sjoplog

Just finished....

2012-01-23T16:26:00.002+01:00

...very few books since my last "Just finished...":

Heaven Scent - Sasha Wagstaff
I like Sasha Wagstaff. Her books belong to the same category as Jilly Cooper or Fiona Walker - beautiful/rich people living debauched lives who generally find it in themselves to clean up their act and find good love in the process. Great escapist reading material, in other words! (Hmmm, I might have said that before. Twice. Nobody can accuse me of not being horribly boring/liking the same things in the same way.) This one is set in France, among a snooty perfume dynasty, and you can tell she's beginning to understand the whole craft of writing books. Looking forward to the next one, as always!

It Had To Be You - Susan Elizabeth Phillips
This one I tried because she's a steady-selling author in my Romance section at work, and I try to read at least one book by an author when I see I keep having to reorder her. Great contemporary romance (straight up, no vampires or angels or time-travel or steampunk side plots either), this is - it happens to be the first part of a series connected to the NFL as well, so double-win for me. :-) The heroine starts out kooky and odd, and the hero seems more scumbag than knight, which I thought was a great twist. The ending requires a bit of belief-suspending, but it doesn't mar an otherwise fun story. I'll definitely be getting part 2 at some stage.

A Trick of the Light - Louise Penny
The most recent part of my beloved Inspector Gamache series. I gushed about the previous part in my Favorite Books of 2011 post, and probably because I loved that book so much, this one was a little bit less awe-inspiring. Then again, it seems that Penny's books come in threes, with the third part finishing a story arc that has been in the background of the previous two books. It happened that way with the previous six books (so two sets of three there), and this is part 1 of the new three-story arc (if my theory holds true). I think I can guess where this arc is going to take me, but it will take the next part in proving myself true. :-)
That said, suitably mysteriously, this was a good, if not pulse-quickening, book - not so much for the murder and the solving of the case, but because of what happens to the cast of characters that make up the Gamache books. Some pretty explosive plot turns are happening as far as they are concerned! Gamache and his second-in-command, Beauvoir - aaaargh! Clair and Peter - hah, finally!
What a shame favorite authors can't write as fast as we read. :-)

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
My apologies to various friends and colleagues who have already read this and gushed about it: it's not my new favorite book ever. I liked it. I enjoyed the idea of the OASIS, the vast cyber-multiverse where everyone in the near future spends as much free time as possible; I even liked the idea of being able to actually walk about (for a little while) the OASIS, with those visors and haptic gloves. I loved the gaming references, the hunt for the Easter Egg, and, once the second key was found, I finished the book in one go.
I guess I'm just not as geeky as I thought - which, in a way, is rather reassuring. Nor do I have enough Western 80s experience to understand some of the key clues. And the main character's non-action for huge parts of the book bothered me, too.
Still, the crux of the book is great: the developer of the OASIS has left 3 keys somewhere in that cyber-multiverse, and each key opens a corresponding gate. The first person to discover all keys and clear all gates will inherit the (multi-billion dollar) fortune of the (deceased) developer. An obscure hint is all he leaves the contestants to point them in the direction of the first key.
Let the games begin!

The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
Wonderful, magical, beautiful book, this. I think it was incredibly hyped when it was first published, but don't let that deter you from reading it. Morgenstern's incredibly detailed writing fits the world of the Night Circus (or Le Cirque des Rêves) to a T, and you find yourself wandering around the circus tents, smelling the toffee apples and the hot chocolate, standing in front of that hypnotic clock in the courtyard.
The story itself is interesting, too: it all starts with two old magicians/enchanters pitting their pupils against each other in a contest. The Night Circus is part of the result, as the two pupils create and design ever more beautiful, intricate, and intertwined tents for revelers to visit. But of course it can't last forever...
I don't like circuses, but I wish I could visit this one. I'll even knit a red scarf especially for the occasion.

A Different Species

2012-01-23T10:42:00.000+01:00

Him: "We didn't finish fixing up and painting the bedroom today."
Me, just back from a day at work: "Okay... So this is going to stay until next weekend then?" (Looking at the living room table.)
Him: "Yep!"
Me, thinking about where the hell I'm going to put the ironing, where we're going to eat, how I'm going to find a fresh pair of underwear tomorrow: "And this doesn't strike you as a problem?" (Pointing at the living room table.)
Him: "Nope!"

And then, having resigned myself to working around the mess (since, sadly, there's no place else to put it until the bedroom is finished, unless I want to do it all myself, but I lift enough boxes and crates at work on a daily basis as it is), I get to hear this: "Oh, by the way, we didn't vacuum either, but since we did a lot of drilling and stuff it probably really needs to be done!"

I think it's time to invest in a boxing ball.

Soup

2012-01-21T20:25:00.000+01:00

Why eat dry kibble when you can have home-made split-pea soup?

And trust me on the soup thing. There will never be a picture with his head more out of the bowl than this one while there's soup left in there.

Image

2012-01-10T22:08:00.000+01:00

"Mom, when you're done with work today, can you look for a suitcase for me for my sleepover tomorrow?"
"...Okay, but why?"
"Because I'm the ONLY nine year-old in the WHOLE WORLD who still has a pink princess suitcase, and it's embarrassing."

The times, they are a-changing folks!

Favorite Books of 2011

2011-12-31T14:58:00.002+01:00

2012 is nearly here (all the best wishes, by the way :-), so here are my favorite reads of the past year, in chronological order (liberally borrowed from this post, but since I wrote those words myself, I don't feel guilty):

The Hunger Games trilogy – Suzanne Collins
Get to know Katniss and Peeta before the movie comes out next year as they head to the Hunger Games as tributes from their district, to join 22 other tributes in a fight to the death. And this is young adult literature? Yes. Collins manages to combine both grisly and human elements in her story, a heroine who is more than a little reluctant, and secondary characters that inspire and revile.

Bury Your Dead – Louise Penny
I’ve now read all seven of the Inspector Gamache series that have so far been published, and I think it’s one of the best contemplative detective series out there, but I have to make a special mention for book 6. For this is Armand Gamache’s darkest hour. A wrong arrest, a terrorist attack, the police force in direct physical conflict – and Gamache, that wise, kind, compassionate, admirable man, is right in the middle of it all. He is truly one of my favorite literary characters to spend time with, as he looks and listens far more often than he runs and shoots, and to see him emotionally suffering so deeply was heart-wrenching for me. If you are looking for a crime series that focuses on the little pleasures and blessings in life as much as whodunnit, give this series a try.
Also, although you *can* read the books separately, you really *should* read book 5, The Brutal Telling, before Bury Your Dead, as they are directly linked. Although really, you should start with book 1, Still Life, so you can be properly introduced to Inspector Gamache and his team. He would appreciate it.

In Europe – Geert Mak
I actually read this in Dutch – gasp! I didn’t know I could still enjoy reading Dutch books, but Mak’s style is kind and easy-going, as he takes you on his journey throughout Europe, visiting those places that were instrumental in the continent’s 20th-century history. He manages to blend travel writing and historical writing in a truly pleasurable way. You learn so much along the way, not just about Europe’s history, but also about the patchwork of countries that make up the continent. He is very good at conveying the devastation of wars, sometimes even decades later, and his thoughtful interjections about the EU, to name one of the subjects he touches, are enlightening to someone like myself who knows only what she hears on the news.

The City and the City - China Miéville
If you want to read something that will put you to work, not just because you discover new corners of the English language but also because its concept takes some thought, then don't look further than anything by China Miéville. I've only read 3 of his books so far, but they are always worth the trouble they take me.
This is technically a mystery. It all starts with a murder, but nothing is ever that simple, is it. You see, it's a murder in a city, but which part? The titular city consists of 2 cities that interlink. Miéville doesn't explain anything to you, he just lets you discover exactly how things work, and although this can be headache-inducing at first, you see what's going on fast enough.
As usual, his books aren't really about the plot; they are more odes to urbanity. He is fascinated by cities, you see it in every book, and here, too, you can literally walk through the city (and the city) for all the details he puts in.
Excellent stuff.

A Song of Ice and Fire series - George R. R. Martin (A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows en A Dance with Dragons)
A fantasy series, but really, it's not at all about the dragons or the changelings or the magic or the wizards or whatever standard fantasy set-up you think of. This is a saga - a melodrama - spanning years and continents, with main characters that die unexpectedly, bad guys that aren't really all that bad, children who lose everything and have to fend for themselves, etc. Wonderful books to lose yourself in, in other words.
Also, books you sometimes want to throw at the wall because that one character you have grown to love, and who has finally gotten things back together a bit, suddenly loses it all (again), or, worse, dies! But you know, life is tough, and Martin gleefully rubs that in.

Pigeon English - Stephen Kelman
The only book I read this year that had me in tears. I reviewed it for work - read that here.

Other books that aren't Fiction but that I still enjoyed an awful lot of this year:

The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook - Tarek Malouf
If you've read this blog before, you'll have seen our efforts.
Daughter and I are momentarily stumped, because her new school schedule leaves less time for Mother-Daughter Baking. Hopefully 2012 will bring some temporal elasticity so we can continue our quest to bake every single recipe in the book!

Stitch by Stitch: Learning to Sew, One Project at a Time – Deborah Moebes
Again, if you've read this blog before, you'll have seen my efforts.
I'm almost done with the wrap-around skirt, and then I have only the A-line skirt and the Blouse left to do. Love this book, and her infectious enthusiasm for sewing. It's taught me to be comfortable with the machine, and to be okay with the fact that not all seams can be straight. :-)

Most Anticipated Book of 2012:

Angelmaker - Nick Harkaway

The second effort by the man who wrote The Gone-Away World (one of the few books I gave 5 stars to on Goodreads). I. Can't. Wait!
Am trying very hard not to read anything about it (previews, synopsis, whatever) beforehand, so please don't spoil it for me!

The only book that can knock this one of its Most Anticipated spot is any new title by Maggie O'Farrell, but so far, no news on that front. :-)

Cocktails

2011-11-21T14:54:00.001+01:00

Nothing like getting 'em started early, right?

Don't know the exact recipe, but it included strawberry yogho (kind of a yoghurt milk-y type substance), lemonade concentrate, apple, and of course, la pièce de la resistance, sugar around the rim of the glass.

Gotye

2011-10-27T15:53:00.001+02:00

I'm in love with this song (Somebody That I Used To Know by Gotye).

It's so quirky and melancholic at the same time; I love that combination. Like the video, too - he has quite the green eyes!

In the "quirky and dramatic" category at the moment there's Lana del Rey with Video Games. Love her voice, although she sings so lazily, if that's even a way to describe it.

And finally, in the "just plain silly" category, here's Coevorduh with Tony Feestneus. "Ik ben so oranjuh, ik ben so oranjuh" - cracks me up! Then again, one of the Jeugd van Tegenwoordig boys is part of the band, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised it cracks me up. I bet Nephew nr. 1 likes this one, too. :-)

Sky Scarf

2011-10-21T20:16:00.000+02:00

I've been sewing, but what about my knitting? Well, now that the NFL has started again I get to knit every Sunday evening, so I've picked up my Spider Web Shawl (I can smell the end now), and I'm also knitting a sweater for The Other Half (he was allowed to pick, and chose Mr. Darcy, hahaha!).

I also heard my favourite yarn store is participating in a sort of Knit-A-Long, called the Sky Scarf. I loved the idea of it: knit one (or 2, in my case) rows on a scarf every day in the colour of the sky that day. For a year. Don't know if I can last 365 days, but I'm going to try it for sure! I found various shades of grey and blue and white in my stash, and bought a few more to cover most of the weather bases, and the first two rows are done:

As you can see, it was gloriously cloudless today

Let's hope I won't need the dark, stormy grey at the bottom left too much.

Right, back to winding my 1400 meter skein of merinosilk for the last bit of the shawl.

Just finished...

2011-10-19T20:50:00.000+02:00

...these books since September 5th:

Haar naam was Sarah - Tatiana de Rosnay (English title: Sarah's Key)
Another "just read this, woman!" suggestion from Petunia, and as ever she's right. I loved this book - right up to the part where the 1940 narrative ends. The last part I found dragging; probably because I didn't like the main character that much, and I would have much preferred to have seen Sarah's story finish. Still, I can see why this book is beloved by millions!

The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes
I actually reviewed it for the store's site, so read there what I thought of the (eventual) 2011 Man Booker Prize winner.

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick DeWitt
And again, click here.

