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.

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.

I had thirteen items on my shopping list this morning: wholemeal flour, two kinds of coffee, two kinds of vegetarian bread spread, 85% flour, a gel pen, corn plasters, beer, sweet potatoes, apples, walnuts and dried pineapple.

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This object, which has been outside our window since mid-October, was taken down last Tuesday. I could just catch it on Monday (western Easter Monday!) when there was an inch of snow on it. Two inches on the roof terrace, by the way.

All winter there have been dozens of these spread all through the town centre. The town authorities say they’re crowns, the local paper calls them jellyfish, we think they’re upside-down pumpkins. They’re extremely noisy when there’s any amount of wind; this one, about two meters below our bedroom window, has kept us awake in a storm. A few weeks ago, one fell down in one of the busiest shopping streets; fortunately it was Sunday and there were only a few pedestrians, none of whom got it on their head.

I watch other people’s shopping carts at the checkout. I think most people do; most people i know, in fact, at least as far as the subject has come up. I make up families and events on the basis of shopping carts: this woman has at least two kids, one small and one very small; this man is on his own and likes to cook; these people are having a party.

Usually there’s some overlap, or at least something I also tend to buy. Sometimes the person in front’s cart contains something I’ve forgotten so I can run and get it. But today, the woman in front of me had nothing in her cart that would ever have been in mine, and not only because I prefer different brands or different flavours: all light, ready-made, pre-seasoned. In fact no ingredients, only products. Even the non-food items were alien, though I don’t remember what they were.

For the record, mine was shallots, olive oil, phyllo dough (see, I do buy some ready-made stuff, I’m not such a purist that I make everything from scratch), a cucumber, a bell pepper, frozen chives, red wine, chocolate, organic-waste bags, toilet paper, bathroom cleaner and washing soda.

Another shopping trip, this time with my blue Ikea trolley and differently blue plastic Other Supermarket crate tied to it with Filia Secunda’s defunct skipping-rope. Note to self: next time take an old towel to keep bottles from rattling.

At the checkout I said “now I’ll get a free apple pie!” because they were giving them away in honour of the opening if your bill came over 25 euros. But mine was a few euros short, as it was yesterday. When I said “pity, your prices are too low!” I got one anyway. Just the thing for teenagers who come home from school hungry on a Friday afternoon.

I’ll do some price comparison (compared, that is, to where I usually buy the same stuff):

No difference

Offley port (didn’t expect that, anyway)
Chimay Double beer (ditto)

About the same price, slightly different product

(these are mostly house-brands)

Puff pastry
House-brand crisps
Frozen spinach

Slightly cheaper

Grolsch lager
Lay’s crisps

Significantly cheaper

Valencia oranges (but they’re small; the big ones were more expensive)
Organic eggs (and they have boxes of 10, which neither of my other usual supermarkets have)

Things the others don’t have

Pfanner Green Apple
Red Rivella

Things I missed (i.e. that the others do have)

Organic frozen spinach (but that may be for lack of looking, I bought spinach on an impulse)
Organic onions (which I’ll ask for next time, so they’ll know there’s demand for it)

They have a lowest-price guarantee, so if I’d had a “More expensive” category I’d have been entitled to my money back.

And I told the service desk about yesterday’s post, so they’ll find this one too.

Latest news about the bread: the bread is good, very good. But there is indeed Stuff in it. I read the small print on a similar bag of white bread flour in the shop, to see if I could use it too, and found lots of ingredients that must be “bread improver”, so I looked at the bag of wholemeal again. In extremely small print, that I can read under supermarket strip lighting but a girl had to read to me at home, there is:

Integrale tarwebloem, dextrose, bonenmeel, mout, emulgator: lecitine, mono- en diglyceriden, meelverbeteraar: L-ascorbinezuur, enzymen: alfa-amylase, allergenen: gluten, peulvruchten, soja.

