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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...