Ramayan 3392 AD + Ramayan 3392 AD Reloaded: Tome of the Wastlands - Shamik Dasgupta, Abhishek Singh and Jeevan Kang
I accidentally read the first one a few years ago, attracted as I was to the bright cover. I opened it up to have a quick look and found myself closing it a few hours later, everything read. The story is timeless (based on the Ramayana, which should be obvious from the title :-)), and the art is gorgeous (if somewhat hurried in places), full of swirls and bright colours and irresistible details.
I immediately ordered Reloaded, but instead got 7 Brothers. I tried it again, with the same result. A cock-up by the publisher, who had evidently messed up ISBNs. And then the publisher went belly-up, and poof! went my dream of reading the next part of the only graphic novel that ever grabbed me. Until I found it on the store's second-hand supplier's site, and gave it a try, with severe misgivings. But Reloaded came in! And I enjoyed it, even if the art was less exuberant. Sadly, there was a third collection announced, but never published, so this will be my graphic novel Firefly.

Pigeon English - Stephen Kelman
Loved this one; it made me cry. Again, click here.

Pomegranate Soup - Marsha Mehran
I've not read Chocolat, I've only seen the movie, and this book reminded me of that, only rather less well done. Very light and fluffy, but the author tries to do too much with it. It could have been quite wonderful if she hadn't tried to add a harrowing back story for the three Iranian sisters. Instead, I found parts of it fun, but mostly I found it was trying too hard.

Snowdrops - A. D. Miller
Click here (last time, for this post!).

Train Man 1, 2 and 3 (Densha Otoko) - Hidenori Hara
Lent to me by EB, at our BBB meeting (which was on Solanin). Based on a true story, this is about a nerd who rescues a beautiful girl from a harassing man on the subway, and is sent tea cups as a thank you. He then, as nerds do, goes onto the internet message board he frequents and asks what he should do, and everyone on the thread encourages him to call her up to say thank you for the gift and to ask her out. It's a really sweet story of someone finding it within himself (with a lot of encouragement!) to get out of his comfort zone and look for love. The people on the thread feature heavily in the story, and make for quite a bit of comic relief. I really liked it.

Snuff - Terry Pratchett
The ARC of this book was thrust into my hands by The Letter I, and I read it during a rather busy week at work (when I should have been reading the last two books of the Booker shortlist, but my head was too full to concentrate). It's a Sam Vimes story, for those of you that know the Discworld a bit, and though I was never a big fan, I really liked him in this. And I liked Young Sam an awful lot, too. Full of the usual mad shenanigans people have come to expect of a Pratchett book, and I found it better than his last, Unseen Academicals.

First Comes Marriage - Mary Balogh
I'm on a two-week break right now, so I brought along some escapist reading. This is the first in the Huxtable series, and I thought it was quite good. A standard regency-era romance, with, as they say, flawed characters. Don't know if I'll read the rest, but Balogh sells well in my section, and I thought I'd check out why. If you like Stephanie Laurens and Julia Quinn, you'll probably like Balogh, too. Sorry I'm not very elaborate at the moment, my head feels like it's full of cotton.

Sorcerers & Secretaries 1 and 2 - Amy Kim Ganter
Another manga lent to me by EB, this one also really sweet (and no more than 2 volumes). About a girl whose head is in a fantasy world more than it is on earth, and a boy who tries to be a player but who can't get the girl (his former neighbour) out of his head. I liked the drawing style quite a lot, and, like I said, a sweet story.

Not to be outdone

2011-09-16T09:55:00.000+02:00

I've been sewing, too: a patchwork curtain for our glass-paned bedroom door, and a skirt for Daughter. Lots of blue (long live making use of every scrap of fabric...). Both these are from Stitch By Stitch by Deborah Moebes again. :-)

The curtain --

First, pick out various fabrics that somehow go together. Cut out loooong strips and sew them together.

Next, cut these panels on the bias; half the panels going one way, the other half the other way. Sew them together in a zigzag. Try and align the seams.

After you do this a gazillion times, you have two panels looking something like this:

All that's left to do now is to sew them together in the middle, make tabs to hang it with, and then use a large enough piece of white cotton to line the back with. Which, of course, is much harder than it sounds, what with trying to measure everything out and not having a big enough table for it so having to use the floor meaning trying to dodge curious cats and children. Also, the cotton for the lining was cheap and heavy, so it was a fair bit of manual labour by then. And I ran out of thread on my spool 20 cms. before the very end. Still, the result is worth it!

The skirt --

As you might notice, I still had a bit of fabric left from the curtain. Enough of each (except the cheap heavy cotton), to make squares for a patchwork, gathered skirt. First, try to find some sort of pattern that is colourful but not eyewatering:

The hardest part of this skirt was actually trying to remember which square came where. I had little piles of squares for each row, with strict instructions on top to Daughter not to move them, since they were In Order. She's a good girl, and didn't move them. :-) Sew each line of squares together (again with the notes of Do Not Touch!). Then baste stitch the top of the second row in two lines, which you then use to gather the fabric until it's the same length as the first row. Pin in place - a time-consuming but very necessary affair! - and sew that to the first row. Repeat with the next two rows and you get this:

Repeat for the back, sew them together, put a properly wide elastic band at the top, hem the bottom, et voilà! A beautiful Daughter wearing a beautiful skirt!

Even better, a beautiful Daughter wearing a beautiful skirt that wants to move!

And next up: a wrap skirt for Mom. That is, if I remember to buy tape so I can tape the pages of the pattern together. Also, if I can manage to extrapolate the pattern to my size, since the sizes provided only go up to size Extremely Fit Person. And my Wii keeps telling me I'm not quite there yet.

Look at her sew!

2011-09-14T20:09:00.001+02:00

Daughter has been asking me to please help her learn to sew. And even though I'm a former teacher, I find that teaching her a craft (as opposed to a subject), is quite difficult. Luckily I have a resourceful child, who came up with the idea of making the same kind of bag that I had made (her earlier ideas all centered on stage costuming, which, while creative, are not exactly something I can make myself yet, so a little hard to teach, also.)

So, on a stormy Monday afternoon, she sat down and chose her fabric, pressed it, measured it (with a little help from me), and cut it all out. Then I drew chalk lines where she needed to go, and off she went! With a finished, double-sided bag at the end of it - perfectly big enough for a book and her Nintendo.

Puuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrr.....

2011-09-11T15:44:00.000+02:00

Because some days, life is this good.

Finally!

2011-09-10T16:21:00.000+02:00

Today was mostly sunny and - above all - blessedly dry. Add that to the fact I didn't have to work or go to/host a birthday party, and you get a Whole Day At Work In The Garden.

And lord knows it was needed, as when we arrived last week (we had a very quick two hours on Saturday then), it looked something like this:

Five hours of pretty intense physical labour later, and we have managed to cut the most monstrous weeds down to size again. My hands were cramping by the end, from all the weeding I was doing. And The Other Half has blisters on his hands from all the lawn-mowing-and-edge-cutting he did. Daughter supervised, so not too much physical hardship for her... But, here is where we stand at the moment:

The house is visible once more! There are some flowers (believe me, this whole summer was tragically colour-free, the few times we did manage to get to the garden)! And crab apples! And, when the sun was out, about a gazillion bees and solitary wasps and butterflies and The Biggest Slug In The World.

Glorious day, full of labour (although we did sneak in a lie-down on the freshly-mown grass for a good long while there) and result. And now I'm going to sit on the couch with an ice-cold Coke and a bag of Doritos. :-)

Just finished...

2011-09-05T20:46:00.001+02:00

...another three months' worth of books:

Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs by Molly Harper

Part of my summer holiday reading, this. :-) She sells pretty well in my Romance section, so I thought I'd give it a try. And I enjoyed it well enough - the story isn't particularly new (girl gets turned into a vampire and has to learn the ropes), but some parts were genuinely funny (I laughed out loud at the bit where she meets her best friend for the first time after her transformation). I may still try out part 2 and 3.

Just Like Heaven and The Duke and I by Julia Quinn

Another Romance section regular, and one I'd never read. I can totally see why she's so popular: her stories are funny and the characters are people you'd like to meet. Of course the plots are formulaic, but then, so are the plots of most fantasy and mysteries/thrillers, aren't they. Lovely escapist reads, and an author I'll probably read again in the future.

Midnight Riot (a.k.a. The Rivers of London) by Ben Aaronovitch

A dark/urban fantasy, this, and brought to my attention because I edit a lot of the store's blog's You Reviews - and this was one of them, and quite positive, too. I think that review nails it; I really enjoyed the dry humour, and I thought the world Aaronovitch conjured up was really interesting - but it didn't grip me at the exclusion of all else (the way I love books to do). I'll definitely be reading part two (Moon Over Soho) at some stage, though.

False Colours by Georgette Heyer

Ah yes, another Heyer! You can't really go wrong with her, can you? Funny, fast, delicious characters, even better dialogue. Good stuff!

Lover Unleashed by J. R. Ward

The latest installment of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, the first x parts of which I inhaled a year and a half ago. And again I thoroughly enjoyed this one - I liked the two principals, I liked the fact that the other brothers made appearances (especially Vishous and Butch come back here), and I still really enjoy the gritty world Ward has created. The only downside I found with this particular book is the rather toe-curling Ye Olde English she tries to have a new group of vampires speak (well, new to these stories, although in their world they have been roaming Europe for centuries). Let's hope they adapt to modern-day Caldwell speak very quickly.

A Game of Thrones * , A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin

* A Game of Thrones I actually read back in May. It should have come between The City and the City and The Princess Bride. D'oh!
Ah yes, and then I fell into the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. I originally read A Game of Thrones because it was flying off the shelves and I had been reading so much about the HBO adaptation that I thought I'd give it the old college try. It took me quite a while to read A Clash of Kings, for some reason (probably because I was limping towards my summer holidays), but once I hit the point of no return on that one, I read them all. I don't think I need to say much about these (after all, so much better info can be found all over the interwebs), except that I did really enjoy them all, and I like the fact that no character is safe from the author's cruel pen. Anyone can be killed at any time, much like it could happen in the real world. I can understand the rabid fans' impatience at it taking 6 years to write book 5 - but then again, I don't think any of those fans have ever tried to write something of this scale themselves.
Also, I'm really eager to see the tv series, once it finds a tv channel here or the box set is out. :-)

Solanin by Inio Asano

This I had to read as it's the first selection of a new little bookclub my friends/colleagues have started. A one-part manga (which, in itself, is rare enough) about the life of twenty-something Tokyo-ers. I'm not a seasoned manga/comic reader, so I tend to read it first for the story, and I will reread it in the coming weeks to have a better look at the artwork. It's the kind of story that simmers in your head after you finish it. For a long time, I kept thinking, "is anything going to happen?" And then something quite catastrophic does happen, and that just has a beautiful resolution. I think that, if you are a singer or a band member, the ending of this story will resonate particularly well. Now to reread it for the art - not the jagged art that you typically associate with manga, but more rounded and there are definitely collage pieces in there, too. Worth a second look for sure!

Artemis Fowl and Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex by Eoin Colfer

And now I'm technically reading Mythology by Edith Hamilton and Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos and I still haven't finished Company of Liars by Karen Maitland (and yes, I'm also aware I still have two classics to read before year's end!) - but these two Artemis Fowl books just sneaked in there somehow. The Other Half is rereading the entire series, so I just picked up part one to refresh my memory, and then I brought home the latest installment for him and ended up reading that before him also. :-) These books are good fun! Artemis is great to read about (never mind that I sincerely hope Daughter will turn out nothing like him), even though his recent character transition to a kinder boy isn't really helping. The Atlantis Complex has him suffering from a psychological disease, which hopefully will be cured into the evil crime-lord genius that Artemis started out as by the next book. Mind you, I don't mind him having a bit of a conscience, but only a smidgeon.

Singer

2011-08-02T21:37:00.000+02:00

So, what do you do with 3 weeks of vacation? You take to your Singer and you learn to sew, of course!

The great thing about buying books for the Crafts section of the store is that you meet up with all kinds of lovely books, one of them being Stitch by Stitch: Learning to Sew One Project at a Time by Deborah Moebes.

I took one look at this book when it came in, and decided to order another one for the store, since this one was coming home with me. It has its faults (i.e. the included cd-rom has its patterns all jumbled, and the only way to unscramble them is by using the Google Docs thingie in gmail and save that as a .jpg (to say nothing about European A4 vs American A4), and the conversion from inches to centimeters isn't exactly great everywhere) but mostly it's a fabulous book for the almost beginner.