“Whole wheat flour”, yes, okay. It should have stopped there. If I’d wanted dextrose, bean flour (that’s probably what made it high-protein), malt (that’s probably what made it so dark), soy lecitin, mono- and diglycerides (don’t even know what those are), vitamin C and enzymes in my flour I could have added them. I feel cheated [1]. Or perhaps I feel as if I’ve been cheating.

[1] Not by the shop, they aren’t required to read and remember every tiny letter on each and every package. By the makers. They did list all the ingredients as the law requires, but they didn’t make it at all clear to the unsuspecting buyer, or the unsuspecting shop assistant for that matter, that it’s not flour and only flour.

There’s this new supermarket, Jumbo, which sits in the mega-shopping-mall that’s haltingly coming into being in the old army barracks in town. The supermarket isn’t actually in the barracks, (a) it’s too big for that and (b) that’s reserved for more upmarket shops, but in a screechingly ugly black cube built for it and the underground parking and the mega-cinema that hasn’t opened yet.

The opening was yesterday. I didn’t go because I hate noise (the Media Markt was also opening). But today, when I needed minced meat and fizzy water and wholemeal flour, I thought I’d have a look.

It advertises as “the cheapest supermarket that actually has everything” and yes, I think it does. It’s nearly as cheap as the cheap-and-nasty one and much less snooty than the current incarnation of the family-tradition expensive one, so I think it’s a keeper. Being the size of three other supermarkets, they have three times as much, rather like the Carrefour I went to in Belgium only without the non-food section.

They have things I thought had disappeared completely, like red Rivella, my favourite drink as a child. I immediately bought a bottle, of course. I still like it, though it’s sweeter than I remember, probably because my taste has changed. Never mind— at least it exists! I’m not a supertaster, but I can taste all artificial sweeteners and they all taste equally vile to me. (Not completely true: aspartame is vilest because it doesn’t manifest itself until swallowed and stays behind for hours.)

I was thinking that my joy would be complete if they had wholemeal flour (I’d seen only bread mixes and plain flour) when I spotted a sign “if you don’t see it, ask us” so I asked. The nice young man pointed me to two-kilo sacks of Soubry Farine pour Pain Complet, which I’d seen in other shops but always thought was a mix, but it’s indeed normal-looking wholemeal flour and I’ll bake from it presently. Kudos!

ETA: It’s high-protein flour, which I thought was impossible to get in normal shops in this country. And it’s really coarse, yay! The dough needed a lot of kneading to become unsticky, rose spectacularly (probably because of all that kneading), and baked very dark. That’s an asset in itself: Expensive Supermarket wholemeal flour stays pale and Organic Outlet wholemeal flour, apart from being very fine, becomes grey. If the bread tastes as nice as it smells, more kudos!

To live in the centre of a provincial town.

An old unique house with idiosyncrasies that I have to work around (I’m good at that).

To be rid of the annoying neighbours and their whiny children.

A roof terrace. Admittedly it needs some work, but it will be a little paradise.

Real built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves as opposed to something almost-right that we rigged ourselves.

A shower I can stand up in.

Getting up without having to hurry because there are three girls on my tail (they have their own bathroom now).

A dedicated laundry room (though it has to double as store room, because we lack a cellar, an attic and a shed).

Wooden floors, i.e. made of floorboards.

This.

Still, I’m not jaded and I don’t think I’ll ever be. Just enjoying all of it.

But the house we bought came with a dishwasher. And I love the thing. I call it “the Clean Machine” in my thoughts.

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In about a month we’re moving to a house in the town centre. An upstairs house on top of the Orthodox church. No garden, no shed, no yard, no cellar (that’s the church’s community room these days), not even a hall except a little bitty entrance that a huge green door opens into.

We have five bicycles.

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In my family, taming electricity for domestic use is handed down through the female line. My grandmother taught my mother to attach a new cord to a toaster. My mother taught me to wire a plug. And now I’ve taught one daughter, and promised to teach another, to install wall sockets and light switches.

