doing it at once on a random day if it’s always on. The man in the game shop told me that he liked the idea, because almost everybody who had number 26 bought something from him as well as doing the get-the-claw thing.

You are serving me far too many Russians lately. My other half is completely right about that.

I wouldn’t have minded the two Russian women who were so eager to do the dishes at my party, though, if they hadn’t gone on to wash every object in the kitchen, and in the kitchen cupboards, and to put them back all wrong, some still dripping with soapy water. It was so convincing that I almost got up (in real life) at 5:25 to restore everything to order. I realised just in time that I don’t have such a big kitchen, and I don’t keep all my glasses and cups in the kitchen cupboards at that. Also, they apparently took most of the money from my froggy bank (to buy cleaning supplies?) and that was so convincing that I weighed it in my hand on coming down.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have left the two women unsupervised if I hadn’t had to take a bus to to to the metal concert with Prima (and possibly Secunda and Tertia) which the paper listed as being at 7:30. They meant 7:30pm, apparently. We got there in the morning and all we found was a village empty of metal bands, which was a great disappointment but it dawned (almost literally) on us soon enough.

I don’t know whether the bent art dealer (in that village, it seems) was also Russian: a big ruddy-faced red-haired youngish man wearing an open shirt that showed off his red chest hair. He only wanted paintings of ‘chicks’, which he later admitted was a mistake, but only after there had been a veritable flood of rather good paintings of young men with blowing-in-the-wind hair clearly made by tanaudel, though the only artist featured in the dream was a bearded man with two young sons who were running wild on the beach.

Good thing about today: I’ve got glasses I can actually see clearly through.

Warning: a rant. Yes, I feel better now.

It must have been the days —weeks!— of subtly wrong glasses, and the resultant squinty headache and crankiness, that caused the bout of can’t-do-anything-right I had this morning while trying to put the folk-dancing magazine together. It didn’t help that Software was Against Me. I can’t recall exactly what went wrong, but I think it’s that KWord doesn’t like pictures and OpenOffice doesn’t like .odt files saved by KWord. I gave up when my stomach growled so loudly that I had to stop and have lunch— at about 2 pm.

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Secunda and I were walking in the Queensday market (where kids sell their own outgrown things and household items their parents have no more use for; ours once earned 40 euros between them and spent it all on other stuff, and ice cream) when an announcement was made over the speakers of the music stage. PA systems being what they are, I understood “Apeldoorn” and Secunda understood “the market closes at 3 o’clock”, and we both kind of gathered that events had been cancelled.

I thought that the market was scheduled to close at 3 o’clock (it was 2:45), and that events had been cancelled because there wasn’t enough public. I’d noticed before that the town seemed very quiet for Queensday and assumed that everybody had gone to Apeldoorn (which is, after all, only about 10 miles away) because Queen Beatrix was visiting that town with lots of her family.

When we were home, the bell rang. It was someone I know slightly who lives nearby, and a woman I also know by sight, possibly his wife. The first thing they asked was “have you heard the radio?” No, we don’t listen to the radio, and we don’t watch TV either, what’s up? “There’s been an accident in Apeldoorn, people have been killed, everything’s been called off, you have to take the flag down or you’ll have the police at the door.” “Or fly it at half-mast,” the woman added.

I’m not going to fly the flag at half-mast if I don’t know what for, so we took it inside and I went to check on news sites: some madman drove his car through the crowd in the royal celebration.

I realised then that I’m not going to fly the flag at half-mast for people I don’t know, either[1]: if it had been the queen, or any of her family, yes, I would have put it back at half-mast. Not that it’s any less bad when it’s random unknown people (two three men and two women were killed, and six five men, four women, two teenagers and a nine-year-old kid were wounded) but it’s less public and world-shattering.

[1] Except on the Fourth of May, commemoration of the fallen of WWII. We all know those people.

I’m still a bit shaken, with a strange mixture of feelings and questions. How would it have been if a madman had driven through the crowd in some town where the queen wasn’t? Did he really mean to hit the queen— and if so, why was he so clumsy about it? When he was cut from the wreck of his car, he seems to have said that his action was aimed against the royal family. Fortunately (for the royal family) there was a handy monument in the way which he crashed against. The Twitter buzz has it that he only wanted to make a point, to kill himself in the sight of the queen; the latest news is that he’s almost succeeded.

What I’m most afraid of is that this will spark more anti-terror measures, more surveillance, more fear, more distance, more restrictions, less unconcerned feasting— less freedom, as almost every incident recently has caused security to clamp down more tightly, whether that’s sensible or not.

My glass cleaner wouldn’t squirt, though there was a centimetre or so left in the bottle.

(warning: 3 pictures after the cut)

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And I liked it so much. It used to be my board for pungent things like onions and ginger and garlic and hot peppers, so the other chopping boards wouldn’t reek of it. In the old house it fell between the fridge and the cupboard and I couldn’t reach it until we moved, but when I had it again I realised how much I had missed it. That was the only time it saw the inside of the dishwasher (and three coats of sunflower oil to get it back into shape).

And then it was worn through. Gah. We have a large round board made of hardwood so it doesn’t retain smells, so that’s what I use now, but it’s not ideal, and I think I’ll look for another small rectangular wooden board. Perhaps later this afternoon in the Queen’s Day market, come to think of it. Secunda bought me a round wooden board there last year.