She writes with passion and a good sense of humor about what sewing is all about, and her projects are designed to teach you a new essential skill each time. So far I've learned straight lines, mitered corners, how to make bias tape, stitching the ditch, the wonders of sewing things inside-out and then flipping them the proper way and having everything come out right, sewing curves, and how to sew on zippers.

In other words, I've made 4 napkins, a placemat, a reversible bag, an eye mask and 3 pillows for our brand-new couch:

My goal is to sew a dress for myself. And once I've done that I may just graduate to these books, Pattern Magic and Pattern Magic 2, by Nakamichi Tomoko:

They have me drooling each time I pass them on my shelves.

Hummingbird III

2011-06-22T21:29:00.001+02:00

Ready for some more mouthwatering food? Here we go...

(A small note on the recipe names in this post: I don't have the cookbook near me, and The Kitten is currently using my lap as his bed, meaning I can't get up to hunt for the book, either. So you'll have to make do with approximations.)

Week 8: Pineapple Coconut Cupcakes

Yum! The pineapple at the bottom was lovely, and I adore coconut flakes anyway, so this was no hardship to make or eat. We learned from the Strawberry Cream Cheese Cupcakes in Week 5, and put a layer of coconut flakes on the bottom of each cupcake before putting the pineapple. Made for a lot less wet mess at the bottom! My mom found these too sweet, and couldn't finish a whole one, but my sweetness nemesis was still to come...

Week 9: Banana Cupcakes with Chocolate Frosting

Yum again! The banana is completely mixed in with the batter, making for a very creamy cupcake. The Other Half didn't like the combination of banana and chocolate much. These might actually go well with the lemon frosting from the Lemon Cupcakes of Week 4, I'm thinking - sour and sweet. Worth a try for sure!

Week 10: Peach Cupcakes

Meh. This was the first batch that none of us liked. I think it might have more to do with the fact that we used tinned peaches rather than fresh ones, though. Still, I don't think I'll be retrying even that anytime soon.

Week 11: Marshmallow Cupcakes

I'm surprised I have any teeth left! Dear god. The Other Half and Daughter really enjoyed them, but they were not for me. I don't like marshmallows (I don't like their sweetness, and I really don't like their texture), so having both the cupcake and the frosting filled with them was too much. Still, I really enjoyed making them, as it required melting the marshmallows and then filling up the little holes you made in the cupcakes.
Important tip, if you want your kitchen to remain somewhat clean and yourself not too badly covered with melted marshmallow: wet your fingers before you slide a dollop of melted marshmallow into the cupcake. This will make it much easier to glide the goop off the spoon. It took me about 5 cupcakes and a selection of rather choice swearwords to discover this.

Week 12: Hummingbird Cake

The ones among you in possession of the book will probably wonder what on earth happened to the Lavender Cupcakes, the Pumpkin Cupcakes, the Green Tea Cupcakes, and the Ginger Cupcakes. Well, we'll be making them during our summer holidays. All of the above require ingredients not easily found down your local supermarket, so Daughter and I decided to skip them for now.

So. Hummingbird Cake. Truly delicious! It's like a carrot cake, but without the carrots (duh) and with bananas. The bananas are again completely mixed in with the batter, making for one smooooooth cake. We used pecan nuts for this one, btw. Easy to make, although we had to make do with 2 tiers since we only have 2 round baking tins. :-) Definitely a cake we'll be making again!

This was also the first time my colleagues at work got a taste of what we bake, after so many weeks of hearing stories and seeing pictures. Poor things!

Week 13: Carrot Cake

Awwww, isn't this cake marvelous-looking? :-) We made it for Daughter's teachers at school as a thank you. See how, in the first picture, it's like a little pacman, with an open mouth and an eye and a speech bubble? Well, that was our cunning way of disguising the fact that we had sliced away three pieces for Daughter, The Other Half and Myself to eat as dessert. Because, you know, we do need to test what we bake! Also, this allowed us to write "thank you" in the bubble, as if the cake was saying it. And Daughter did a stellar job decorating. But mainly it was a disguise.

As carrot cakes go - I've tasted better! I have a recipe from one of Gretta Anna's cookbooks (I think it's the orange one, although I'm lucky enough to have both)(they are my Mom's Cooking Bibles, and all three of her daughters received both these cookbooks about 15 years ago!) that is much tastier. Gretta Anna's recipe includes pineapple, which the Hummingbird doesn't, and to me that is really missing here.

I think we'll be making the Hummingbird Cake from this book, and Gretta Anna's Carrot Cake from her book in the future. That way we'll get the best of both.

Anyhoo. I think that's more than enough sugar for one post, don't you?

Speed

2011-06-20T11:32:00.000+02:00

Went from fast asleep in bed to packing snacks and gymbags to standing fairly-coherently waving to Daughter at the school yard (with no item of clothing of mine or hers inside out or put on in the wrong order and all teeth brushed) in 25 minutes.

All without coffee.

I'm impressed.

Just finished...

2011-06-16T20:02:00.002+02:00

...more books than I thought I did in 3 and a half months...

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
This was a bookclub book. It left me neither warm nor cold. I wish I had better things to say about it, and parts of it were enjoyable enough - it's a love story set during WWII in the US, between a Chinese boy and a Japanese girl who gets sent to the prisoner camps - but it just didn't click for me. Also, if you wait all through the war for your girl who's in a war camp, don't come telling me you can't wait a few more days after the end of the war for her to come back and find you before you ask someone else to marry you, because I just don't buy it.

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
A re-read, and I'm afraid it's still not my favourite Austen. That said, any Austen has more than enough wit and cutting remarks hidden in the text to make the story enjoyable, and it's the same with Mansfield Park.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Ah yes, the first classic you all voted for me to read this year. Now I must ask, why on earth did you want me to read this?
Good things first: I can see why it's a classic, because, for its time, it must have been enormously controversial (certainly foul-mouthed), and I've never read a book from that period that is set up quite in that way (and yes, I've read quite a few). But... I hated it. What a bunch of hateful, petty, small-hearted people. There are about 2 people that you can actually like in that story, and they do get their deserved ending, but sadly mostly it is all about the famed Cathy and Heathcliff, the former a selfish, bipolar trutje (look it up in a Dutch dictionary) and the latter a lumbering, bad-tempered, self-loathing brute. I can't stand people that feel they need to have a fight to live, anyway, so reading hundreds of pages worth of book peopled with only that kind, well, all I can say is, never again.
I can only hope the other two books you chose are more worth my time. :-)

The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny
Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny
So after that colossal waste of energy, I turned to books with characters I actually want to spend time with. And Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is certainly one of those; he's the kind of fictional character you wish you could meet in real life for a cup of coffee and a chocolate treat. I found both books incredibly tense, and you would do best to read the series in order, for Bury Your Dead is best enjoyed knowing what happens in The Brutal Telling. Gamache is wise, and considerate, and thoughtful, but human nonetheless, which means he makes mistakes. And it is his mistakes that are at the heart of both these books. I found Bury Your Dead absolutely haunting; it weaves the past and the present together beautifully, and it shows Gamache at the most vulnerable point of his life. I'm not going to talk about which murders he is asked to solve, because they are important, but to me not nearly as important as the consequences Gamache has to live with as he tries to solve the cases - and makes mistakes.
If you are looking for a murder mystery series that looks beyond the whodunnit to how such a case affects the people trying to solve them (as well as how they affect the people living near the crime scene, or related to the victim), look no further than the Armand Gamache series by Louise Penny.

In Europa by Geert Mak
This book was calling out to me, although I don't really know why. It's part travelogue all over Europe, part general European history of the 20th century, and wholly interesting. As it is written by a Dutch writer, I took a deep breath and tried it in Dutch. And finished it, too! I found it very easy to read, and remarkably interesting, although he does skip over the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s. He does write about these decades, but compared to the detailed care he gives to WWI and WWII before then these decades feel a bit skimped on. In any case, I liked his pleasant style and thought-provoking observations, and the questions he raises about what exactly Europe is, and just as importantly, what "Europe" means, are quite important. I'm Dutch first, and European second, but he contends that for "Europe" to work, it should be the other way around (much like Americans are that first, and, for example, Vermonters second)(with the exception of Virginians, who are only Virginians and nothing else, of course ;-)). I can really recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the upheaval that was Europe in the 20th century.

Retribution by Jilliane Hoffman
Next, a thriller that I've been meaning to read for a while. It's the first of a two-parter, but I haven't found the second part hanging around the store yet. A law student is brutally raped by a man in a clown mask. X years later she works in Miami as a lawyer, assisting the police team on the trail of a serial killer. When a man is arrested with a body in the trunk, she recognizes his voice as that of her rapist. Let the games begin, so to speak.
What makes this book very interesting is that you're never quite sure if the rapist is the serial killer (until the very end). Also, she has to bend and break a few rules to get her case where she needs to (and keep her rapist in jail), but considering her violated past, you have great sympathy for her. And yet... she's a lawyer who should be upholding the law, not breaking it. So an interesting psychological thriller this, with twists and turns. I liked it.

The City and the City by China Miéville
Another bookclub book, this time my choice. I liked it - Miéville is always interesting. He plays with language and form, so don't expect to breeze through his books. They are tough cookies, but I always feel somehow invigorated after I've read one of his books. I like the challenge he throws at me, and I think I can meet it. In this book you realize very quickly that it's called The City and the City for a reason, although it will take you quite a while to figure out exactly how these cities relate. He never stops to explain the situation, but lets the context do the talking (the same goes for his use of language, which is quite specific to the situation the cities are in, but makes perfect sense once you grasp what's going on). Am I being vague? A bit, yes, but I don't want to spoon-feed you the plot or the answers. Dare to read it, and you'll see what I mean. Also, once more a beautiful book about urban life, and once more a book where the city and the city are described with so much detail you can pretty much walk through them. If ever there was a theme in his works, it would that of the metropolis.

The Princess Bride by William Golding (well, by S. Morgenstern really, actually, of course)
You know, I read this book a few years back and loved it. I remember laughing a lot at all his asides and all his comments, and actually wondering for a while if this Morgenstern fellow was real or not. And re-reading it I still enjoyed it, but not as much. I don't think this is any fault of the book, but more a matter of timing. Sometimes you simply pick the wrong time to read something. Having said all that, if you've never read it, but you like adventure and silliness (and if you know the movie), please read this book. :-)

Summer Knight by Jim Butcher
And finally, I finished part 4 of the Dresden Files this afternoon. I really enjoyed this one! I liked his Faerie Courts and the twists and turns of the murder he has to try and solve, and I liked the new characters that are introduced in this part. Butcher has a great imagination; I like the way he writes action scenes, you feel like you're right there. Here's hoping Harry gets a proper rest before book 5 (and makes the rent).

Hummingbird II

2011-05-10T11:00:00.001+02:00

So of course I thought I was going to put up a post a week featuring all those delectable goodies Daughter and I would be baking... Best laid plans, etc. I did take pictures of all of them, though, so here's an update so far.

Week 2: Chocolate Cupcakes (with chocolate or vanilla frosting)

Hmmmm, these were delectable, and very basic to make. Again most were given away to Daughter's classmates, and the chocolate-glazed ones were taken with me to the Women at Work Gathering. Eating them provided the only moment of silence in a very fun and talkative evening. Here's to more of those meet-ups!

Week 3, Red Velvet Cupcakes (with cream cheese frosting)

Had to go on a hunt for red food coloring, which can really only be found in the Asian (super)markets here. I only have a picture of the goods before they went into the oven, but they didn't really rise well (this was a more old-fashioned recipe, including vinegar and buttermilk (can I just say that the English term for that sounds so much tastier than the Dutch?) and bicarbonate of soda (which I didn't have at the time)). I wasn't too blown away by these - although the frosting was delicious. With this frosting, as with the vanilla and chocolate, they mention that you have to mix it up for "at least 5 minutes" - only the next sentence here is "don't mix too long". And I don't think you should, or it will start to shift.

Week 4, Lemon Cupcakes (with lemon frosting)

These turned out well! I think cream cheese frosting would be even better though, because the lemon on top of the lemon was a bit too lemony for me... Sorry to my colleague in Amsterdam, who I promised one to, but in the end I wasn't sure it would survive transport (also, she would only have gotten it on a Friday, and we make these on Monday). So instead I will try to remember to bake some more when I next go to Amsterdam myself.

