March 11, 2003

I did something funny to my knee last Wednesday and pitched down the cellar stairs on Saturday because it buckled; now I'm still sore on the left side, and presumably black and blue but too stiff to look over my shoulder. Also, another cold is going around in the family and has come around to me. Telling myself that no cold is forever (as opposed to diamonds, which in our case we have not got) doesn't help, but I do it anyway.

Writing

Not writing much; typing up the synopsis (which seems worse every time I look at it) and plot-noodling a little for other things. I feel like Catweazle, "nothing works!"

Reading

But I am reading. Oh yes, I'm reading. I'm not like Boudewijn, who can read two or three works of fiction at the same time (well, alternately, of course), but doggedly finish one before starting the next.

Currently it's The Fall of the Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, which has made me put Swordspoint back on the to-read pile. Dense, convoluted, and altogether delightful. Perhaps a little too much explicit sex, but one can't have everything.

Here is another review, touching on Swordspoint as well.

Also, for Lent, I've picked up School for Prayer again, by Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh. It's good to go back to school from time to time. I keep it in the kitchen to read while stirring vegetable stew.

For one believeth that he may eat all things; another, who is weak, eateth herbs. (Rom. 14:2)

The World

Cleaning up my bookmarks, I found Resources for Great Lent, and this seems as good a time as any to call attention to it. There's even a Lenten quiz, easy for Orthodox choir singers: I scored 83%. Only 50% on the Ecumenical Councils, though, in spite of having done that in theology class and getting "Excellent" there.

Real Life

Church life seems to be more real than anything else in the first week of Lent. Not to mention all the strange shopping - to think that in seven weeks hgytvty (a cat typed this, I'm leaving it in) I'll be doing Easter shopping and that will be strange.

Fourteen people in Great Compline on Monday, counting the priest. Six in the choir: three sopranos, one alto (me), one tenor and two basses. We used to do that with only one soprano and one alto and hardly anyone in the church a few years ago. We're becoming a large parish.

Kids

The life of a school photographer is hard indeed. I spent a Wednesday afternoon trying to take pictures of the school korfball event. It's strange that it's called "korfball" in English, a direct borrowing from Dutch; logically it should be called "basketball" because the thing the ball is supposed to go through is definitely a basket:

This is supposed to be a picture of a goal by one of our school's teams (one of the teachers said "Keep it!" when she saw it), but the digital camera is slooow. A delay of four seconds, as I found out when I took one of the scoreboard in the final. Good effect, though.

That's 7 to 2 for "us" in the last second. Not the team Naomi was in - they finished next to last, according to Naomi because "we could do everything except score!" This was another team from the same fourth-grade class, the one with all the good players in it, and they cooperated much more than they usually do in class.

And this is what happened when I had to step back because there was a ball coming straight at me and my camera:

It was fun. I wouldn't have enjoyed the korfball so much if I hadn't been taking pictures, though I missed most of what was actually happening. I'll definitely volunteer again next year.

Necessary Luxuries

Our worthy cheese lady is quitting - has quit, in fact - for health reasons. Fortunately, she's found someone to take over the shop, and we're going to give him the benefit of the doubt until and unless proven otherwise.

Quitting meant a remaindered basket, any object for 1 euro, and one of the objects was a jar of smoked trout paté. Just the thing for late-night peckishness in Butter Week.

Now, in Lent, the necessary luxuries are tactile rather than culinary: time for the bath thingies a child gave me for my birthday, rose-scented hearts and vanilla-scented ducks and don't-know-what-scented little green men and red women and dark green seahorses.

O Tempora

From Trouw, 10th March:

I have a dream. It is the 8th of March, International Women's Day. The Dam in Amsterdam fills with veiled women. Then Major Cohen rings a bell. And all those women take off their veils as one.

The dreamer is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee making it big in Dutch politics (she's in Parliament for the VVD, the Dutch brand of liberal, meaning civilized right-wing). She's an ex-Muslim, now a fundamentalist atheist of the evangelical sort, taking every opportunity to insult her heritage. I'm not qualified to attack her on specific points, so I'll restrict myself to pointing out that this is another case of "everybody should do what I do" instead of "see, this is what works for me". And that getting rid of a symbol doesn't get rid of what it's a symbol of, and that the same thing can mean different things to different people.

Before they fly away

A dig! Deventer has a good department of archaeology (but a bad website, click on "Archeologie" in the purple sidebar to get the right <expletive deleted> frame). There's a law these days that wherever building is planned, archaeology must be done first, and this has caused the department of archaeology to find an Iron Age settlement in Colmschate (former neighbouring village, now development suburb) with superstrate from the first and second centuries AD. The local free paper had a picture of some of the finds, captioned as "Roman pottery" though one of the exhibits is a clearly labelled sauerkraut jar from the nineteen-twenties.

Kids could dig in a patch of ground seeded with earlier unclassifiable finds - better than throwing them away. We came back with a nice collection of clay pipe-bowls, shards of pottery from prehistoric to twentieth-century (three pieces that I think are probably sixteenth-century even fit together) and a rib and some vertebrae from what was probably once a cow.