ETA: Nope. Though I did buy a dark blue backpack for one euro to replace the green backpack.

Finally they’re doing something about the old tumbledown town-house between the weigh-house (now historical museum) and the toy museum. The meters-high sign seems to imply that it’s going to be a Russian restaurant. (Not much information yet behind that link; they say sneak preview soon.)

But the text the publicity people probably think looks Russian…

… is all Greek to me. Gibberish, as if someone took some lorem-ipsum text and put it in a symbol font. When it’s so easy to get real Russian lorem-ipsum text (took me less than a minute to find, and I’m not even a publicity person).

A duel, and mysterious ships
The mystery revealed

Is anyone still getting the writeups from here, rather than directly from Valdyis galsin or via my front page? If so, please speak up in comments or by mail. If nobody does within a week or so, I’ll stop posting links here.

Seventh week of Mizran, back in Turenay.

On Valdyis galsin:

Aidan writes to Cora
Cora writes to Aidan
Raisse leaves Valdis
Moyri writes from Essle

Vespers and Liturgy: quiet (17 including choir and altar) but with an actual deacon! The choir seemed to be afflicted with Plague of Frog in Throat, but it was mild and transient. Afterwards a man came to test the fire alarms— when I went to sign his papers (having been specially appointed by Fr T to do that) he said he’d been about to come earlier but then it looked as if there was a service going on. Well, yes.

While my other half was doing the non-weird shopping I did the usual weird Holy Week shopping: flower-arranging foam because the stuff that was in the base for the cross was worn to fragments after three years and the usual flower-arranging woman isn’t there; house slippers (a size too large, it turns out, because they have a different supplier that does get the size right— I was used to buying the next size up); some battery-powered bike lights because they were ridiculously cheap and we never seem to have enough; a black-pattern-on-white headscarf for Holy Saturday.

We sent Very Tall Altar Boy to the supermarket for more eggs to dye red because I’d underestimated the number we needed. The already-dyed eggs now all have crosses and the letters XB for Christos Voskrese. Rather good for Thursday; there have been years that I was finishing the eggs in the community room after Liturgy on Saturday.

After last night’s service —Matins and First Hour of Holy Thursday— I realised it would be pointless to keep a complete record of the services as I did last year. After all, most of the statistics will be the same (last night’s service was actually a few minutes shorter than the same one in 2008, though we made an effort not to read too fast). I do want to keep some kind of record, though, for myself and anyone else who is interested.

This morning when I went downstairs at 7:00 to make prosphora I thought “the crazy days have started”. Now I’m typing this, however, it occurs to me that it’s perhaps the sanest part of the year: we’re never so close to God as in these few days. The only craziness is in daily life. There’s always something unexpected— usually not to do with Holy Week at all: yesterday it was my other half having to go to the optician because his glasses had broken in his hand. (The optician and his apprentice spent about an hour trying to fix the frame, gave up, and put the glasses in a sports frame so he can at least see something). I could manage to dye eggs and make pascha, but there was no time left for laundry or kitchen floor (or indeed to sit down long enough to rest my feet enough not to hurt in church; I think this afternoon I’ll try to get a pair of inlay soles designed for people who stand a lot). Also, the church freezer turned out to be broken— it’s probably been broken for days if not weeks. Having fresh prosphora every Sunday keeps one from noticing, but I was baking ahead for three Liturgies in four days, two of them usually very well-attended. We rescued all but one bag of prosphora, and I think all the kulich (but we didn’t dare open those bags) and put them in Choirmistress’ freezer with the altar prosphora.

There’s already one house guest out of three (briefly four) expected: Very Tall Altar Boy, who is now studying his Greek from Secunda’s book. It’s a first-and-second-year book and he’s in Chapter 4 while she’s in Chapter 11. Secunda herself is doing Dutch, because she’s excused from class today but obviously not from the test on Tuesday.

Now for service 2 of 9, Vespers and Liturgy of Holy Thursday. I’m wearing my newly tie-dyed purple T-shirt that turns out to match my favourite purple top (floppy half-open shirt that needs something under it) perfectly.

Usually when the radio wakes me up at 6:30 I hit the “off” button the moment there’s a sound, because my other half’s alarm doesn’t go off until 6:40 and I want him to be able to enjoy his extra ten minutes. This morning, however, I was in bed alone because he’s in Helsinki, so I actually listened to the radio for a bit.

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Time: 4:35
Congregation: started out 3 (all men), grew to 5 or so (mixed), 1 man was left at the end
Crew: Altar: Fr T (not in the altar except at the beginning) Choir: started out 3, ended up 2, with 5 in the middle; all women (3S, 2A)
Coordination: good
Tunefulness: all right
Knees: Oh, yes. Also feet, calves, thighs, buttocks, hips, back and sides, shoulders, arms, hands, chin and throat (my black headscarf is scratchy) and forehead (there’s sand on that floor). I did manage to do all the prostrations, though the prayer of St Ephrem the Syrian in the First Hour caught me unawares.
Voice: normal, a bit wobbly at the end of Matins on account of weepiness.
Strangeness: It’s daily Matins so the Lauds are read rather than sung. I love those psalms, especially 148, “Beasts and all cattle; Creeping things and flying fowl. Kings of the earth and all peoples; Princes and all judges of the earth; Both young men and maidens; Old men and children”. Also, four hours of darkness is absolutely no preparation for having the Ninth Ode and all the rest of Matins in the light.