Week 5, Strawberry Cream Cheesecupcakes

Omnonnom - these were yummy but very messy. Tip for next time: put some of the cookie crumbs you are supposed to put on top in the bottom as well, before you put in the strawberries. Hopefully that will stop them leaking a bit... Also, when they say you need 200 grams of biscuits for 12 cupcakes? They're joking. A few cookies is more than enough.

Week 6, Cupcakes with a Dark Base*

* Not sure if this is the English title in the English version of the book; I'm translating as I write :-)

Chocolate on the bottom, cheese cake with chocolate chips on top. What's not to like? Well, this was another "old-fashioned" recipe, with vinegar etc. And I've discovered that they turn out quite heavy. But we did enjoy them, one day even warmed up, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top.

Week 7, Hazelnut-Chocolate Cupcakes (with hazelnut frosting)

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner! These are so incredibly delicious... Please note the rather large pot of Nutella in the background of the first picture. That says it all, I think. Right, kid?

Progress

2011-04-11T09:29:00.000+02:00

You take this:

And then you do a lot of this:

Then you take a big sieve and shovel everything back in (minus the large roots and bricks and shards of pottery and glass that you've dug up) and you get this:

And a year or two later, you find that you suddenly have this:

And this:

Put it all together and this is what our garden now looks like:

With apologies for the cloudy quality of some of these pictures. My camera phone seems to be dying. Oh, and the flowers are in the left bottom corner of the last picture, just out of sight.

I love being a gardener.

Hummingbird

2011-03-29T20:34:00.000+02:00

Petunia and Clark were here on Saturday, with their gorgeous brood, which, aside from Daughter's room covered in styrofoam snowflakes and a lot of laughter, also brought us The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook.

Petunia bought it for herself since she's started trying her hand at baking goods, but she's discovered she likes to bake apple pies and such rather than cupcakes and brownies and cookies. So it was handed down to me, and I fell in love. Absolutely every single thing in it makes you want to tear out the page and eat it.

Daughter, once the styrofoam was vacuumed off her, took a look inside and immediately declared that she wanted to make the Vanilla Cupcakes, which happened to be recipe no. 1. It took a little twisting of the old arm, but I agreed, and on Monday, during her lunch break, we made our very first batch.

Daughter read out the entire recipe, and weighed all the ingredients, and mixed everything together, and even put the tray in the oven (I did help here and there - when her arm got tired from holding the mixer). She really did a stellar job, but had to go back to school before the cakes were ready, so I promised her we would put the icing and the sprinkles on when she was back. Since her good friend's birthday was the next day, she was going to reserve the best one for him, and check with him if he wanted chocolate or fruity sprinkles.

I was stuck at home, breathing in the gorgeous smell of vanilla and staring down the bowl of fluffy icing. Lovely fantasies of having 11 cupcakes to devour over the next week sprang up and were not suppressed. Three PM took forever to come around, and the drooling was becoming a bit of a problem, but finally Daughter was home.

"Right," she said. "I have orders for 8 cakes."

"?" I asked.

"I checked at school who wanted what topping, and I have 8 people that want cupcakes."

"But - but I thought you were only going to ask the birthday boy?"

"I did, he wants fruity. But the teacher wants chocolate, and J. wants chocolate, too, and R.'s grandmother wants fruity. See? Here's my list."

Poof went my dream of eating cake after cake after cake. In the end I had to make do with 1.

And this is what I had to let go:

I ask you, is that fair? I should think not. I may have to rethink how to bring across the "share with others" message.

On the positive side, both Daughter and I really enjoyed baking this first batch, and she has 20 kids in total in the class, so we've resolved to bake every single recipe in the book.

Next week: Chocolate Cupcakes!

Stunned

2011-03-14T22:46:00.001+01:00

I simply cannot get over these Before and After satellite images of the tsunami in Japan. CNN also has a very humbling collection of images.

Before. I can't seem to save After, so click on the links above.

I'm devastated. I'm lucky to have no empathetic reference material when it comes to the people I see on tv, walking in a daze around what used to be a cosy neighbourhood, now transformed into a rubble of stone and mud, but I'm devastated nonetheless.

Maybe it's because I've been to Japan, and I've loved the country and its people for so long; I haven't been to New Zealand or to Haiti, or to any of the other recent disaster areas - they certainly didn't make me feel like this, much as I found it terrible what happened.

I have no words for this. This display of force makes everything people like to complain about in this country (and boy do they like to complain here) completely irrelevant.

I don't know what I did in my previous lives, but it must have been something amazing, because I cannot stop counting my blessings.

Sketches

2011-03-05T19:50:00.000+01:00

I'm not one for (black-and-white) drawings and sketches, generally, but I think I'm in love.

All three are sketches/drawings by Georges Seurat (if you've ever heard the term pointillism, then you'll know his name). We're at disc 5 of The Private Life of a Masterpiece, and it's really A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte that was being discussed, but the sketches/drawings that popped up at the beginning of the documentary just took my breath away.

Sadly these little reproductions do no justice to what I saw on my tv screen, and I'm sure my tv screen does no justice to the real thing, so I'm going to have to hope and look out for an exhibition somewhere near-ish in my lifetime. Curse that documentary series!

Escher

2011-03-02T19:56:00.000+01:00

Stil leven en straat (1937)

As promised, Daughter and myself presented ourselves at the Escher in the Palace museum yesterday.

I had a remarkably difficult time convincing Daughter to abandon her pyjamas, but once we were there, I think she forgave me a little. The treasure hunt this time was rather more basic, and I could tell she wasn't as taken with Escher as she was with van Gogh. Which I can imagine, as with van Gogh paintings you can see all those dollops of paint, and all those wild brushstrokes, and all that glorious colour - and Escher is an altogether more technical (and generally black-and-white) experience. An average eight-year old isn't going to be interested in one of the original woodblocks he used, or in tesselation, or in all those teeny little details that make up all those etchings.

When I asked her what her favorites were, she answered "his selfportrait and the cat." Take that, Escher afficionados! I think she will tell me something entirely different in 5 or 10 years. :-)

The top floor of the museum contains a wonderful mess-with-perspective room to have your picture taken in (see first picture here), wooden puzzles (as well as computer programs) to recreate some of Escher's famous math-bending compositions, and a truly brain-melting optical illusion called Moving Buildings. Plenty of stuff to do as well as see, in other words.

All in all, a good visit, but I think we'll have to go back once her math skills have progressed.

Just finished...

2011-03-01T17:30:00.000+01:00

It's been a loooong time since I had one of these up. Apologies if I don't have too many details for every book, and that these are short, but The World's Best Caesar's Chicken Salad's chicken is roasting in the oven and I don't have much time...

The Solitude of Prime Numbers - Paolo Giordano
Bookclub book. I loved the start, which introduced the two main characters individually in an unforgettable way, but by the end I grew very frustrated by especially the boy, because even as an adult he was unable to form any kind of impression. Not even on himself, I think. The girl, at least, fought back, in her way, in a wonderful photography session. But the boy... I just wanted to smack him upside the head. The title is very apt.
Haven't seen the movie, btw.

Covet - J. R. Ward
Part 1 of the Fallen Angels series. Very obviously a set-up books for later on, but nonetheless enjoyable. Click here to see what I thought about her Black Dagger Brotherhood series, and you'll understand the appeal of Covet. :-)

The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
Ah yes! An absolute recommendation now. This is going to be my new trilogy to push into people's hands when they're looking for something for their teenage child to read. Or for any high school English teachers who are cool enough to think outside the regular classics box. Or for anyone looking for a book for their bookclub.
You can read the first part on its own, but I recommend that you read all three of them (certainly, once you start the second book, you will have to finish all three).
It's a story that can be read on many layers - it's an action series, with a streetwise heroine and a politically savvy hero; it's a (civil) war story that is not at all afraid to show the horrors and brutalities of war; it asks questions about what it means to be a hero, and how that glory has a very dark side, too; it also asks questions about leadership and rebellion and jumping from the frying pan into the fire, etc. Excellent stuff, both to read, and to discuss. I loved it very much.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox - Maggie O'Farrell
Ah yes, again! I think I've sung the praises of Maggie O'Farrell every single time I've read one of her books, so I won't repeat myself too much here.
Rereading this book (for my bookclub, yay!) was every bit as magical as reading it the first time. Especially since it's was sunny, so I got to sit in the sun on the balcony and be transported. :-)

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks
This was also a bookclub book. I liked the obvious love Dr. Sacks has for his profession and his patients, and how he thinks outside the box, and how he focuses on what his patients can still do (as opposed to what facilities they have lost due to brain or other trauma).
But there were so many cases that they began to blur together, even though every one was unique. I don't have a medical background, so after a while, with all the specific terms bandied about, I became a bit lost.

Right. Time to work on the dressing!

Dwarven Battle Bonnet

2011-02-24T19:56:00.000+01:00

The somewhat fearsome creature pictured above would be my colleague, The Letter I, wearing the birthday present I made for him. I must hasten to add that he requested it. Or rather, he requested "a beard hat."

Yes, he's that kind of guy. Who will actually wear this. Out in public. Welcome to the world that is the American Book Center, is all I can say to that, really.

Anyhoo, details! The pattern - and yes, there is a pattern. In fact, there are oodles of patterns for beard hats. There's this one. And this one. And this one. But I fell in love with the Dwarven Battle Bonnet. (Sorry, you may need to have a Ravelry account to view the patterns, since I couldn't easily find them elsewhere.)

Since The Letter I is a big Magic and fantasy fan, I thought this would be particularly apt to knit for him. It was quick enough to do, and the pattern was easy enough to follow, although I found that the mouth opening was, erm, cavernous. So I sewed it up a bit at both mouth corners. I don't have the yarn labels near me, but the black was some kind of acrylic/fake that I really didn't enjoy handling (although it's no problem to wear, since hair provides a nice buffer). The orange was some kind of Eco Cotton, which is much softer to handle and to wear straight on the skin.

It was quick to do, and a lot of fun. We all tried it on at home, and to see The Letter I light up as he unwrapped it was well worth it. :-) I know already he'll scare the bejesus out of me when he knocks on the store window to be let in on a Sunday morning...

Janelle

2011-02-23T20:58:00.000+01:00

Where was I this past Monday evening? At the Melkweg in Amsterdam, of course, along with Junior Big Sister and Niece #3 (among others) to see the lovely miss Janelle Monáe do her thing.

Junior Big Sister and Niece #3 are Huge Fans, from the moment they laid ears on her in September last year, while I've been doing my usual thing, which is sort of listening and humming along and waiting for the click (it's ever late for me)(mainly I went along so I could spend an evening with Junior Big Sister :-)).

But the concert sure helped with the click because the girl can SING! During Mushrooms & Roses, while painting (!), she just let her voice go, and go, and go, and she could have done that for three hours and I still would have been absolutely spellbound. I think the song was Mushrooms & Roses, but I kind of lost track of everything going on as the goosebumps took over.

It was a shortish concert (about an hour and fifteen minutes or so), with her current hits Cold War and Tightrope finishing it off, and pre-concert personal favorite Come Alive as encore. I loved it - she won me over completely!

Heh. Just saw on her website that her upcoming tour with Bruno Mars will feature Plan B. ^^

In Anticipation of Spring

2011-02-21T13:44:00.000+01:00

Baby, it's cold outside! Sunny, but cold. Cold enough to make you forget we had a few balmy, gorgeous, springy days last week.

So, as a public service, to keep our chins up, so to speak, I here present you with a few pictures as proof that spring is indeed trying to crack through the winter cold, and beginning to succeed.

Go home, winter. You've worn out your welcome!

Votes are in

2011-02-17T22:55:00.000+01:00

Well, thank you very much, all you blog readers and tweeters and facebook commenters. I have a top 3 and they are....

1. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
2. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

On the injured reserve list we have Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, should I somehow misplace/have stolen/throw out of the window/burn the first three.

I now have ten months and eleven days to read them. Easy as pie, right? O.o

(In any case easier than aligning the pictures, god-awful b$&%Q#*(d of a blogging editor.)

Poll: Classics

2011-02-15T19:12:00.001+01:00

Okay, wherever you're reading this, help me out, please. I have various classic works of literature that are slowly petrifying on my To Read Shelf.

I've decided to read 3 this year. As in, finish, since all these books have been picked up and half-read before.

