I realise that I went to bed still trying to decide how to do something, but that doesn’t mean you had to keep the choice hanging over my head, literally, in a Javascript-type input box. It was quite distracting while I was helping salvage the crashed spaceship. I’m not sure when it went away, but it definitely wasn’t there when the cute little alien engineer (who called herself Catherine; I don’t believe for one moment that it was really her name) drove me to the station in the evacuee bus. In fact she liked driving the bus so much that she wanted to become a bus driver, “engineering,” she said, “is just something incidental”.

I ended up at the station at half past midnight, hungry, but all the shops were closing except one, where the shopkeeper gave me a glass of milk and some indifferent sushi. It was my own fault for not realising that the train I took would loop back and become the 2:40 to Amsterdam at that very same station, or I’d have had some of the interesting sushi with seaweed and sesame seeds, but I ended up with a basket full or chunks of salmon-coloured and salmon-flavoured rice. (I do want to try the raw salmon-coloured rice he also had, for making one’s own sushi, if it exists in the waking world!) The milk was excellent, though. And at least the sushi was free: the shopkeeper was giving away his leftovers to people taking the last train because otherwise he’d have had to throw it away.

It’s upon us again, and while it’s nice to see so many people in 19th-century clothing pass beneath our window I don’t want to go to the Bergkwartier, where it’s held. Too much waiting to get in: an hour and a half according to the local paper’s website, and there’s actually a kind of bridge that the people going in go under and the people going out go over, so I can believe that. Also, too much shuffling past pre-arranged events. While trying to reach the cheese shop I passed a gaggle of housemaids with brooms being placed in formation by someone who looked for all the world like a second-rate theatrical agent from a 1950s movie, cigar and all. The cheese shop wasn’t as busy as I’d feared; no more custom, according to the cheese men and women, than on a normal Saturday. Apparently, all the extra people in town don’t do their weekend shopping while they’re here.

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After the Omnivore’s Hundred, Very Good Taste is at it again. I score a whopping 32, due to having spent two Christmases in England (one with a family who did all the traditional things, one with friends) and being in an international Orthodox parish, which takes care of all of Eastern Europe.

Here’s what to do:

1. Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2. Bold all the items you’ve tasted.
3. Place an asterisk after all the items you’ve cooked/prepared.
4. Optional: Cross out anything you never want to try, or add an exclamation mark after anything your really want to try.

You’re also welcome to post a link to your version of the list at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk.

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We have a nifty programmable phone that I’ve never managed to program, and two or three times this morning it rang at me very loudly in my hand, while I was trying to make a call, making me jump and shudder. Yes, phones do that to me, especially when it’s so close to my ear. I think I pressed the wrong button and hit “sound ring tone”, but I can’t be sure that it wasn’t someone trying to get hold of me.

This was in the course of spending literally the whole morning trying to phone the poulterer: three or four times redial every twenty minutes or so, trying to hit a gap in their engaged tone. Either everyone wants to order game or poultry for Christmas, or they had the phone off the hook. I didn’t think of going in person until it was too late to go in person, but I did realise eventually that they had a website (caution: some of it doesn’t like Konqueror, and a different some of it doesn’t like Firefox; I’d like to get my grubby little hands on the HTML) so probably also an email address. They did, and they promise on the site to answer mail in 24 hours, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they can’t be that fast at this time of year. But <phew>. Mail at least isn’t scary.

Thank you for making me laugh so much at the short curly-haired man who sat at the back-room table offering me “a complete business solution” including editing services. Editing, dear curly-haired man, is what my business is. And I did really mean it when I said “I’d like everybody to stay here”, also, or rather especially, the curly-haired man’s tall weedy sidekick called Atanasiy who was hovering in the kitchen door. If he’d wanted the toilet he should have said that and I’d have kept an eye on him, but I rather think he wanted to go upstairs to snoop, or perhaps to steal. And why did the curly-haired man ask whether “all three of us” (he had only seen Prima, not the other girls) stayed in every evening?