Lesson learnt from the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete: however hard you try, it’s never good enough. This is a lesson I so must not learn.

Lesson learnt from the life of St Mary of Egypt: the only joy worth the trouble is what you squeeze out of the bare rock, painfully, by utter asceticism. Every bit of fun that’s easier to obtain is intrinsically sinful.

Years ago, Fr T forbade me to attend this service because it tended to teach me these lessons. It’s not for nothing that after the service it’s wine-and-oil (beer and deep-fried potato balls in my case).

Great Compline, Litia, Matins and First Hour.

Time: 2:15
Congregation: started out 4 besides altar and choir, only one was left at the end. It was a Tuesday night, of course, when nobody expects to go to church.
Crew: Altar: Fr T on his own Choir: 3 women; we sang most of the plain stuff in unison.
Coordination: good!
Tunefulness: good enough, especially as we mostly ignored Fr T when his cold made his voice go all over the place.
Knees: standing too long made them unfit for kneeling, so I had to sit between the two instances of the prayer of St Ephrem the Syrian to let them relax.
Voice: normal with a little burr at the end.
Strangeness: the service has intrinsic strangeness. It starts very Lentish, though with God is with us in the elaborate setting; then it becomes an all-out feast for Matins, and goes back to Lent very abruptly with the First Hour cutting in before the proper end of Matins.

Letter 1

Second week of Mizran.

Or: biology is easy, physics is crunchy

(Blosxom doesn’t do tagging, at least not without a plugin that would destroy other things. Faking it:)

Tags: AdaLovelaceDay09, #ALD09

The school is in a sad state of rebuilding, not only renovation but also much structural work. There is hardly a classroom, hallway or common-room that doesn’t sport boarded-up bits or is covered in plastic. All except the new science wing with combined theory-and-lab classrooms.

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A gushing letter frm Selle to Cora.

Cora gave Aidan this letter to read when they’re out of one another’s sight.

The introductory talk (with lots of examples from 15th- to 20th- century art) was about the conflict between figure and background and different ways to deal with it. You can emphasise the contrast, or make the background part of the figure, or vice versa, or any kind of mix-and-match. It’s amazing how people pick up things from the introduction even if they don’t intend to put it into practice consciously.

It was a very nice relaxed class: sometimes it’s a fight for me (usually enjoyable, but still a fight) and sometimes it just flows, like today.

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Raisse’s view of things.

They’re in no particular order, and I may think of more, but these are the ones that come to mind immediately.

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Well and truly fed up.

From my slow Lenten spring-cleaning:

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First week of Mizran, still in Valdis.

Raisse and Cora meet a very quiet party crasher in Episode 8, here inserted in its proper place so the story can run straight again.

Maidens all:

When it’s your turn to clean the upstairs bathroom, the laundry also falls to you, as you know well enough. Here are some things you may not know, or if you know them, may well forget.

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The one in Essle, that is.

I think I’ve got the hang of desktop activities now. For a while I liked the idea in theory, and even had a couple, but never really used them because I didn’t use a lot of widgets— I’m of the empty-screen school. But I do a lot of things that do require stuff on the screen, and that’s what I’ve discovered activities are in fact for.

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Over there —> you can see my new Twitter feed. I don’t know whether I’m actually going to use it much; I’m trying it out now so I’m probably a bit more voluble than I’ll eventually end up.

What made me decide to get a Twitter account after much wavering was the sudden realisation that it’s not meant to let people know what I’m doing at every moment —for instance, I’m not still making bliny— but to throw offhand remarks to the world too small to actually blog. I thought I’d use it to announce blog posts, too, but that’s before I found the widget to put on my blog.

On grounds of principle I ought perhaps to do my microblogging on identi.ca because that runs on free software (and some people I’d like to follow are there, too) but I’ll be a sheep for a bit to start with.

In the box are the 100 bliny I promised. In the dish in front of it the other 59. The last two are tiny, but the batter was too much for just one.

Now I can write up the recipe for the Purplish Cooking Pages and give the comparison table some headings. This was the largest version of the recipe; I can safely label it “about 150”.

My father-in-law gave me a 32 cm Scanpan frying pan, I think it’s this one, and it’s having its maiden flight right now making bliny.

I’m at about 50 (of 100 promised, likely to come out more) and I love the pan already. For one thing, it’s so large that I can fit in twice as many. And it goes on the wok burner! Also, it’s got some kind of heat-transfer technology in the bottom so it gets hot very evenly and stays at the right temperature— bliny isn’t the hot and hectic job it was last year and all years before.

I had this old green cloth handbag, and a few weeks ago the shoulder-strap snapped clean off, unmendable (or at least not mendable without extensive, expensive and visible trickery). I’d been wanting a new one anyway — I have another handbag more suitable than the old green one, black and with secret and super-secret compartments, but it’s got a wonky zipper and having that replaced would cost as much as a completely new one.

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If this is XXS, what will M be like? Or XL?

The idea for today’s art class was to make a kind of combination of model and portrait drawing, to show the model’s personality. Peter-Frans warned that it would be very intense and confronting, both for the students and for the model, and it was.