Only which ones? Here's where you come in. Please pick the 3 you think I should read, and put them in the comments section. The 3 with the most votes will be read, and the other seven will get another shot next year (at least, that's what I'll tell them).

- The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
- Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained by John Milton
- Les Liasons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Aeneid by Virgil
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Ok. Go!

Treasure Hunt

2011-02-14T20:30:00.002+01:00

Daughter's school was closed today, so the two of us went off to Amsterdam to visit the Van Gogh Museum. Like most museums they had a treasure hunt for children, so off we went, and I must say it was one of the better treasure hunts I've seen. They really made you discover the paintings!

De aardappeleters (1885)

For example, one of the questions posed for De aardappeleters (above) was "Does the clock in the painting say 19.00 hrs, yes or no?" Yeah, you try to find that clock.. It's there (although you may not be able to see it in this small version), but we had to search long and hard. :-)

They had little puzzle pieces, asking us to which painting they belonged, and that painting was not necessarily in the same room as where we had been answering questions. And they also showed you a palette with various colours, and asked you which painting was made with it.

Daughter fell in love with Zonnebloemen, and was given a postcard of the painting for correctly answering all the questions.

Zonnebloemen (1889)

I saw my favorite again, and discovered some new favorites as well. Daughter saw up close the amazing way he used colour and paint strokes, and I could tell she was impressed. We didn't stay nearly long enough, but then again, she's only eight. As she grows older I'm sure our visits will grow longer.

Amandelbloesem (1890)

Korenveld met kraaien (1890)

Kop van een skelet met brandende sigaret (1886)

Next up, for the spring vacation in 2 weeks, is Escher in het Paleis, right here in Den Haag. Hopefully they'll have a treasure hunt just as informative and interesting.

Shawlitis

2011-01-29T20:03:00.001+01:00

A few months ago my local yarn store (or LYS for those in the know) organized a shawl swap. I filled in a form saying what colors I liked, and if I was allergic to cat hair or wool, and more of those kinds of details, and a few weeks later everyone that joined the swap received these details from another person. The idea was then to knit (or crochet, or weave) a shawl for this person. This past week was the week to start sending out the package with the completed shawl in it.

I haven't received the shawl made for me yet, but I did send out the one I made on Wednesday. I heard today that my recipient got it in the mail yesterday, and from what her daughter told me she really liked it! I hope so. :-) I took some pictures beforehand of the finished project:

As usual, I went for my lace knitting bible, Victorian Lace Today by Jane Sowerby, and picked a shawl I hadn't made yet: Miss Lambert's Shetland Pattern for a Shawl. It was quite easy to make, really! The pattern repeat was only 6 rows, so it was quickly memorized by my head (and my hands). I used Filigran lace no. 1 in the most beautiful muted purple. I loved the yarn, it was 100% merino and soft and gorgeous! I think the end result is quite good, if I may say so myself. :-)

All in all it's been a great project to be a part of. Apparently there's going to be a Sockitis starting in March. I've never knit a sock in my life, but I think I'll give it a go...

First, though, a Mystery Project for a colleague of mine. If you're reading - I finally started it this afternoon (*queue The Twilight Zone theme*)...

Details

2011-01-23T19:39:00.000+01:00

Went to the garden a few days ago, and it all looked pretty dreary:

But if I've learned one thing over the past two years of working with plants and dirt, it's that you often have to look more closely, and so I did:

See? New shoots! Already, and it's only just gone half-January! Bulbs are also showing their first tips, and the garlic survived all the snow, and the strawberries will make it, too.

Couple that with the fact that's it's still light out at 5 pm, and, even if we get another frost, I think I'll survive another winter.

Growing Up International

2011-01-16T23:07:00.000+01:00

I'm a glass half-full kind of person. I consider myself very lucky to have lived in the places I've lived and met the people I've met.

I have friends all over the world, and South America is the only continent I've never been to (except the Poles, granted). I have seen very primitive places that transported me back in time, and I have felt the excitement of ultra-modern cities like Tokyo.

But every now and then I curse the fact that I have lived in so many places. Because you see, all those school- and university friends that I made there - you know, the ones that share my growing pains, that I spent hours talking to after and during school, that I went to dances with and later to bars, that I would visit at late hours at uni - aren't here right now. They are in the US, and Japan, and Sweden. But they're not here in Den Haag.

I love my family very much, and I think you would be hard-pressed to find better sisters than mine, or a more amazing dad or wise mom. I have a husband who loves me and lets me know it, and a daughter who makes me laugh and grows into a strong woman a little bit more every day. I have found some wonderful friends right here that I love very much.

But sometimes all you want, all you need, is a friend from way back to talk to. To get silly with. To call, even though it's a little too late in the evening. To stay out way past grown-up bedtimes.

I miss you.

Feed the Birds

2010-12-18T14:25:00.000+01:00

Went to feed the birds in our garden this morning - at least, the ones that haven't been snowed under. This is what I found when I got there:

I opened the gate, and "Kokomo" shuffled into my ears... ^^ Worked for me!

When I finally slogged my way home I found The Other Half and Daughter hard at work in the parking lot. So here's snowman no. 1 of the season:

All this snow is not half bad. Although I must admit I get a bit of a slap in the face when I realize there's still three days to go until winter actually starts...

I'm a bookworm, hear me munch!

2010-11-20T22:46:00.001+01:00

(OK, I couldn't resist this one either :-))

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Facebook Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt and underline the ones you’ve seen the movies of. Tag other book nerds. (This is also an instruction, but not one I personally particularly need you to follow-up on: Tag me as well so I can see your responses!)

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Graham
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (not quite sure why this is here as well as Chronicles)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (does Barbie & the Three Musketeers count as having seen the movie? ;-))
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Time flies

2010-11-05T10:30:00.000+01:00

Eight years ago I gave birth to a healthy and beautiful - if somewhat reluctant (*coughtwelvedayslatecough*) - baby girl.

She looks like her daddy, but her character is similar to mine. We clash ("Sometimes you do things that are so embarrassing, Mom!"), we frustrate each other (She: "This house is dirty!" Me: "Well, have you done anything to clean it lately?"), we fight ("Stop trying to make me do things your way, Mom! I want to do them on my own, in my own time!")(I can hear my own mother chuckling across town now).

But much more often than we clash we cuddle, and laugh, and play, and dance, and bake cookies together, and read, and blow kisses, and wrestle, and garden, and bike, and cry during movies together. Every day I marvel at this miracle that is my daughter, who is already so big and so accomplished only eight years into her life.

Baby, I love you and you do me so proud.

But I will forever call you Baby. Even in front of strangers.

NaNo2010

2010-11-01T20:58:00.001+01:00

Oh goodness, yes, I've signed up for the annual writing madness that is NaNoWriMo again. Had absolutely no idea what I was going to write about until last night, plotted out an impressive story that had Highbrow Literature written all over it, thought up a good first sentence, and I was as good to go as any other year that I've participated.

Started this morning, after a Guinness Book of World Records-worthy bout of dawdling and it's been like pulling teeth all day. But I think I have a format I like now (you do not want to see the way the story faffs about the first two pages though)(I'm currently on page 3). And Highbrow Literature it still is, as long as you like your Highbrow Literature humorous and chick-lit-y.

Onwards wanna-be authors!

Just finished...

2010-10-26T22:16:00.000+02:00

Another mainly happy group of books for the past month. Sadly fall is now really, truly, here, and my mind's swinging away from sunny and funny to bleak and depressing. Not that bleak and depressing weather/books aren't any good, but I'm a summer child. I prefer my good books sunny and funny. Anyhoo:

Warrior - Zoë Archer
Have I ever mentioned I love my job? I get to buy books for, among others, the Romance section at the best bookstore in the world. And so when I saw this one, with none other than Indiana Jones on the cover, and read the blurb featuring words like "action" and "adventure" and "romance" I knew I was giving this book a chance, in the store and for myself. I liked most of it, too - I loved the fact that it's set in Mongolia (as opposed to Regency England, where most 19th century historicals are set). I loved the hero and the heroine, and I loved the allies that were alluded to (and in some cases showed up) that will feature in the next parts of the series. I liked the iffy language less. It seemed to fall in and out of period language - not that I'm an expert, mind you. Possibly the author really did her research on this, and I'm very wrong, but it still felt clumsy to me. Still, I'm giving the next one a try after NaNo.

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
The fifth bookclub book of this cycle, and I found it absolutely wonderful. It's a series of short descriptions of cities, as told to Kublai Khan by a visiting Marco Polo. The interludes between Khan and Polo are philosophical and for some reason I was really touched by Polo, who was away from Venice (in real life) for 24 years. I felt his homesickness, somehow.
The descriptions of the cities are simply, to use an expensive word, ethereal. I felt as if I were reading dreams, and floating from one still to another. Sometimes I immediately had a complete image in my head of what was being described, but often I only caught glimpses and close-ups of the wet cobbled streets. Tantalizing.
I'm definitely reading this book again.

The Cruellest Month - Louise Penny
Part 3 of the Inspector Armand Gamache series. This one was the most suspenseful so far. Not only because a spooky house features heavily in murder and resolution (and Penny knows how to set up a mean chapter-ending cliffhanger), but also because the Arnot case, which has been hanging over the series up until now, dogging our intrepid inspector, finally steps into the spotlight. I won't say it's cleared up, but I was glad to finally find out what was going on!

The Murder Stone - Louise Penny
I went straight into part 4, in which the Inspector and his lovely wife (Reine-Marie, what a lovely name, eh?) take a vacation. Not only does Three Pines, the setting of the past three books, hardly feature (instead we're at a hotel at a lake), but it's warm and summery! Not as black and frightening as the previous installment, but once more I absolutely didn't have a clue as to whodunnit. Well, I had a clue, but then the clues also pointed to several other just as likely suspects. Lovely series, in other words.

Nadia Knows Best - Jill Mansell
Of course I grabbed another book by Ms. Mansell after I so enjoyed the first two. The set-up is similar to the others I read (large group of characters, upbeat writing). And I liked this one, too, although I strangely wasn't taken with Laurie (one of the male leads) at all. As opposed to Rennie, who features in...

The One You Really Want - Jill Mansell
Somehow liked this one much better. I fell in love with Rennie, who's a rock star who really prefers to sit at home and watch Casablanca, but with girls throwing themselves at you, what's a bloke to do, eh? This affinity for rock stars may have something to do with Daughter's peals of laughter when she watches I'm In The Band...

Happy Ever After - Nora Roberts
And finally I finished part 4 of the Bride Quartet. We got them quite early, since they're pencilled in for a November 2 release date. Read it too quickly, really. It was Parker and Mal's story. I should have taken more time with it, but the weather turned definitively grey and wet, and there went my romantic sensibilities, down the drain with the weather. Maybe I'll reread it next spring. :-)

WIPs

2010-10-14T22:47:00.002+02:00

I've been knitting away quite industriously over the past few weeks. Partly because I'm making a massive lace shawl for myself, and partly because as of last Friday I have to knit a shawl to send off to Far, Far Away (and I'll be getting one from Far, Farther Away, too) as part of the Shawlitis shawl swap. And that's altogether too many shawls in one sentence, but what can a knitter do?

Anyhoo, one project is languishing - the Shell Tank from Nora Gaughan's Knitting Nature (brilliant patterns inside but rather a dull cover, it must be said). I fell for the patterned front panel, and the asymmetrical design of it. Ended up learning how to knit from a pattern that has two things going on at once, on the RS and on the WS. Gaughan is not for the faint of heart, so I'm lucky I'm not (as far as knitting is concerned). :-)

All the parts are knit, I just need to block them and then sew them together. Waiting for the heating to be turned on (by ourselves, but we're holding out for even colder weather)(to prove we're not ninnies!)(...) so all the pieces have a chance to dry out in good time (since, if there's one thing I can't stand, it's manky smelling clothes, bleurgh).

(Can I just say that I hate Blogger's picture upload mechanism? Thank you.)

The next thing that I'm working on will take me forever to finish, even though it's going faster than I could have anticipated. It's a massive lace shawl for me!me!me! (the first one I'm knitting for myself, yay!). It's knit in the round, and every two rows I get to increase a total of 12 stitches. So each circle is getting progressively longer to knit. I may never finish... Or perhaps just in time to have it fit as a funeral shroud for my shrunken little 87 year-old body, who knows... Still, I'll be the most gorgeously decked out corpse for miles. Once again the pattern (Spider's Web Shawl) is from Jane Sowerby's marvelous Victorian Lace Today.

