Awesome, that instruction leaflet on how to carve a mouse from an apple. It didn’t even come out a cartoon mouse, though it wasn’t very realistic, more like those mice from illustrations in children’s books that may or may not wear clothes. If that and the A2-sized comics about the ever-growing family were part of the magazine that had sent reporters to the festival in the school, I want a subscription!

The festival was splendid in itself: singing, prayer, interesting clothes, exotic people. I think it was in fact a music festival, but I got all kinds of culture from it. And money. When I found myself nibbling money I stopped immediately, though the gold coins were nice and sweet, the silver coins nice and spicy, and the little strips of what looked like cardboard and served as paper money interestingly crisp. Only the big brown-skinned man in a fur coat who everybody was shunning (presumably because he was infected with something catching) paid his due with a pile of normal five-cent coins, that nobody touched for fear of infection.

I don’t know why the children’s choir had to sing in the dark, but I do understand that the gym, where we first saw them, wasn’t suitable to do that in: it had the kind of high-up windows that gyms have that nobody could reach to cover with something the light wouldn’t get through. That was probably the reason that only six children and an old man were at a table on the other side of the gym from where I was at another table —and occasionally on it— collecting —and occasionaly eating— the money.

On second thoughts, what I heard of the children’s choir (at some kind of service for a saint) leads me to think that in the dark they would have sounded even more amazing.

In crawl, that is. This morning I could do every other length for about half an hour: crawl one way, breaststroke back, repeat. No need to rinse as I was in the water already. My legs are doing some of the work as well now, and I manage not to hit or bump into anyone because I can actually see other swimmers underwater.

Last week a woman, who had seen me struggling at first, complimented me on my improved style. I can’t see myself, but I knew I couldn’t be as messy and splashy as I started out. Still, it’s nice to hear it from someone else.

With all this I must have overstrained my muscles or depleted my blood sugar or both, because when I stopped at a traffic light my leg gave way and all I could do was to fall as gracefully as possible on to the little bit of grass verge. As I was picking myself and my bike up, a man who had seen me go down while driving past came up, “are you all right?” “Oh yes, I can fall,” I said, and when i realised that probably wasn’t clear, “I know how to fall.” And when he still looked puzzled, “Elegantly. Thank you, anyway.”

I cured the weakness with chocolate digestive biscuits and aloe-vera juice (with lemon, which has the fewest additives, only honey and lemon juice; the variety called ‘natural’ has artificial grape flavour, as if it’s natural for aloe vera to taste like artificial grapes).

Next: build up enough stamina not to have that happen again. And keep my right ear in the water at all times, even when taking a breath.

Last week when I was putting the groceries in my bike bags a girl aged about eighteen tried to give me a flyer for a new service apartment complex —expensive poky flats for the affluent over-sixty. I’d already passed billboards advertising it, so I knew immediately what it was, and said “how old do you think I am?”

“Dunno,” she said.

“I have kids younger than you, and a husband and a house, and we don’t want to live in an old people’s home for a long time yet!” I said.

She started to protest, “it’s not an old people’s home”, but then she saw the picture on the flyer —for the first time, it seemed— and shut up.

Read more ...

We had a friend over the other day, who is a math whiz (and so are his wife and their seven-year-old son), and he gave me the equivalent of an earworm:

Doing whatever math you like on only four fours, make all whole numbers from 0 to 12 inclusive. I think you have to use all of your fours, because otherwise it would be too easy.

I told him I’d work on it while swimming, and in three-quarters of an hour I managed to do 0-5 and 7-9. 4 itself was hard for a while until I realised that 4/4 is 1 (which I’d already used to make 1 and 2) and that I could use up another four by raising that to the 4th power. This also gave me 5, and my first instance of 3— I got a much simpler 3 later, (4+4+4)/4.

6 had me stumped until I got home and wrote my sums down. Strange, because several of my attempts to get 4 had come out 6, so I thought when it was actually 6’s turn “oh, I’ve done that” and went on to 7.

Can I do factorials? (4 - (4 / 4)) ! + 4 = 10. I got a flash of insight about 12 too, but 11 is still beyond me.

Completely forgot to mention food in the bits-and-pieces post, but that was plenty long already and the food deserves a post of its own anyway (yum, German food!) Now I need tags rather than categories, because this is the third post about the Kirchentag and they’re all in different places.

Read more ...

(for what it’s worth; it was fun, and I think I mostly agree)

I’ve started trying to teach myself front crawl again (and googling to find out the correct term in English gives me the BBC Sport Academy tutorial, which I’m definitely going to peruse when I finish this post). [ETA: I wasn’t allowed to watch the masterclass movie because I’m not in the UK <grr>; the tutorial itself tells me mostly what I’ve already found out by trial and error.]

Read more ...

“You” here means you-the-reader, at least old enough to read this by yourself.

Without knowing your height and weight at any time in your life, I can prove to you that there has been a moment that your weight in pounds was exactly the same as your height in inches.

Read more ...

Please try to keep the outside world out of your renderings, because it was very disturbing to have a big cupboard in my website (yes, I know websites are usually 2D and the cupboard was 3D) every time my other half’s cold made him snore. At least I have a good idea of the website now; it happened to be the one I’m actually about to make. I must look into drop-down (or rather, drop-sideways) menus, because the dream ones looked splendid.

I did like the game we were playing with cards and the objects pictured on them. All of us, especially Tertia, preferred the fruit deck, even though we didn’t get to eat the fruit. The Really Strange Objects deck would have been nice too if there had been enough physical Really Strange Objects to make a sizeable set. The sort-of-like-a-glove thing there was a card of fell out of a collection of other stuff later, but even if we’d had it in time it wouldn’t have been enough. I haven’t a clue about the rules now, but it must have been akin to Happy Families. This was outside the junk shop, which also had a really nice old book that I didn’t buy for some reason, and a tiger-striped cat that could change shape (as in: long and thin cat, chubby cat with short ears, small frisky kitten; not from cat to anything else) at will.

Then, at the renovated school, you made me marvel at the movable walls, though the girl showing me around (not one of mine, though all of mine actually attended that school) was more jaded about them and kept saying “yes, it does move but we’re not supposed to do that”. All I was amazed about was that they could move, even the little glass doors the size of a cat-flap in the very high doorstep which the girl said were only in case of fire.

And now I’m still wondering whether the appointment (to go somewhere and do something fun) that I realised was NOW instead of sometime in June and I wasn’t prepared at all, making me wake up at 6:05 unable to go back to sleep, is real after all.

I figured I could go swimming on Holy Thursday and Holy Friday before services; the only drawback I could see was that swimming makes me hungry. Well…

Read more ...