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Doing it in binary saves 101101, er, 45 candles. I won’t be such a symmetrical age again until I can light all the candles at 63.

Behind the table Prima can be seen, who baked and decorated the cake single-handedly. (I should have thought of it when she was 1111 last month.)

Chocolate cake, lower filling: marzipan, upper filling: cherries. Covered in whipped cream, decorated with hundreds-and-thousands, candied cherries and almond slivers. Delicious!

I have a froggy bank!

A birthday present from Prima. I’d seen a similar one in a shop and told her I liked it. This one is prettier! I especially like the ladybird on the frog prince’s front. I think I’ll call him Frederick.

This means that Tertia can have the piggy bank back that I had on semi-permanent loan. (She’s called Rosalie.)

All my presents at breakfast were green:

Left to right: new milk mug from Secunda (both of my favourite mugs broke within a fortnight of each other), Prince Frederick, aloe vera face cream from Tertia. My other half’s present wasn’t suitable for the breakfast table: it’s black and lacy.

ETA: amusingly, most of my shopping turned out to be green too. As is my bag, and also (not in the picture because I was wearing it) my coat.

Only the pictures of the black kitten are really recent (one of his humans allowed me in on a Tuesday night after early music and let me pet him). The rest are from my serendipity generator: screensaver that shows all my pictures as a slideshow. The calico sleeping with the orange curtain as backdrop was the one that prompted the gratuitous-cat-pictures series, but I thought I’d overwritten it with another of the same filename.

If you recognise your cat, please claim your cupcakes by giving me your street address! Nobody ever has: all my readers live on the other side of the world and/or don’t have cats (well, except one, you know who you are, and I’ll catch your cats on camera yet and bake something savoury for you instead).

I typed ‘blog’ instead of ‘kate’ by mistake and krunner opened the Kate session called ‘blog’.

I didn’t know it could do that!

Also, I’m getting used to it rolling out an extensive menu of educated guesses, and even choose from that occasionally— like the Kate session called ‘blog’, until now.

Cat: sleek tabby catling, just out of ears-too-big and tail-too-long kittenhood.
Mouse: amazing brainpower for such a little head.
Human: foolish creature with fondness for cat photography who forgot to charge her camera batteries.

Human spots cat, dismounts from bicycle and gets out camera.

Meanwhile, cat is intently watching a small pile of dead leaves, which rustles. Pokes it with a paw; sure enough a mouse runs out.

Cat puts paw on mouse. Mouse squeaks.

Human notices that camera has no battery power but wants to watch what happens.

Cat lifts paw, as kittens do to make sure that what they think they’ve caught really exists, though the mouse is perfectly visible.

Mouse takes advantage of this to start running.

Cat puts paw back hurriedly, on the tail this time.

Mouse goes into full reverse, runs up its own tail and sinks teeth into cat’s paw.

Cat yelps and retracts paw. Mouse runs.

While cat is washing injured limb in embarrassment, mouse pauses, looks back over shoulder with look on face saying clearly “I wrote How to Evade Cats, by A. Mouse” and disappears into shrubbery.

Human goes to buy milk and oranges and frozen peas. On return sees cat watching pile of leaves again.

That one will make a mouser yet.

We get a reminder invoice from the dentist (actually handled by a separate billing company) because apparently our insurance hasn’t paid the bill on time. I distinctly remember filling in a claim form, putting everything in an envelope, ticking “Dentistry” on the envelope and posting it, so I call the insurance company to find out what happened.

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We had the third Resurrection Gospel last night, Mark 16:9-20. Something bugged me about it, so I did some research:

So which is true? And which really happened— which is another thing? The point is that we can’t know whether Mark’s or Luke’s version or neither of those is the “correct” one until someone invents a read-only time machine. But it doesn’t matter: both versions are read in the Orthodox Church as part of Resurrection Gospels, because both the hardness of heart at the resurrection and the exultant sharing of experiences are relevant.

According to BibleGateway, “the most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20” so it ends at 16:8, “So they went out quickly and fled from the tomb, for they trembled and were amazed. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” A good ending, but without the closure one wants in a gospel, so I’m not surprised that someone added the twelve verses that comprise the third Resurrection Gospel. Where they got them from —word of mouth, other writings, their own imagination— we can’t know any more than we can know what “really” happened.

I wonder what Bible literalists make of discrepancies like these, but somehow I don’t feel like making an effort to find out.

Straight from the western front.

It was a bit disconcerting to find that the Machynlleth Fencing Club had its annual general meeting in a swimming-pool; on the other hand it does explain some of the questions in the questionnaire. Also, “Machynlleth” explains why the questionnaire was in Welsh, though it mercifully turned to English when I started to fill it in.

The herbs in the swimming-pool garden were awesome, growing from barely poking out of the ground to knee-high in half a day. Tasted properly of mint and dill and fennel, too. But the tabby kitten the size of a mouse —literally!— wasn’t there, and the large vet surgery that had suddenly materialised on the site of the web-design company to the left of our favourite pub had never heard of it. Neither could it do anything about the tabby-and-white cat motionlessly suspended above the basket of a delivery bike in front of their entrance (which didn’t seem to hurt it, though it looked very angry).

Clearing my backlog of links: most of these were sitting around waiting for an opportunity, none was big enough to warrant a post of its own.