And the last thing is something I can't say too much about. I joined a shawl swap at my local yarn store, and it went international (thanks to Ravelry). I'm knitting a shawl for someone, and someone else is knitting one for me. Come January I'll be sending off a package and hoping to receive one too. Exciting stuff! I'm enjoying what I'm knitting so far, especially the colour of the yarn. But apart from one unclear picture, I won't give you any other clues. :-)

A Bright Career Ahead of Her

2010-10-14T22:20:00.002+02:00

It's Children's Book Week here, and in honor of the occasion all the children at school were invited to make a drawing of their favourite book (what with this year's theme being Illustration). Daughter had a hard time deciding which was her favourite book - Harry Potter? Geronimo Stilton's Kingdom of Fantasy series?

In the end she settled for a classic, given to us by my lovely and much missed Soul Sister in the US at birth. Whenever I read it to Daughter I read the English bit first, and then translate what I just said. I don't think she really hears anything I say, though. She just knows it's a very sweet story, and although she may start out sitting next to me, she always ends up all cuddled up with me. :-)

This is what she shook out of her sleeve (as the Dutch saying goes) Monday morning at oh-dark-hundred:

Not shabby, for a seven year-old, eh? I'm hoping she gets the picture back from school, so we can hang it somewhere Overly Conspicuous.

Switch

2010-10-11T21:02:00.000+02:00

A couple of months ago I heard somewhere that if everyone ate just one vegetarian dinner a week, the strain on the climate would lessen considerably (since 7 kilos of grain = 1 kilo of meat: think of how many days you can survive on 7 kilos of grain as opposed to 1 kilo of meat - and think of how much farmland is used simply to feed cows to feed us).

So I've been trying to cook a vegetarian meal on Monday or Tuesday (my weekend, and therefore my cook days) for quite a while now. Not always succeeding, but it was a step in the right direction, I thought.

But at the end of September, after yet another poultry-disease-that-could-transfer-to-humans scare in this country, an idea formed while I was listening to various comments about animals crammed together in too small stables on the radio. What if I turned that one-vegetarian-dinner-a-week thing around?

What if we ate only 1 meat dinner a week?

Would we be wrecks pining for ultra-rare steaks after three days? Would there be enough variety? Isn't meat a source of important vitamins? Will vegetarian dinners be filling enough? Is it doable, in short?

I mentioned my idea at dinner, and Daughter and Husband, astonishingly, warmed to it. Daughter loves her salads (I know! I'm very, very lucky), so after reassuring her that salads were without meat, her eyes began to shine. We batted the idea around and laid down some rules:

- for the whole of October, we will only eat 1 meat dinner a week, at most (and this includes chicken nuggets, bratwurst rolls and kroketten at our - pretty much weekly - fast food dinner);

- sandwich meats are excluded (no need to take things to extremes straight away, after all);

- when we do eat meat, we'll try to find the organic version of what we want;

- when we are at someone's house, we will eat what they serve and not restrict ourselves to vegetables etc. only.

Eleven days in, and I've not missed my meaty dinners at all. Both Husband and I have found a new excitement in cooking, looking up vegetarian dishes and trying new things out. We haven't really worked with all those meat substitutes, either - just lots of vegetables and pasta and potatoes and eggs and rice. And herbs, from our garden. :-)

A good idea, so far. I do have them, sometimes.

Oh! what a tangled web we weave

2010-09-30T19:38:00.000+02:00

Although I never practiced to deceive - I'm just utterly useless at winding a skein of yarn. Even thick yarn like araucania cotton. I shudder to think what I'll do with the skein of merinosilk laceweight, al 1500 meters of it, innocently lying in my stash, dreaming of joining my massive Spider's Web shawl some day...

It was the husky voice that did it

2010-09-23T21:10:00.000+02:00

Resistance was, in the end, futile.

I've been trying for ages not to buy John Legend's song This Time, but after feeling weak in the knees every time I hear it, most recently this afternoon while it played at the supermarket (egad! The supermarket? I thought I'd be safe there!), I caved in and bought it on iTunes. It's currently on repeat.

If he walked into where I work and sang that song to me I'd be a quivering puddle of regret at letting go what was obviously the most fantastic relationship I never had. I'd say a tearful "yes, I'll take you back" and he'd sweep me off my feet to the rousing applause of all my colleagues and customers. I wouldn't realize I had a Husband and Daughter until he stopped singing.

I know it employs all the tricks in the book (weepy strings, voice building up to the chorus, etc.) and yet I keep falling for it. So I thought the only sensible thing to do would be to buy the thing and listen to it over and over again until I've built up some kind of immunity.

Yeah.

Just finished...

2010-09-23T00:03:00.000+02:00

It's been a while since my last Just finished... post, so it's time to do an update of what I've been reading the past two months:

Wedding Season - Katie Fforde
I've read Fforde books before, and enjoyed them a lot. But this one didn't do anything for me. The only thing I remember is that one of the characters has her colours done (à la Colour Me Beautiful).

A Fatal Grace - Louise Penny (titled Dead Cold in the UK)
The second part of the Chief Inspector Gamache mystery series. A lovely, comfortable read (never mind that it's centered around a murder) - but it's comfortable because the characters enjoy the pleasures life has to offer, and realize there is much fulfillment to be had by just slowing down, having a cup of coffee, and watching the world go by. I really enjoy this series and will definitely read the rest.
One word of exasperation aimed at editors/publishers: This book is originally called Dead Cold, but in the US has been retitled A Fatal Grace. Why?! Why?!??! Why rename something perfectly beautifully (and significantly) titled? They did the same thing with the P. J. Tracy books. Long live fantasticfiction.co.uk, where you can easily keep up with the various titles of Louise Penny's books (and P. J. Tracy's). Stop doing this! What with the widespread use of internet, it's no longer necessary to rename your books according to what you think the demographic might like, because they'll have heard of the original book through all the various book-sharing sites and forums already anyway. Stick to what the author wants!
Also, stop publishing books in that silly elongated mass market paperback edition that you charge a significant amount more for (yes, Penguin, publisher of the Harry Dresden books by Jim Butcher, I'm looking at you!). Especially stop publishing the last installment of a very long saga in that edition, as the fans and collectors already had to put up with hardcovers and a mid-series cover change - and some of them rebought the entire series because of that. And now still don't have a complete series that is one beautiful homogenous unit. Not. Cool. At. All. (On a related note - just saw that that very long saga isn't finished after all. Traitor!)

Visions of Heat - Nalini Singh
Part 2 of the Psy-Changeling books by New Zealand author Singh. I enjoyed the first one, and I enjoyed this second book fine, too, but I'll not read more. Somehow I can stomach the idea of vampires/wizards, but men who change into leopards and back seem a step too far. :-) Still, the group of people she writes about is cohesive and interesting, but I've seen enough for now.

Wicked Games - Sasha Wagstaff
If you like Jilly Cooper, you'll like Sasha Wagstaff! A big book with loads of characters that are filthy rich and have convoluted relationships. A great escapist read.

Bed of Roses + Savor the Moment - Nora Roberts
Part 2 and 3 of the Bride Quartet. Roberts is the kind of writer that always knocks out well-put-together books, and these are no exceptions. Four friends have set up a wedding planning business, with each one representing a separate discipline (photography, flowers, cakes, and the actual planning)(that would be books 1, 2, 3, and 4 right there :-)). What I love about these books is that they are simple, straight-forward romances. Not a werewolf or shape-changer or ghost in sight. Oh, and the way they are printed - Penguin (you again!), well done, this time.

Remember Me? - Sophie Kinsella
Sophie Kinsella is the pseudonym of Madeleine Wickham. While I like anyone who calls themselves Sophie, why on earth would someone with the romantic name of Madeleine Wickham bother with a pseudonym?
That aside, this is one of her non-Shopaholic books, which is why I read it. I don't like that series at all, so I'm always looking forward to her one-off books. This one was funny (as usual), with an interesting idea at the start of it: what if you wake up in the hospital and you have amnesia? You can remember everything except the past few years. How do you cope?

Thinking of You - Jill Mansell
Got this one out of the library because I wanted to read a staple of my Romance section. And since Katie Fforde let me down with that Wedding Season book, I went to that other English writer I always try to stock everything of. And I'm so glad I did. Sweet, funny, regular romance, with adults (as in, mothers and middle-aged women) as the main characters. Exactly the right kind of book at the right time.
This one is about a woman whose daughter is off to college, and suddenly she finds herself with a severe case of empty nest syndrome. She has a hilarious ex-husband, her daughter is cool, and her new boss is handsome and snarky. Really enjoyable read.

Rumour Has It - Jill Mansell
So much so that the next time I was at the library I got this one. Slightly younger main character, but everything else was in the same vein. This time it's about a girl who's dumped by her boyfriend at the start and then ups sticks and moves to the countryside to be a Girl Friday for the most wonderful man and his daughter. And no, he's not the romantic lead. :-) Again with a great supporting cast!
She writes about people you really start to care about and wish you could meet in real life. For both these books I wished she would have kept writing, even though they all ended well.

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City - Greg Grandin
You may have noticed that everything since July has been chick lit and romance and escapist. Well, the reason I needed to escape was this last book, which I've been reading on and off since July, too!
This is a bookclub book, and nonfiction. I'm not a nonfiction reader by nature, but that's why my bookclub is awesome - it gets me out of my comfort zone.
Fordlandia is about the rubber plantation Henry Ford set up in the late 1920s, in Brazil. The initial aim was to grow rubber for use in his car factories, but simultaneously he wanted to create a kind of utopian settlement, with clean streets and a dance hall (certainly not featuring the Charleston, though) and a Church, etc. He created several of these kinds of villages throughout the US, so why not start one in Brazil?
Of course, things go horribly wrong; after all, the Amazon is not exactly the US Midwestern region.
I liked the idea behind this book. I just didn't like the writing style. Grandin is not a storyteller. He's a historian. And because he's a historian, he jumps back and forth in time, and between Brazil and Detroit, resulting in a hard-to-follow clump of pages for someone who has no background in Ford and US history of the 1920s-to-1940s. He grandly introduces men as saviours of the plantation who then end up leaving after 2 months because they couldn't take the climate, written off in half a sentence. There's an entire section about a trip upriver one of the managers took that only exists because Grandin seems to want to show off the fact that he's read Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.
The only thing that saved this book from my Biggest Waste of Time spot was the epilogue, which shows the state of the Amazon today, and the dangers of soy bean farming and deforestation. Chilling stuff, that. Just a pity that the 250 pages before it waffled on.

Scaring Horses

2010-09-20T20:30:00.000+02:00

Daughter and I trundled off to the beach this morning, to scare some horses. Loads of people were there, including quite a few school classes, all of them packed with foghorns and vuvuzelas and flags and whistles and piercing screams (that would be Daughter).

Tomorrow is Prinsjesdag (our State of the Union), and that includes a parade with horses and carriages carrying royalty, and the animals need to get used to noise and crowds, so they have a yearly practice session with people screaming and making a racket, and army tanks revving engines, and a marching band, and bullet noises over the speakers. And, towards the end, with lots of smoke, too.

There were 27 new horses who had never done this before (the veterans didn't even bat an eyelash) - and a few of them really needed it! One was so spooked when he rode by that he nearly jumped on top of the horse next to him (he certainly half-flattened its rider). Towards the end he was already doing a lot better, though.

We'd never been before, but we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and will try to go again next year. It's not often you're asked to make as much noise as possible!

Baby no more

2010-09-16T22:37:00.000+02:00

We were looking at Daughter's school (and before that daycare) pictures from the past years:

Apologies for the grainy quality of this camera phone picture!

All The Husband and I could say when we'd spread them out was "awwwww!". Daughter was, of course, highly embarrassed by us, but she'll just have to confront her therapist about this when she's 32 or so.

Or maybe she won't be too damaged, after all (a mother can hope):

Stormclouds up ahead

2010-09-15T20:11:00.001+02:00

It is, yet again, windy and rainy. We've been having strong winds and grey skies and cold rain since the last two weeks of August, bar a few pretty days.

I'm not ready. At all. I feel like I've completely missed out on the summer, even though I must have enjoyed lovely days in the sun. There is even actual photographic evidence of me lying in the grass soaking up the rays.

