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.

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.

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.

… 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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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.