Yesterday I woke up at 4:15 from a nightmare. I don’t remember what it was about —perhaps fortunately— but I couldn’t get back to sleep, and after tossing and turning for another hour I admitted that I wouldn’t ever get comfortable and got up. Amazing that being comfortable in bed is a whole-body experience, but being uncomfortable in bed is a detailed experience: every little bit has its separate discomfort.

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This is labelled (1) because I intend to post more: every time it occurs to me, a picture of an object I like and the story behind it.

My grandfather made this for my mother when she married in 1954. I inherited it in 1998. The two spoons on the left came with the rack, as well as the two spoons-with-a-hole in the back row on the right (one pointed, one round). It’s clear that I don’t use the spoons-with-a-hole as much as the rest; only for cake batter (so slightly more lately) and some sauces. I bought the three round spoons on the right in the front row when I moved out of my parents’ house in 1979. The two oval spoons (third from left in the front row and the one behind it) I bought to fill up the rack because most of my mother’s spoons smelt too much of cigarette smoke and I had to throw them away.

It’s always been on my mother’s wall and on my wall, except for a few years in the house before the last when we had no place to put it. It wasn’t easy to hang it up: these tiles sit on a sheet of wall-finishing board on top of what felt like drywall to the drill, which is half an inch or so in front of a sixteenth-century wall I didn’t want to touch. So I had to drill very carefully, swapping drill bits twice: the crack between the tiles was soft, the wall-finishing board tough, the drywall soft again. But it’s now firmly on my kitchen wall, where it belongs.

But they were too pretty to leave in the shop, especially at half-price.

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Picked it up somewhere; found it in different places.

Four films I could watch over and over:

The Three Musketeers (with Douglas Fairbanks)
Labyrinth
The Princess Bride
The Court Jester

Four favorite TV shows: (note: I haven’t watched TV at any length for over ten years)

Original Star Trek
Catweazle
Kunt u mij de weg naar Hamelen vertellen, meneer
Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Four favorite foods:

Cheese
Anything in aspic, especially ham rolls with horseradish
Guinea-fowl
Chocolate

Four websites I visit every day:

Glory to God for All Things
Slashfood
nu.nl
Boing Boing

Four places I would love to be:

London
The flat bit of Canada (failing that, eastern Groningen, preferably on a bus)
Anywhere at the seaside
Beverwijk, strangely enough, because that’s where I used to go whenever I needed a brain reboot when I was living in Haarlem

Four favorite colors:

#FFEBCD blanchedalmond (was my website background colour for years)
#8B0000 darkred
also, though all greens and most blues are off for my vision on a computer screen:
#53868B cadetblue4
#228B22 forestgreen

Four names I love but wouldn’t/couldn’t use for a kid:

(these are names we didn’t actually use for kids, though they were considered)

Sara(h) - felt too much like an old woman’s name
Rachel - it wouldn’t have done to call twins something with the same initial. But every year on the eve of the Sunday of the Fathers of the Old Testament, singing the sticheron in the sixth tone about Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel, I vaguely wish I’d known beforehand that I’d have three daughters (though Prima and Tertia are glad I didn’t, they like the names they’ve got).
Daniel - name for my first that didn’t make it. Also, for Younger Boy Twin, but they were both girls.
Jonathan - name for Primus but she turned out Prima; also name for Elder-or-Only Boy Twin, see above.

Four people to tag:

<points> You. And you. And you too. Oh, and you. If you feel called, don’t hesitate.

My ex-employer deigned to pay me about half the travel allowance they still owed me (the other half is being taken care of) so I could afford to shop for boots. I love boots; I never buy any, because (a) they tend to be above my budget (it does make a difference that I’ve taken to wearing skirts more; that makes it less wasteful) and (b) I have difficult shaped feet, narrow heels and broad toes and muscular calves. But boots are in fashion so there are lots of them.

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On my way to go grocery shopping, I was waylaid by a very small knight in shining plastic armour. And an even smaller squire in a crenellated red doublet and an incongruous headscarf.

“Password”, they demanded. When I said “sorry, I don’t know it” the squire came up and whispered something in my ear, which I repeated, and they let me pass.

Only then did I notice that the knight was also wearing a headscarf, under her helmet.

I don’t know what these girls will be like in ten years, whether they’ll be wearing headscarves or wildly flowing hair or neat coiffured heads, but I hope that whatever it is, they’ll be doing it proudly and of their own free will. That they’ll be themselves, as they were when I met them today.

(On the way back I was waylaid by a tabby cat in almost the same spot. Cats are uncomplicated: they don’t want passwords, they want to be scritched behind the ears. And they don’t grow up to make choices.)

The first time after the summer that I have to turn on my bicycle light on an evening errand, and of course the tail-light battery is flat. Fortunately I remember that one of my daughters has the same type of light, and yes, hers works.

While I’m trying to pry her light off in the gloom a scruffy man passes and asks “Hey! What are you doing?” Not aggressive or belligerent, just curious and concerned.

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I’ve been wearing glasses for two and a half weeks now, and I must say that I like it. Not only the pure vision effect —I do really see a lot better, though the 3-D has lost its ‘wow’ factor— but it suits me to be a bespectacled person.

I think I’ve had everything now: rain, sleet, grease, condensation from opening the oven (I hadn’t expected that) or from drinking something hot (I hadn’t expected that either, and it made an old hand at glasses-wearing laugh at me at coffee after church), bumping into things because parts of my face are an inch or so further forward than I expect, kisses going ‘clank’ instead of ‘smack’. Oh, and all the little flies that used to fly into my eyes while I was cycling and don’t any more.

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I’ve always had very good eyesight. Last time my eyes were checked, about ten years ago, the left was 125% and the right 180% of normal. But they’ve always been very different: so different, in fact, that I’ve never had proper depth vision. And as it seems silly to have glasses to correct only that (cylinder and no correction; I don’t know if it’s even possible) I’ve never had glasses while my eyes were good enough.

But now I’m fortymumble, and my left eye had been falling short of expectations for some time, though not annoyingly enough to do something about it. Until this morning in the middle of the liturgy of the parish feast, when the slight squint that (I realise now) had become second nature suddenly sprouted a headache.

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