But somehow, in my mind, there's a blank where summer ought to be. And faced with this fall weather, already going strong for nearly a month, I'm ready to just give up. Throw in the towel. Run away, and then run away some more. Crawl into bed and refuse to get out until it's April.

The idea of six months of short days and cold nights and wind, sleet, snow, hail, and more rainrainrain is simply unbearable this year. I wonder why, since other years I haven't had this problem. And this year I spent oodles of time outdoors, in the garden, so it's not like I have a lack of vitamin D. Are the planets aligned the wrong way for Virgo? Is the Year of the Tiger so horrible for Rabbits? I wish I had an answer, so I could do something about it.

Instead I just mope. Sorry, Husband and Daughter and everyone I snap at. I'm crabby and fretful and I drop everything and I have little patience. I sincerely hope there will be a prolonged Indian Summer soon, even though we're on the wrong continent for those, because it feels as if I haven't had time to say goodbye to the sun and the warm weather, and they just slipped away from me, and I am here, bereft.

Mother Nature can be a bitch

2010-09-11T20:48:00.000+02:00

When last I left the garden, it looked like this:

All gorgeous, in other words. One entire side was all finished, as far as digging holes and sieving back the earth was concerned, and lots of plants from our balcony were transferred to their new permanent home. A growing and thriving area full of corn, tomatoes, and courgettes. And a special section adjoining the terrace full of herbs (so we can smell the basil and the rosemary when there's a breeze!).

Three weeks later... and it looks like this:

Click on the images to see the devastation that two weeks of almost non-stop, almost gale-force winds and rain, one weekend spent preparing and celebrating my birthday, and one weekend spent working and doing my duties for the group I joined at the allotment to beautify the public areas left.

We lost all of our tomatoes, if not to the strong winds, then to rot.
More than half the corn was blown over, but The Husband put them back up when I was elsewhere last weekend, so this week we did manage to get some harvest from them. We've got two stalks left now.
The courgettes loved all the rain, meaning we had ones that would have won the prize at the county fair for Largest Vegetable. I ripped them out of the ground today. One can only eat so much courgette.
And all that lovely sieved earth had completely broken out in weeds.

Thankfully, Mother Nature was in a benign mood today, and gave us a warm, sunny day, probably the last one of the year. So we grabbed our buckets and our shovels and our gloves and six hours of labour later there is a semblance of order once more:

I'm hiding the photo of the area at the left bottom corner of the left picture above. There was not enough time in the day today to start there. Especially since I really wanted to do a bit of fun work, too, and planted out a few plants (no idea what kinds) that have been bunched up in a forgotten corner for far too long. And I sowed some columbine, lupine and poppy seeds, too, for next spring.

The Husband also worked his butt off (after he ran 10k this morning), and dug a new hole on the other side of the garden - one half garden of digging and sieving left to go!

Put in my place

2010-09-07T13:27:00.000+02:00

I was standing in the school yard yesterday, bleary-eyed and cotton-brained, waiting for the bell to ring, when the very sweet mother of Daughter's friends The Identical Twins asked how I was doing.

"Tired!" I sighed. "I'm off to Amsterdam today to have an exit interview, and I worked yesterday, and all last week I trained two newbies, which is fun but very draining, not to mention the mental en physical prep work beforehand, and worked my regular hours, too, and then Saturday I didn't have to work but I did have my monthly shift at the allotment because I'm in this group that is trying to beautify the public areas and in the afternoon I had to go to a wedding, which was lovely, but not exactly relaxing. And then this week I have to work all week also so hopefully on Saturday I'll finally have a proper day off. And you?"

She smiled back. "I've been trying to find a job. Just a few hours, cleaning whatever needs to be cleaned. I've tried lots of places, but no luck. Hopefully my husband will have better luck; he lost his job a little while back."

That shut me up, and rightly so.

Really, sometimes (and with "sometimes" I'm probably flattering myself) I'm so self-absorbed I wonder I even know Daughter's name. Really, I have nothing to complain about, so if you ever hear me huffing and puffing and moaning about how my life is so busy, just smack me upside the head.

Finally I get to show off!

2010-08-30T10:13:00.000+02:00

Whew, got to give the 2 recently completed knitting projects away yesterday, so now I finally get to post about them here (didn't want to spoil the surprise :-)).

First off, the scarf for Mother-In-Law:

I love knitting lace! It all looks frumpy and disappointing until you block it, and then - whammo! A gorgeous, delicate thing of beauty appears from out of seemingly nowhere.
This is the Melon Pattern Scarf from Jane Sowerby's Victorian Lace Today (which has become somewhat of a bestseller in my Crafts section at the store, what with my yodeling about it every time I see a knitter browsing there).
It took me forever to knit, because I only tend to knit when I watch TV, and I don't watch TV an awful lot. I liked knitting it, though; it wasn't a terribly difficult pattern and the yarn (Grignasco Merinosilk - no website yet to link to) was just so gorgeous (especially the colour!). So, many thanks to the World Cup, and to my team for making it all the way to the final, so this scarf could get finished. I can't wait for the NFL season to start, as that means long Sunday and Monday evenings of knitting. Is it really still 2 more weeks?

A rather quicker knit were the Opera Gloves from Annie Modesitt's Romantic Hand Knits (doesn't appear to be in print anymore, though). The pattern's actually called Some Like It Hot, btw. The yarn was Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino, a yarn I love because it's so soft. I bought the book because I was flipping through it, saw these gloves, and knew they were meant to be made for Senior Elder Sister. I'd never knit gloves (or socks, for that matter) before, but they turned out alright in the end:

I love it when a project comes together. :-) And even more when the people I gave these to like them!

I'll get the ice-creams...

2010-08-26T21:22:00.003+02:00

Nephew #2 found this, and it's so brilliant I have to put it here too:

35

2010-08-25T21:39:00.000+02:00

Look what 35-year-olds I joined today:

And look who will join our excellent company in the next few months:

I'd say that 1975 is a fine year!

(And that the new Blogger editor is no improvement, but that's for another post...)

Multifunctionality

2010-08-08T20:36:00.004+02:00

We're off to England in a bit, to visit friends whose daughter is Daughter's BFF. Hooray!

We're flying, and, as you do these days, we ordered our tickets online. The thing is, you have to print out e-tickets. And we said goodbye to our little Lexmark a while back (when it began to forget its own name, we decided we had to be cruel to be kind, and sent it off to a recycle home somewhere). And everyone in the family that owns a printer is on holiday. And so are we; i.e. we're not going into work just to print out three pages of e-tickets.

So, there was really only one option left: we bought ourselves a new printer.

Welcome to the Family, Epson Stylus!

You have an exciting career ahead of you printing e-tickets every two years or so, and a NaNo-novel come November! Benefits include cat hair clogging up your most intimate orifices and a dusting at least once every twelve months!

We know you can print in three billion colours and we know we can plug memory cards into you and we know you print with photographic quality, and yet all we need you for are basic black-and-white A4 pages filled with 12-point TimesNewRoman script. We know you can snooze when we don't need you and we know you can make a five-course dinner and we know you can copy, and yet all we - hang on. You can copy? You can copy?!

You mean we actually bought a printer that was really rather cheap and it also copies stuff?

Holy crap.

Suddenly the possibilities are endless. And they start with one knitting pattern this evening, to be copied so I don't have to lug the book across England and back. ~w00t!1

Stash

2010-08-02T20:53:00.003+02:00

I've always prided myself on the fact that my knitting habits are pretty tidy. I'm a Project Knitter: I fall in love/decide on a project, and then I buy the wool/needles/accoutrements for that project, and that project only (and I buy the stuff right here, in case you live near Den Haag and are looking for a great little wool shop).

So, no, I don't have a stash. I don't have closets bursting out of their seams with heaps and hanks of yarn in all colours, plies, and fibers.

Or so I thought.

I had one of my very infrequent clean-up bursts recently, and I decided to put all my various needles that were spilling out of little paper bags in my closet in one box. I was tired of having them fall over and tangle up. And since I was at it, I might as well grab that bag full of all and sundry and look through that as well.

And hey, presto, there were heaps and hanks of yarn in all colours, plies, and fibers in there. Imagine that! I do have a stash, after all.

A stash that fills two boxes, even. It's not much compared to your average knitter, I think, but it's about a box and a half more than I thought I had. I'm glad I found all this stuff, though, because I had a lot more of that one particular yarn I really loved, so I can make something else out of it. And I discovered I had more yarn of something I was making for Daughter, so I now have no worries about finishing that up, either.

And my needles and stitch holders and stitch markers are now all in one box, too.

Being a Virgo, I took one look at that picture, and decided to go one further.

Sigh. Yep, that would be a label stapled around each of my circular needles. So that I don't have to fish around and measure every one when I'm starting a new project (what with that being something that happens once every six months or so, it's such a hassle...).

Still, the result does my inner neat-freak good. And makes my hands itch to start something new.

A mind full of nothing

2010-07-30T20:20:00.005+02:00

Incredibly, I've already reached that stage of my vacation where I have trouble remembering what day it is. A good sign if ever I saw one. But then, how can I not unwind so fully so quickly when I have...

...holiday skies like this?

...a holiday home like this?

...and a holiday garden like this?

Mmmmmmmm... I think I'll do today over again tomorrow. :-)

I Kid You Not

2010-07-29T18:11:00.003+02:00

SETTING: Store, interior. SHOPPER walks from STAGE LEFT, having just tried on two pairs of jeans. STORE ATTENDANT stands DOWNSTAGE RIGHT chatting to a COLLEAGUE while keeping an eye on the changing rooms.

SHOPPER: Excuse me, may I ask a question.

STORE ATTENDANT nods, trying to finish a sentence to COLLEAGUE. SHOPPER is holding TWO pairs of JEANS.

SHOPPER: I just tried on two pairs of jeans. These ones, size Really Large, fit me fine. But these ones, size Really Really Large, are tight. How come the bigger jeans are tighter? Are they a different model; I can't seem to find any information on the pants.

STORE ATTENDANT takes one pair of JEANS and looks them over.

STORE ATTENDANT: It's because the Really Really Large jeans are dyed black. When jeans are dyed it sometimes changes the size.

SHOPPER: ...
SHOPPER: ...
SHOPPER: ...

SHOPPER takes BOTH pairs of JEANS and EXITS STAGE RIGHT. STORE ATTENDANT resumes conversation with COLLEAGUE.

A Copiosity of Collective Nouns

2010-07-27T20:05:00.004+02:00

Found this while stumbling the other day. The original can be found here. V. brilliant.

Man In His Natural Habitat

2010-07-24T19:40:00.002+02:00

Yep, the BBQ works, alright. :-)

And look at this week's haul from the garden!

Time to look up some courgette recipes, I think...

THIS close

2010-07-22T20:55:00.002+02:00

I'm *this* close to vacation - only tomorrow and Sunday left to work and then it's 3 weeks of nothing, baby! Off will go the phone, work mail will not be checked, and the only books I'll look at are my very own (and therefore every one of them of the highest quality and taste Literature has to offer).

Also, I'm *this* close to finishing 2 (yes, two!) knitting projects. But I can't share pictures, alas. Not until two certain days have passed. Still, already beginning to anticipate what I can knit next... This, for sure, and it will be for MEEEEEEE. :-) And maybe this. Or something out of this.

Or maybe I can gather my courage and venture to the market and buy cloth to sew something... Ah, the endless possibilities *finishing* things bring.

Just finished...

2010-07-17T14:21:00.000+02:00

My reading frenzy has not yet abated. Here the books I've read in the past 3 months:

Lover Avenged, Lover Mine - J. R. Ward
Well, of course I was going to finish the entire series, wasn't I? At least, the series up to now, that is. And I loved reading all of them, even in one go (doesn't happen that often that I find a series and finish all in one sitting; usually I get tired of the style or quirks of the writer, so I pauze halfway, sometimes never to come back). Plenty of new hints in the last part, too, for an upcoming showdown. Will have to order 20 hardcovers for the store for the next part in the series, I think, unheard of!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J. K. Rowling
Ah yes, the old HP. You see, The Husband and I have started reading Harry Potter to Daughter. And a few chapters into book 1, I started to wonder about what exactly happened at the end, since I didn't really remember anymore. So I started at book 5, having read the first 4 often enough, and charged through the last three, much to Daughter's chagrin, who wanted to charge along next to me but who can't read English (yet). Right now we are in book 3 with her, and she's really loving them, even the scary bits. Fred and George are personal heroes of her, now, alas.

