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.