True, it was my father-in-law who did all the wiring in our new attic and left the ends securely bundled up and tucked away for me and, as it turned out, the thirteen-year-old to screw the sockets and switches on after each girl had painted the walls of her own room. Next time I’ll find out how to do wiring, too. Electricity, as the thirteen-year-old has already noticed in school, is interesting and easy.

The best part was, of course, to reconnect the mains when everything was in place, and flip the switch, and see the light come on.

Coming out of the shower this morning I heard <bzzzzz> <bzzzzz> <sizzle> over my head. Her Majesty was back, or one of her daughters. The <sizzle> happened when she hit the ceiling lamp, thinking it was Outside.

I wanted to do something about her; being stark naked in a small room with a wasp, however groggy, isn’t my idea of comfortable. I dried myself in a hurry, opened the window and took my clothes to the landing to dress, turning off the light. When I came back she was sitting on a packet of washing powder, which I moved as close to the open window as I could, and yes, she took off into the (admittedly grey) sky, looking as pleased as I’ve ever seen a wasp look.

There was also a medium-sized spider weaving a web on the ceiling, probably hoping to catch the housefly that came in when I was letting Her Majesty out but promptly flew out again.

And the crocuses are in flower, and the tulips are doing their best. Winter really seems to be over at last.

This is the home of either a small solitary bee or wasp, or a largish trap spider, though the latter is unlikely because I didn’t see any spinning-work or a trap door. It’s in the little alley that runs to the street between our house and the house next door. I saw something black and pea-sized disappear in it when I took my bicycle to the street to go and take the picture of the bug poster.

All of this cost me the net sum of 59 cents.

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“I think there’s a wasp in my room,” Menna said as she came down, still in her pyjamas. Well, this is better than two years ago at the same time of year, when the three girls were still sharing the room and there was a wasp on Rebecca’s chest with only a sheet between her and it. Or last year for that matter, when the wasp caused shrieks rather than calm observation.

This wasp was on the floor in front of the chest of drawers, making it impossible for Menna to get at her clothes safely. I think it was the same queen wasp that I put out of the window last year and the year before, but I’m not sure how long they live and whether they can communicate a perfect location to hibernate to their daughters.

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I cleaned the messy half of the kitchen: bread bin, coffee machine, gunky bottles of oil and vinegar and soy sauce, shelves always full of miscellaneous junk. Among the miscellaneous junk there were many stamps cut out from supermarket-brand coffee bags: when you have twenty-five and stick them on a special leaflet (it’s a sheet folded in three, hardly a ‘book’) you can redeem that for a free bag of coffee of your choice. I filled three leaflets and bundled stamps for three more in twenty-fives with elastic bands.

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Going through my old bookmarks I found the FlyLady site, and as I’m doing the spring cleaning in four-hour installments (kitchen cupboards today, stove tomorrow) I was interested. I’d forgotten the sugariness, the cutesy abbreviations (trademarked, no less), the silly and sometimes downright stupid advice.

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“I saw a mouse!” wasn’t what we expected Menna to say when she went to the cellar to get a new box of breakfast crackers. But she did see a mouse, running across the rusks-and-crackers shelf and disappearing behind the sugar. The first thing I did after the initial shock was to grab the nearest cat, who happened to be Leentje, and carry her down the cellar stairs — she didn’t want to go by herself, because she knows all too well it usually isn’t allowed. She sniffed everything, caught nothing, went to sit under the bottom shelf with her head sticking out and a smug expression on her face, and left a good amount of cat scent to chase any passing mice away.

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It was Johanna, the black Cat of Little Brain, who brought it out of the cellar and put it in the middle of the living-room floor, but we suspect that it was actually Leentje who made the kill. A medium-sized greyish-tan house mouse, thoroughly dead. The Cat of Little Brain sat looking at it, and at me, with a look of “See? A mouse. What now?” on her face and didn’t growl or try to seize it when I abducted it in a dustpan.

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