Convert any number from any base into any other base up to 36. I’ll be 110011 years old next week— or 1220, 303, 123, 28 or 1F, take your pick. I think that was google-fu because of something we talked about on the #rasfc IRC channel.

Romanian Orthodox chant of Psalm 50. The neighbourhood is also worth a look. I think I got this from the Orthodox Women’s list, or the coveredorthodox list, both of which I’ve unsubscribed from because they were getting on my nerves, and that’s not something I need in Lent. I’m not one of these people who give up the Internet for Lent and announce it loudly all over the place; it’s not for that, but there was a bit too much angst on the OW list, and the coveredorthodox list seemed to be full of (a) women who were tentatively starting to put something unobtrusive on their head in church and (b) women who felt called to “move towards” full-time headcovering, and I don’t fall in either category, so it felt pointless. If you’re reading this and you’re on either list, do comment; I may come back after Easter and see if it’s changed.

Palace Design and Court Structure in (mostly) the late fourteenth century. It would be perfect for Valdyas if the House Velain wasn’t so oblivious of decorum and hierarchy, confound it. I think Boudewijn pointed me to this one.

Not quite my period, but too pretty not to share: 18th century blog, “fashion and culture from the 1700s” by Johanna Öst (via Woest en Vredig).

Ah, Horseradish! by Dale Dougherty on Boing Boing. Amusingly, there were horseradish roots under a “Parsnips” sign at one local supermarket until I alerted them to it (actual parsnips never materialised, worse luck, but the horseradish is now correctly labelled “Mierikswortel”).

The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe by Don Ringe on Language Log. It’s long and involved —I keep rereading it and finding new things to think about— and it’s got 163 comments at the moment of writing this. I like the message in the last sentence: “You are the product of diversity because Europe has always been diverse.”

Finally —I’m in two minds about whether it’s fascinating or squicky— Creative Food Sculptures. The orange carrying itself to the food processor does squick me a bit.

Valdis, the eve of the feast of Mizran.

Coming and going.

And she sends a package, too.

More about the “fietsers” signs.

This sign says “beware! cyclists”, because the cyclists are going in both directions on a path designed for only one direction. “Cyclists, beware of cyclists” seems the right interpretation. Motorists don’t have to beware of cyclists here: they can’t go anywhere near that cycle-path because of all the fences.

Just how the cyclists are going to end up in that lane —or leave it at the other end— is a mystery, because before they can reach it they’re sent to the right to go where that car is going, and end up at the other two signs. Perhaps the “beware! cyclists” sign is only for people who actually want to go somewhere on the road that’s being dug up.

Here. It becomes evident towards the end why Aidan’s worry kept me awake.

ETA: Aidan’s letter to Radan explaining the outcome of all that worrying.

Now I know why the bicycle I was riding to the comics shop made me feel free and awkward at the same time: it didn’t have any handlebars. I did get there in one piece, and it was a really nice comics shop, at the site of the small town-centre supermarket. I especially liked the half-text, half-pictures historical thing that Tertia bought while the rest of us were picking out colours for the shop’s new house-style. (Though I still think a shade called ‘lead’ shouldn’t have any yellow in it.) That all those people were shouting at us for being wizards didn’t matter much, because we could just ride away to the conference-with-music at the hotel where I was leading the singing group consisting of my own daughters and the Swedish middle-school teacher with the cute baby and all her students. Only it was a pity that when I wanted to answer the girl called Esma’s question whether she’d remembered everything right, the alarm clock blasted the noisy kind of classical music at me instead.

All of this came at the end of a night of tossing and turning, not because of any worry of my own, but because of Aidan’s; every time it made me wake up I realised it wasn’t me but him and I fell asleep again, only to be caught in it again. Perhaps I should have read some more Trent Intervenes before bed, after all.

(Ljouwert, May 2005)

“Baker, your butcher”.

(apropos of nothing: digikam says, when starting up, “Finding items not in database”. Clever of it!)

I went back to the hospital to show my shiny new ID and have my picture taken by a cute little robot-eyestalk camera. I took some more pictures, too, each of them better than the one of my face on my hospital card.

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Confusing, innit? This pair of signs doesn’t seem to give any information, not even whether it’s a warning of cyclists (“fietsers”) or for cyclists. That last is easy: any motorist who isn’t from a country without any bicycles will recognise the street as one likely to contain cyclists, so the signs are probably meant for the cyclists themselves.

At first sight they look completely spurious: cyclists have been using this street in both directions since the invention of the bicycle. Also, if there was only one sign it would be clear to them where to go, but the fact that there’s a pair invalidates that. It becomes clearer when you realise that the signs are there for cyclists who have already been diverted from a road that’s being dug up and restructured. Any cyclists going along that road in the direction of the left-pointing sign (towards the town centre) are sent to turn right, and can then see by the left-pointing sign that this, too, is a way to go where they’re going.

The right-pointing sign is for cyclists coming from the town centre (like me this morning): it says to them “dear cyclist, contrary to what you may have read in the paper, the roadblock that this arrow points to isn’t meant for you, just for the cars.”

There might have been a sign with an arrow pointing up as well, encouraging cyclists to rise into the air go straight ahead (to the right of the parked cars) and end up at the river, where there was a roadblock until recently but isn’t any more; but seeing that all but one of the cyclists who passed me when I was standing in the middle of the road trying to take this picture did indeed go straight ahead, that sign would have been superfluous.

