It’s not only a neat little city for the tourists. The moment we left the centre —first to go to church in a neighbourhood just outside it, later to walk to the Dampoort station to catch a train— we saw many more houses that were tumbledown, badly kept, neglected, than the occasional one in the centre. The point seems to be that if it’s not touristic, it’s not worth keeping up. I have a suspicion that St. Michael’s church, for instance, is kept poor by its obscurity: it’s not one of the Big Sights, though <plug> if you like churches it’s perhaps even better </plug>, much more churchy.

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(No pictures, because I lent the camera to Tertia. Two other people in her study group also had cameras. Next time it will be in my pocket.)

The second year had fieldwork day— divide into study groups of four to six people with ideally an adult supervisor, go to a designated place along the little stream that runs along the north side of town, take samples of water and soil, catch the fauna, observe the flora, draw the landscape, interview people about Nature Development, etcetera; all of this for double geography and biology credit.

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The bottle of natural rose water that we bought in Haarlem years ago was finally empty, and our quest to get it locally was unsuccessful (though now that I know the brand, I know where to try: the pharmacy section of the organic-food store). Also, we were out of Darjeeling and almost out of Oolong. And I wanted to go to the convent in The Hague and show the sisters the Life and Travels of Father Adrian web page to see if they agreed that it was ready to put online.

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Brain duly rinsed. Not even at the station yet and I saw the first strange thing.

There was no puff of smoke, and anyway the shoes weren’t pointed, but still. They were about size 38, too small for me or any of my daughters, or I might have taken them.

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(A blog-as-I-go spree)

Wednesday night: There’s a snow front coming. The Dutch Railways decide to preventively cancel some trains, especially in the West. We snigger at them being fazed by a little normal winter weather.

Thursday morning: Foggy. Temperature around zero Celsius. I go to work. Trains completely normal, but they still say they’re going to cancel some after 9:00. We’re still laughing at the so-called weather alarm.

9:45 The radio says that there’s heavy snow in the south already. I look up a news site and find that it’s worse in Belgium. Professor comes in and says he’s leaving early because otherwise he may not get home (he lives in Belgium). We advise him to leave right away and I hurriedly finish a letter he wants to sign before he does. My colleague (who has to cross a steepish bridge in a car) and I decide to leave as soon as there’s substantial snow. Other people, who live in town, stay.

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Another trip into the West, not for research this time but, on the pretext of buying tea in Haarlem, to solve my POV and plot problems on the train. A trip Away From it All to get some uninterrupted writing and thinking time, not really alone but at least without people who want something of me.

The POV problem proved easy —a matter of moving one paragraph from the second scene to the first and tweaking a word or two—, the plot problem is still intractable, but the space opera romp I started a few days ago when stalled, because that was something I could do, acquired 71 words, all moving the story forward. One darling I’ll never kill, from an earlier scene: “engineer-scaring gorgeous”.

ETA, in the Skating Cafe: my plot problem has just solved itself. All it needed was for me to delete six words and move a speech tag to the middle of an utterance.

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The story was stalled, requiring research— it ends with a fight in a church, and I even know which church: the church of the Beheading of St.John the Baptist in the Zuidbuurt in Zoeterwoude. It burnt down in 1964, perfect for the story: I can cause that.

Anyway, I wanted a day off before starting the new job on Tuesday.

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Hence the new green clothes. I’m not completely satisfied, but I’ve done enough fiddling for now.

I went to Haarlem, because we’d run out of tea, without even taking my coat, just a heavy cotton top over a T-shirt. 19 degrees and sunny. Lots of lambs; the cutest were the black ones with a white stripe down their face. I can’t tell summer birds from winter birds, but I saw a blackbird almost weighed down by the bunch of twigs she was carrying, so it must be nesting time.

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When I was in Germany (via Koblenz) I took lots of photos with the intention of blogging about at least some of the things in the photos. And I made up lots of text in my head, but I didn’t have a laptop with me (on purpose; the expletive-deleted thing weighs seven pounds and the power unit another two, and I had to carry everything on my back). And writing on the Apple is.. well… uncomfortable.

I wrote the preceding entry, about the phone, almost the moment we were back from holiday (late July) but kept it until I’d have posted the holiday entries.

And now, of course, I don’t know what I wanted to write.

Perhaps some of it will trickle through, and I’ll post a retrospective…

We’ve rented a holiday house in Germany. In Steinbach-Hallenberg, in fact, a little town in the middle of nowhere^WThüringen in the former German Democratic Republic.

Now to get there. By train: it has a station, that’s one of the reasons we picked it. (Other reasons are that it’s in the middle of the woods, in hilly country, not really developed for tourism yet, and it has a beautiful ruined castle.)

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