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.