That is, the joyful half, merry as a marriage bell. (And brownie points for whoever gets this reference)

Time: 2:15
Congregation: two, apart from altar and choir; one left during Vespers and one in the middle of Matins.
Crew: Altar: Fr T and an adult acolyte (his son) Choir: 1 soprano, 1 alto (and at times Fr T singing bass)
Coordination: decent
Tunefulness: okay, except for the times we went up, up, up, unable to stop it
Knees: didn’t start to hurt until I sat down afterwards
Voice: frog in throat, but basically all right
Strangeness: the altar people were in blue, though it’s a feast of Christ. Fr T said later that this is because of the strong overtones of the Mother of God, and indeed most of the verses are from Psalm 44 and there are several stichera with the theme of “after forty days, his mother gives him out of her hands”. Also, I saw parallels with the Presentation of the Theotokos, which I intend to blog about when my head stops hurting (slept badly and not very long).

Cora writes to Raisse, not the queen but the weaver, from Valdis.

Raith gets caught in a canyon

(for a while. Edited completely.)

While I was in church (post about the Presentation forthcoming; I noticed some new things) Boudewijn fixed the comments problem for me— I’d bungled the paths in the captcha plugin. I would have found it by myself, but that would have taken most of tomorrow, I’m afraid.

Not yet recaptcha— let’s seen if this works, first. I’ll put back old comments (gradually) and I’m inviting new ones to this post. Please, like last time, tell me which OS and browser and whether you see anything strange.

Let’s see if comment spammers can prove they’re human beings.

I needed a picture for my new identity card (optimistically called “travel document”, though that’s only one of its uses these days), and identity pictures have to conform to so many nitpicky little rules (PDF, four pages, pictures are so clear that you don’t really need to understand the Dutch) that I went to the Very Upscale Photographer to have one taken. One try was enough, fortunately, done by a nice businesslike woman who gave clear instructions.

(piccy after the cut)

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An architect about to renovate a building in Leipzig, East Germany, unlocked a door and found a flat untouched since the spring of 1989. Apparently the occupant left in a hurry: there are dirty bedsheets in the washing machine, uneaten bread rolls in the kitchen, and a full ashtray on the table.

Here is an article in German with lots of pictures. Note the Vita-Cola bottle in the kitchen; there still is Vita-Cola, but it comes in plastic bottles now (and actually tastes better than some Western brands).

Whoops, didn’t notice until now that tanaudel had actually posted some questions; I was waiting for email (and coping with slight technical problems because of my shiny new KDE 4.2).

So here goes:

The Rules:

• Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me!”
• I will (probably, in my sole discretion, and reserving the right not to) respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
• You will post the answers to the questions (and the questions themselves) on your blog or journal.
• You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. And thus the endless cycle of the meme goes on and on and on and on…

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I briefly considered not posting this because of privacy, but it’s all over her public profile anyway. Also, I wanted to show off the cake! The inside is chocolate cake with almond slivers, buttercream filling and cherries, the outside plain marzipan (rolling out marzipan takes muscles, determination and really good tools, and I seem to have all three).

I’d think twice before entrusting my “heating, warm water, indoor climate” to something called that!

I went to the Shiny! New! Hospital, somewhere on the outskirts of town in a wilderness, for a routine blood test. Why on earth hospitals always have to be so far from everything is a mystery to me, unless it’s to be accessible for ambulances (but that can be done in the middle of a town with enough blue lights and sirens).

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March 24, 2009 is the first Ada Lovelace Day, a day to “highlight the women in technology that we look up to.” As I’m writing this, 1,179 people have already pledged to blog on that day about a woman in technology they admire: if you scroll down a bit you’ll see my pledge in the sidebar (when I signed up there were only 300 people on the list, but it seems to have gone very fast after that). Even though the goal of 1,000 has been met, you can still join! And you don’t have to be a woman to do it: Cory Doctorov is on the list, too.

Until now, I never thought that I’d want to do something like this, being a non-feminist (which is not the same as an anti-feminist). But I have daughters. Not that I have the ambition for my girls to end up in technology, specifically —all of them seem to have different leanings— but I don’t want my girls or any other girls to be scared off from technology because of their gender only.

I’m going to interview the girls’ science teacher, if she’ll let herself be interviewed of course, and ask how she got to take that career path, who her role models were, whether any of them were women, and whether she thinks girls (still) need female role models. I wasn’t sure that I thought they do, but what brought me round was the thought that the United States now have a black president: if [this person in a high position] can be X, nobody can claim legitimacy for discriminating against X any more.

Raith writes a hasty letter to the king.

It will be a bit unquiet around here as I try to get comments (and captcha, preferably ReCaptcha) working properly again. I’ve had up to ninety-three spam comments on one entry.

There’s a statue of the boy with his finger in the dyke in Spaarndam. According to this rather good article about Hans Brinker, it was placed there “in order to please the American tourists”, who all wanted to see exactly where the boy had put his finger in the dyke. Also, I recommend reading past the pictures of the statue in the first link.

