Just now that the Krita sprint is underway there’s a power cut. Extremely local, though: our house (though not either of the neighbours, or the church), the shop opposite, and a handful of shops around the corner. The power went out at 9 and when we called the energy company around 10 they said “someone is on his way already, but it may take some time to clear up.”

In the next few hours, three vans and a small digger appeared with a total of nine men. Two came in to apply a voltmeter to something in our meter cupboard. There was already a hole in the road a bit further on, with two men in it and two others staring into it while the digger driver looked on with some interest. After taking measurements in our house and presumably some of the other affected houses. they started to dig a hole in front of the restaurant on the corner.

My other half took the hackers down to the church cellar, where they did have electricity, a kettle and a coffee machine, though no network because the server is out too, of course. (And anyway, nobody ever has any signal in the cellar, phone or wifi.)

When I went out to take some pictures, the workmen showed me the cause of it all: a burnt-through coupling the size of my forearm. As I’m writing this at about 15:40, someone is wrapping the new coupling in what looks like heavy-duty duct tape.

Epilogue: at 16:45 the power was back, minutes before I came in from getting more firewood. It’s not on the website of the local paper yet.

These are ecologically-conscious dishwasher tablets. So why can’t they package their regular dishwasher tablets neatly arranged in a small box like this, too, instead of throwing them haphazardly in a box three times the size so it’s two-thirds full of air? According to Prima, who is quite good at economics, because transporting air is still cheaper than getting a machine or a human to stack dishwasher tablets this neatly.

They work well, and they don’t contain phosphates or perfume, and they’re only marginally more expensive than the other kind, so I’m sticking with them. Also, the little box is very cute.

My glass cleaner wouldn’t squirt, though there was a centimetre or so left in the bottle.

(warning: 3 pictures after the cut)

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From my slow Lenten spring-cleaning:

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Dismantled the Christmas tree, tied it up with twine, put it in the downstairs hall (well, actually the little bit between the front door and the stairs where there’s no room for anything) to put it out for collecting tomorrow. We thought briefly of sawing it into pieces and burning it in the fireplace, but the needles would cause too much soot and the rest doesn’t have enough substance. Also, the Christmas tree collectors take only entire trees, not bags full of branches.

Picked up some bits of tinsel.

Swept and vacuumed up 97.4% of the stray needles. The rest will keep turning up everywhere until Easter Pentecost Transfiguration sometime in 2010. Some made it into my cleavage. I’d have seriously considered undecorating the tree in the nude if it hadn’t been in front of a window looking out on the street, and if it wouldn’t have made other parts of me than my right hand look like a porcupine. Decided not to vacuum the stairs and the hall yet, though I did sweep a bit.

Picked up some bits of tinsel.

Put this year’s crop of Christmas, New Year, Solstice and generic Holiday cards in the decorations box so as not to forget someone next year because they happen not to be on the list. The list gets more complete every year, but I don’t think it’s perfect yet.

Picked up some bits of tinsel and a partridge in a pear tree. Why is tinsel so persistent?

There’s something strange about undecorating exactly on old-calendar Christmas, even though it’s the day after the Theophany in my book. And there were indeed a few people at the church door this morning, but they were reading the bulletin so I’m confident that they know we’ve had Christmas already and weren’t skipping it. (If they can read Dutch… most people who can also know which calendar we have.)

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.