All that time, my other half was in the front room talking to the pension guy, and we had quite a good time (after I’d shooed the curly-haired man and Atanasiy out) having a drink with the pension guy and his wife. I don’t think we got the pension done, but that didn’t seem to be urgent.

…but designing a letterhead and an invoice form, setting up an accounts and hours-registration spreadsheet, and entering receipts and expenses and hours into the spreadsheet took me five hours in all. Which I entered on the hours-registration page of the spreadsheet under “firm: admin”, of course.

And now that I want to send an invoice I notice that there’s a (very small) bit of work that I could invoice as well, if I’d only done it; so I’m now going to do it so I can register my hours and write the invoice. I shouldn’t forget to send copies of the relevant tax documents either. Fortunately I thought of making the copies yesterday when I was copying other stuff anyway.

Note to self: scan, and perhaps PDF, all documents that it might be useful to send copies of to clients; it saves a trip to the copy shop. Also, the firm needs a ring-binder, perhaps two.

Another note to self: set aside half a day a week to be my own secretary. It seems to be harder to be one’s own secretary than to be someone else’s, but I think it’s just harder to start from scratch than to go by procedures that already exist.

Ondernemingshuis, “Enterprise House”

The statue in front is “Ainsi soit-elle” by Maïté Duval. Here’s a larger picture of it.

Yesterday I went to Apeldoorn and registered with the trade chamber (Kamer van Koophandel).

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What the celebrities use I wouldn’t know— the message, in triplicate, was spam and I threw all three of them away immediately. Probably a remedy for “ED dysfunction”. I never tire of pointing out that if a remedy for ED dysfunction works, it will leave you with functioning ED, and that’s probably not what people want to achieve. (Yes, I know that it’s probably a case for the Department of Redundancy Department, like Bengloarafurd Ford.)

But it did make me think. Celebrities don’t usually impress me, at least not the mere fact that someone is a celebrity. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the Netherlands called “BN’ers”, Bekende Nederlanders (Well-Known Dutchpeople) who seem to be known only for being well-known: TV starlets, featherweight singers, footballers’ girlfriends, all of whom I can joyfully ignore because I don’t follow the media much.

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From Jay. It has only a minimal overlap (food/snacks) with the four things meme I posted in December 2007.

I’m being elaborate on a meme that seems to call for brevity, but I don’t care.

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I approve wholeheartedly of the technique to get instantaneously to any place by dreaming of it and waking up there. But it did land me in Copenhagen with no cash at all and only 50 euros in the bank (which, usefully, I could see on the screen of my mobile phone, green on black like an old Hercules monitor). And when I discovered that it could be done with a web page too, and demonstrated that to someone, I ended up outside Copenhagen on the site of a news item, in a field, without a computer or any other means to get back except my own feet. This made me arrive after midnight and miss the last train.

Fortunately, the nice woman at the post office let me have 1,50 euros to phone my mother (who, in waking reality, died ten years ago this month) in exchange for about a foot of sticky tape— I gave her the rest of the roll, too, because I had nothing to cut it with.

I could conceivably have taken a plane home —the post office had some on offer— but the 50 euros sort of precluded that. When looking at plane schedules and prices I realised that the man and woman behind the counter, who I had been conversing with in a mixture of their barely adequate English and my (realistically) very inadequate Danish, were actually speaking Dutch with one another; as were the various gaudily dressed fat middle-aged women in the street, obviously well-to-do tourists.

I did get back eventually— by waking up again.

If Barack Obama wins the election —which I sincerely hope— he will be the first president of the United States who is younger than I am. That’s truly a sign of advancing age: that it’s not only doctors and police(wo)men who are younger than oneself, but also presidents of the United States. And when Queen Beatrix retires, the king as well.

On the upside, he will be the first president of the United States I’m conscious of who isn’t an old white man. Though technically Bill Clinton wasn’t old either: almost a year younger than Obama when he was elected. (This surprised me a bit when I looked it up.) But older than me, at the time, and undeniably white.