(Here is my earlier post about Hans Brinker)

So I’m taking part in the current flu epidemic— the flu jab I had in October probably caused it to be not very bad, but I spent most of yesterday and part of today in bed, asleep, dreaming strange dreams. (Dear dream engine, more of the striped and black kittens, please, and less of the pretending to need a wheelchair. Oh, and I’ll have you know that I do not disapprove of my other half writing books in Church Slavonic.) Tomorrow I have some admin stuff to do which I expect to tire me so much that I’ll spend the rest of the day in bed as well, hopefully finishing reading The Magic Grandfather.

I have done some work on the Great List of Everybody; it’s basically mindless work that I can do even if my head and all my muscles hurt.

At least I like food again, which wasn’t the case yesterday. And coffee. And beer and Dutch gin. I feel like I can do everything, and then when I do something (anything at all) it makes me so tired that I have to rest for an hour before I can even think of tackling the next thing. This seems to be a feature of this particular flu.

This morning Prima was in the same state that I was in yesterday and I sent her back to bed as my other half sent me yesterday. I think Secunda will be next: she was particularly vague today.

If I’m in any state tomorrow (er, today; it’s after midnight) in between the business phone calls I’ll try to get captcha working again, because I’m fed up with the comment spam.

“Unleashing the weather”.

ETA: And another: “The waiting game”.

Phone: Ring, ring.

Me: <my name> speaking.

Russian-accented voice: Hello, this is [very common Russian name; as I know someone with the same name and the same accent, he has me confused for a bit]. I have a question.

Me: Well, ask!

RAV: Is the church open?

Me: Do you mean today?

RAV: Yes, is it open today?

Me: We don’t have any services today, only Saturday evening and Sunday morning.

RAV: Yes, but is the church open?

Me: To pray or light a candle or something, you mean? No, it’s not usually open on weekdays.

RAV: But it’s open tomorrow, right?

Me: It’s not open on weekdays. Tomorrow is Tuesday. It’s not open on Tuesdays.

RAV: Is the church open tomorrow? It’s the New Year.

Me: (confused) Er…

RAV: Tomorrow is the New Year, is the church open then?

Me: [calculates: ah!] It’s not the New Year here. We had the New Year on January 1, and even then we didn’t have the church open.

RAV: But it’s an Orthodox church!

Me: Yes, of the patriarchate of Constantinople. We have the Greek calendar, not the Russian calendar.

RAV: It’s a Russian Orthodox church!

Me: Yes, but we’re not of the patriarchate of Moscow. We don’t have the Russian calendar.

RAV: You ought to be open! I came at Christmas and you weren’t open!

Me: We had all the services at Christmas. Only, we happen to celebrate Christmas at Christmas. [oops!] We celebrate Christmas on December 25th.

RAV: It’s a Russian Orthodox church!

Me: Yes, but we have the new calendar. We’ve celebrated both Christmas and the Theophany already. We’re Dutch, not Russians.

RAV: So when can you open the church for us?

Me: Well, we have services on Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 10:30.

RAV: You can open the church if we come tomorrow, can’t you?

Me: Er, no, sorry.

RAV: But you’re of the church, aren’t you?

Me: Sorry, I’m not the caretaker, I just answer the phone as backup when the priest isn’t there. I can’t very well come and open up the church for anyone who wants in to light a candle. [not telling him that it’s only down the stairs and out of my front door…]

RAV: [indignant noises]

RAV: [silence]

RAV: So when are your services?

So I told him again… I’m afraid he still doesn’t believe that any Orthodox church, let alone a Russian Orthodox church, can be not of the Patriarchate of Moscow.

I don’t doubt that he could have known, because he must have been the man I saw reading the bulletin when I was taking down the Christmas tree. Perhaps he thought we were so Russian that we only listed the old-calendar dates, not the new-calendar equivalent. But even then he could have seen that we didn’t have any services (and no priest, at that) over the New Year.

Cora has written to Selle and to Kisif. The first self-sufficient entries on Valdyis galsin!

… one sees interesting things. This quite recently painted panel on the façade above a shop (in fact almost directly opposite this alley, I leant my back against the fence to take the picture) puzzled me until I actually translated it.

Writing on the wall

The text may be hard to read; clicking on the picture or the caption will give you a larger version. It says “Hoc Latus Supra”, Latin for…

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(silly: the first thing I post to the new blog is reproduced here identically because it’s a pointer anyway)

Eleventh week of Anshen (part III)
Twelfth week of Anshen

There will probably be more in the 12th week, but that’s likely to be in the form of letters from Valdis.

As of today I have a dedicated roleplaying blog after all. I’ve been fiddling with it for a few days, and to wind down from Christmas undecorating I got it to a usable beta state just now. At the moment it contains all entries (except purely admin stuff) from the /roleplaying category, which will also stay here in case of bookmarks. Forever for webby values of ever, if my categories stay manageable and/or I find a way to collapse categories; otherwise until the category list grows out of control.

New game writeups will go to (ta-daa!) Valdyis galsin, “Letters from Valdyas”. Not that it’s all letters; galsin also means “pages of writing”. I promise to announce everything here as well as on my home page. (Which incidentally has had a new name for a while now, House Between the Worlds; “Irina’s Front Page” was getting on my nerves, more and more silly and newbyish, a sort of “My Web Site”).

I know that I’ll lose some Found Objects readers, but fortunately I’m not being paid per click, and anyway the clicks will only end up at another site of mine, you’ll still be able to find me. And there’s of course nothing against putting both in your rss reader <hurriedly adds rss feed>. Most people don’t seem to mind having the roleplaying stuff in with the rest but I wasn’t comfortable with it myself. On the new blog I may even do away with the Read more… links, because it’s clear that it’s all game writeups and I won’t feel I have to hide those from people who want to skip them. On the other tentacle, it’s kind of liberating to have the blog for only real-life stuff again. Also, I think the new thing is pretty! As a bonus, the directory structure is slightly more sensible and the HTML a bit cleaner.

Comments don’t work yet over there, mostly because I’ve been too lazy (busy, impatient, etcetera) to look into how to do it properly. Found Objects comments are still a kludge, even though they work now. There’s a link to my mail form, however, if someone wants to say something.

Dismantled the Christmas tree, tied it up with twine, put it in the downstairs hall (well, actually the little bit between the front door and the stairs where there’s no room for anything) to put it out for collecting tomorrow. We thought briefly of sawing it into pieces and burning it in the fireplace, but the needles would cause too much soot and the rest doesn’t have enough substance. Also, the Christmas tree collectors take only entire trees, not bags full of branches.

Picked up some bits of tinsel.

Swept and vacuumed up 97.4% of the stray needles. The rest will keep turning up everywhere until Easter Pentecost Transfiguration sometime in 2010. Some made it into my cleavage. I’d have seriously considered undecorating the tree in the nude if it hadn’t been in front of a window looking out on the street, and if it wouldn’t have made other parts of me than my right hand look like a porcupine. Decided not to vacuum the stairs and the hall yet, though I did sweep a bit.

Picked up some bits of tinsel.

Put this year’s crop of Christmas, New Year, Solstice and generic Holiday cards in the decorations box so as not to forget someone next year because they happen not to be on the list. The list gets more complete every year, but I don’t think it’s perfect yet.

Picked up some bits of tinsel and a partridge in a pear tree. Why is tinsel so persistent?

There’s something strange about undecorating exactly on old-calendar Christmas, even though it’s the day after the Theophany in my book. And there were indeed a few people at the church door this morning, but they were reading the bulletin so I’m confident that they know we’ve had Christmas already and weren’t skipping it. (If they can read Dutch… most people who can also know which calendar we have.)

Not Frozen Bubble (or play it here; works with Firefox, doesn’t work with Konqueror, haven’t tried anything else. Update: it’s a frames site <grr>, you have to find it from the menu), but real frozen bubbles. Next time it’s so cold that spit goes “clink” I want to try this too.

It seems that it’s hard to comment with Firefox under Linux (though Opera and Konqueror have been proven okay) so here’s a test entry for comments. If you-the-casual-reader use yet another browser, could you please try, even if you don’t have anything to say? I’m not going to optimise for anything Windows, but if you’re having problems I could try to solve them.

Update: the captcha seemed to be the problem, so I’ve temporarily disabled it. Update to the update: eradicated it, even, because doing it half-heartedly had broken comments completely. Now it works again for me with Konqueror or Firefox. Please, someone with Safari or Chrome or IE, test it for me!

I don’t know what exactly was wrong, but something didn’t seem to be able to read the captcha output. Good incentive to get reCaptcha working, as I’ve been intending to do for a while but it didn’t seem necessary because nobody was commenting anyway.

She’s been too pregnant, too busy and too tired to have any actual adventures, but that doesn’t mean she has nothing to write!

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Or, more to the point, shall I start a separate blog for roleplaying stuff: game writeups, pointers to Cora’s notebook and the occasional related post? I know I have readers who read everything, readers who come for the roleplaying stuff but read the rest anyway, and readers who skip the “fiction”; on the other hand I know of at least one reader who reads only the game writeups. While it’s easy in this interface to pick one category and read that, there’s no way to read all categories except one.

I realise that the fact that another blog would be one more place to go would deter some readers; if that applies to you, would you change your links to point to the other place or stay here and miss out on the game writeups? If you don’t mind having one more place to go, would you read both, and if not, which one?

I’ve toyed with this idea before, but that time people told me they didn’t mind the writeups even if they didn’t read them, but with the recent mini-campaign the roleplaying threatens to swamp the rest. Even if that doesn’t bother you it’s starting to bother me. Also, I’d be able to make a more sensible (less organically grown) directory structure and a dedicated interface. I’d probably move the existing roleplaying posts to the new place and leave pointers here for a while (lots of work but worth it).

Please comment and tell me, or if comments are too daunting, there’s always mail or IRC. My mind is not quite made up yet.

Another letter from Raith. She’s not the diary-keeping kind but I think she’d blog if she had the technology: she needs to write to someone, even though it’s unclear when or even whether it will arrive. She gets technical at one point, but Ayneth is probably used to that.

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It’s time for previous/next links, because this is turning into a real mini-campaign. Mini-continuity glitches are being addressed with mini-retcons (someone reported missing who Raith has already mentioned as being in existence, things like that).

Note that Raith wrote the first letter to Ayneth before the letter to Athal, even though I wrote and posted it later. She will doggedly keep writing to Ayneth, whether or not any letters will actually arrive before she herself gets back. This one is likely to arrive unless the ship taking the wounded to Valdyas meets with misfortune.

And I know she’s rambling at several points; I couldn’t keep her from it.

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