In fact, this post is in the first place an excuse to link to slacktivist’s post about bigotry and stupidity which everybody ought to read.

From Penelope Trunk, via Jay.

Here be questions!

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79 words

What the site told me apart from giving me the badge was more informative:

318 points, so you achieved position 64188 of 844040 on the ranking list

You type 846 characters per minute
You have 79 correct words and
you have 3 wrong words

I used to be a very fast typist when I was temping as a student— about 600 cpm on an electric machine. And my laptop has a very nice keyboard, so I’m not surprised at having become faster.

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It’s cruel of you to force me to make my mental image of Valdis conform to the map of Haarlem, even if you give me four gold rings (well, three; one was my own wedding ring, though I could take it off easily which isn’t the case with the real one) to represent various features of it. Especially as you, or rather your henchpeople, weren’t exactly clear about which side of the river railway in Haarlem you meant to project Valdis on. You of all entities should be aware that Valdis, unlike Haarlem, is on both sides of a river. That you did it just before waking made it extra cruel, because it pushed my ‘redo frantically’ button hard and made me wake up with a headache— or perhaps the headache was already lurking and that pushed the button.

That said, I was very pleased that a couple who I know only online turned out to be breathtakingly beautiful, especially in their wedding picture, and made me determined to have it printed large and glossy and made into a jigsaw puzzle to give them for their anniversary. On the other hand, I’m still puzzled by the charge of twenty-five cents on top of the three euros fifty I already paid for cutting the key to enhance it to +1, and why did the checkout girl giggle so?

ETA: dream captcha to keep your dreams free of spam.

Next time you serve me three different threads, do it in three nights, pretty please? I’d have liked to be able to keep my promise to the ghouls, because (for ghouls) they were very nice and civilised, but I had to call Lord Vurian to do it for me because I was on my way to Trier with Secunda on Secunda’s bicycle. Anyway, it wasn’t Trier at all, but a dream-version of Zeist, even though it had whopping big signs saying something Latin starting with C which I recognised as the name of a suburb of Trier. And I got only the merest glimpse of Mary’s new roleplaying system with a very eclectic questionnaire as character sheet, but, well, I had to go back and attend to the ghouls.

A friend of ours moved to Germany, just across the border. He can still come to church and sing in the choir: there are people in the parish who live in the Netherlands but are farther away.

His house has an orchard. Last year he had a glut of plums and brought bags full to choir practice to give to whoever wanted them (and I had a lot of yummy plum jam!) and this year it was apples.

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I applaud your efforts to emulate a full-blown dream server by giving me something so intricate that my brain parsed it as tabbed browsing.

One tab with adventures at the harbour, one with diplomacy in the palace, and one with a meal at a high-class restaurant, to change between at will.

The fourth tab, a little office to administer all that, was a brilliant idea of yours. Pity that that was the place where the alarm went off, too, so I never learnt whether we caught the villain, how successful the negotiations were, and what we had for dessert.

But well, one can’t have everything.

If my grandfather was still alive, he’d be a hundred and twenty today. In fact he died in the summer of 1968 when I was ten and he just short of eighty.

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Here’s a list of a hundred things that Andrew of Very Good Taste thinks every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. My score is 62, and some of the things I haven’t tried are for lack of opportunity rather than lack of adventurousness.

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This threw me a bit at the supermarket. It should look like this:

and not like this:

I don’t know why the company, or the supermarket, now has the export packaging; has the domestic market become too small? Or had they underestimated the domestic market and run out? (which is the other side of the same problem?) I don’t think they mean ‘Holland’ as in ‘North and South Holland’ as opposed to ‘Overijssel’; it says ‘Pays-Bas’ on the French side.

Anyway, it’s nice to know that it’s “Kosher for Passover and all year use”, even though that doesn’t concern us.

But fortunately, the contents were the same, or I’d have sent the company Very Angry Mail.