Running with the Moon - Jonny Bealby
This is a bookclub book (as are a few below this one; I've been very conscientiously reading them this year!). It's a travel story, about a man, his motorbike, and Africa. Could have been much more - I don't think you can distill all of Africa into 200 pages, can you? I liked some parts, and didn't care for the others. He does these syrupy flasbacks to his girlfriend, who very unexpectedly dies while on a trip (to India) with him, which were annoying in the beginning, but by the end you want to know how that story goes, so you tend to skip forward looking for the next bit. :-) Not a book I keep thinking back to, but also not a book I threw against the wall in disgust. Meh, in other words.

Light Boxes - Shane Jones
A bit of a hype/cult book, this. Rather optimistically marketed as the next House of Leaves by Danielewski, but don't let that fool you. House of Leaves is a few hundred pages of blackness, and weirdness, where the book itself mirrors the story quite ingeniously. I love that book, and think back on it quite often.
Light Boxes, while odd and off-kilter, is very, very short. I finished it in an afternoon. And it has some great ideas (February holds a town hostage; an unpleasant prospect if ever I saw one). And the cover is gorgeous. And I probably will have to read it again to get more out of it. On the whole, though, it's too short to properly engross. Also, it's way overpriced, so I'm glad for my contacts in the book business got me a free reader's copy. ;-)

Naamah's Kiss - Jacqueline Carey
My annual trip to the Terre d'Ange universe, courtesy of Jacqueline Carey! Every year I wait patiently for the US paperback, and snort it up as soon as I get my fingers on it. This is part 1 of, presumably, a new trilogy, with new characters, but set in the same world as her previous six (starting with Kushiel's Dart). The good thing is that it's set about a hundred years after the last part finished, so everyone you knew is now a figure of history or legend, and you start anew. I love the new heroine, Moirin, who is a feisty girl, but not as dependent on pain as Phedre before her (yay!). And Carey's world-building is marvelous, as ever. Truly a literary holiday. :-)

Sunnyside - Glen David Gold
Book the second by the wonderful Mr. Gold (or Mr. Sebold, I could say). His first, Carter Beats the Devil, blew my socks off. This second one, not so much, but that's not to say it's not good nor enjoyable. I really liked most of it - no one writes descriptions of full-on action better. But the figure of Charlie Chaplin is not in the brightest phase of his life, so all the parts with him tend to be a bit down (then again, tears of a clown and all that). The parts with Leland Wheeler I loved, all of it. A fabulous twist at the end with him, which I won't spoil here. But the story strand with whatever-his-name-is, who ends up going to Russia, I found too much. For me, that could have been left out, and I wouldn't have missed it. Gold tries to write about too much, I think, which is a shame. Then again, he's simply a good writer, so I will look forward to his next book.

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Another bookclub book, and one I tried to read a few years ago, but aside since I wasn't in the mood for a WWII book. I'm glad I had to try again, because it is fantastic. The narrator of the book is Death, who follows Liesel, a girl who steals a book from a grave digger when her brother dies on the train trip south to their new foster home. It's the first book she steals, but not the last, and they all play an important part in her growing up. It's a WWII story set in Germany, for a change. My grandfather always told my mother that the war would have been a lot worse if there hadn't been so many good Germans, and I'm glad there's a story now that echoes that conviction. I, for one, have never thought about the war being just as hard and full of deprivations for the ordinary folks in Germany. I knew it, on some level, but I'd never learned or read about it. A quiet book, very powerful. If you find a copy somewhere, buy or borrow it if you can.

Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett
And so I always wait for the paperback edition of the latest Discworld book, too. This one is all about football, and wizards, and goblins, and fashion, and the hereditary dislike/hatred that you get when you follow a team. Glad to see the Patrician get a large part here, as I love him dearly. Full of snide asides and funny similes/metaphors. I think I liked Making Money and Going Postal better, but that main character (Moist van Lipwig) made my heart sing a little bit more than the main foursome in this one. :-)

Poppyland - Raffaella Barker
Another wonderful book by a writer both Petunia and I adore. Sadly, she's the kind of writer that only bookworms will ever appreciate, much like Our Lady of Literature Maggie O'Farrell. If you don't read lots of books, you'll generally only read the hyped ones, and not really dig much deeper for people like Barker and O'Farrell, simply because there's no time or inclination to do so. But Barker can write all kinds of styles, from laugh-out-loud funny to, dare I say it, poignant. This story is all about two people meeting for one life-changing moment, and how their lives go on. The question is whether they'll find each other again, and if they do, whether they're willing to take the risk with each other. She manages to write in quite distinct voices (the rather scatter-brained Grace and the quieter, heartbroken Ryder). Beautiful book.

Carry On, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
And all of a sudden I had a 6-day workweek that included training my first new recruit. Since this required a lot of brain energy from my side, I grabbed the always-wonderful Wodehouse to entertain me lightly and happily. You can't go wrong with Jeeves and Bertie Wooster!

Nocturnes - Kazuo Ishiguro
Ah yes, another bookclub book. This is the second book by him we've had to read (the first one being Never Let Me Go), and I didn't like this one either. The fact that this was a collection of 5 short stories made it slightly easier for me to get through this one, especially when the stories overlapped in the fourth one. But to me he writes about boring people who do boring things in a boring manner. Urgh, urgh, urgh. If you want to read a good book about music, try Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, please. And if we ever have to read him again I'm going to steer very, very clear of that book. I'm not wasting more of my time on his writing, sorry Mr. Ishiguro.

Someone Knows My Name (aka The Book of Negroes) - Lawrence Hill
And finally, my most recently finished book. The title is actually The Book of Negroes, but in the US it's been renamed Someone Knows My Name. And although this is probably done out of political correctness, it's not a bad renaming, once you read the book. Both are right; the US title is more correct for the first part of the book, and the original title reflects a historical document that comes to the fore in the second part of the book. It's the life story of an African girl, Aminata Diallo (Meena for short), who is abducted and sold as a slave when she is 11. Hill touches on everything in her life (***spoilers ahead***): her youth, the forced journey to the coast, the notorious crossing, slave life on an indigo plantation, life as a slave from a not altogether evil man, her escape in NYC, her exodus to Nova Scotia and even her return to Africa (***end of spoilers :-)***).
It is all beautifully told, and Aminata is a heroine worth following. A book that holds on to the minute dignities people treated as less than animals hold on to - sadly something that is surely still topical today. I can really recommend this book; an educational read that is also engrossing.

Pfffft

2010-07-12T20:28:00.002+02:00

Yep. That's pretty much what I feel like today.
As you may know, we lost to Spain in the World Cup final last night, and even though I'm not a rabid football fan, I am a huge sports fan. So having my team lose a nailbiter (maybe not for the rest of the world, but definitely for the Dutch and the Spanish!) is tough.
Still, I'm really happy that, for the first time in my personal living memory, I saw my team go all the way. It was a new experience, and I hope it will be repeated. :-) They didn't play the prettiest of football (and were lucky to escape red cards every now and again), but it was the first time I ever saw a Dutch football team that was, in all senses, a team. And one with a lot of mental toughness, also not something the Dutch footballers are known for.
So I'm massively proud. I wish there was a way I could thank them personally; send them a little letter, or something, but I wouldn't know where to send it to. So I'll just write it here.

Thank you, boys, for allowing me to back a winner - you won second place, you didn't lose first! Thank you for your incredible heart - that honor guard you made for the Spanish on the field as they came down with their medals and the cup was truly world class. Thank you Coach van Marwijk and Dirk Kuyt for being gracious in defeat so soon after it - I'll always remember how you both, ten minutes after the final whistle, told the cameras that the best team won, tears in your eyes and all. Good luck to everyone, players and staff and families. Take your time to rest and recover, and enjoy the festivities tomorrow.

Wedded Bliss

2010-06-24T20:10:00.002+02:00

Accidentally locked The Husband in the entire day.

He was still asleep when Daughter and I left for the day (on account of having dealt with a computer crisis until four in the morning), and out of habit I locked the front door...

Of course, he didn't notice it until 5 pm, when he wanted to be off to the store and found his way quite literally blocked!

Well, it's one way for a girl to ensure a happy, and above all continuing, marriage, isn't it?

Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have a Dress

2010-06-05T22:47:00.003+02:00

Tadaaaaaa!

A small miracle, if I may say so myself. Sewn by Yours Truly.

Things I've Learned About Sewing:
- Ironing and pressing the fabric is just as important as sewing.
- You can sew over pins.
- Improvisation is a valuable talent/skill.

Since I actually took a few pictures of the whole process, I'll share them. I may even say something witty, although I'm tired, so I'm not making promises.

It all started with a visit to the Noordermarkt in Amsterdam, with Auntie, my friend and now ex-colleague. She is a Sewing Goddess, and helped me look at fabrics while we got thoroughly rained on. I found the one I liked at the very end of the market, of course. :-)

I got the pattern from Absolutely A-Line: 1 Easy Pattern = 26 Adorable Dresses for Girls by Wendi Gratz. Of course, Daughter, at 7, is only 20 cms. shorter than I am, and has already outgrown all the sizes in the book. So I had to guess a bit when cutting.

Tip: For your First Sewing Project, pick a nice, stiff fabric. The stuff I chose, while lovely and, well, lila(c)-colored, was very slithery. Not ideal for pleats (which, incidentally, are also not the least-ambitious things to try to learn to sew on, but I seem to have a knack for picking hard things to get started on)(then again, that's the best way to learn!)

The Singer in action. Yeah baby!

Pleats + ribbon + top = one half dress. The book kept saying how you could press the pleats and then sew them, but see note above about slithery fabric. Didn't happen. Took me a few hours to understand this. Managed to make pleats anyway, so there.

And then you sew the back to the front and you have a dress!

Oh, if it were only so simple... :-)

The book talks about facings (extra layer of fabric on the inside of the dress at chest-height) but I didn't have enough material (owing to one very tall child and the pleat-ambition), so I made do without them. Meaning I had to wing the sewing together bit as I couldn't make sense of the instructions anymore!

Still, it looks pretty on the hanger, crooked seams and all! But it looks even better like this:

There She Goes Again...

2010-05-15T20:31:00.008+02:00

...with more pictures of the garden. Apologies, but I just love being there and seeing everything grow. :-)

I'll keep it to basic overview pictures, though, since all the detailed ones are only interesting to me, My Better Half, and possibly Daughter, detailing as they do the amazing fact that everything has gotten slightly bigger since last week.

Alright, from left to right:
- Daughter's patch of garden (including a positively exploding rose bush/tree that's beginning to bud)(notice also the amazing blossoming grass underneath it! Glorious!)
- The clematis that used to be on our balcony is thoroughly digging his new space
- All kinds of veg; garlic, onion, shallots, potatoes, zucchini, tomatoes, sweet corn, strawberries, and peas
- We have a red one!

Also, even though I'm a known Duck Killer, the species as a whole seems to have forgiven me. Or else I'm now being stalked.

And a final piece of news concerns Daughter.

You may remember that two-and-a-half years ago, we had a little earring drama. Shown here is only one side, but I can promise you the other side has an identical look. It was her own idea, she was very brave, and is already requested heart-shaped dangly ones once these ones can come out.

Double Oh Daughter

2010-05-04T21:31:00.004+02:00

Last week, Daughter noticed a Suspicious Individual in our midst. Since she is (shhh!) a S-P-Y in real life, she infiltrated Suspect's habitat, posing as a coffee lady, and managed to take an Incriminating Picture:

When she reported to Headquarters (i.e. Me, who is also (shhh!) a S-P-Y in real life), we inspected the evidence she had gathered, and noticed the suspect was reading something. Obviously they were Plans of Dastardly Deeds, and, ever the professional, Daughter this time disguised herself as "Sylvia", a "regular passerby." Suspect fell for the ruse, and Daughter was able to take a more detailed picture:

Alas, as we reconvened at Headquarters, our cover was nearly blown by Suspect's henchman, a suspicious-looking feline if ever I saw one:

We managed to distract the henchman with the promise of food, however, and, going deep undercover one last time, Daughter managed to substitute Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone for the Plans of Dastardly Deeds when Suspect was looking away.

We celebrated our saving the world with a mug of chocolate milk, and resumed our regular disguises of Daughter and Me. If you ever need help, we'll know where to find you...

Ducks

2010-05-02T18:25:00.002+02:00

Junior Big Sister and I killed a mama duck and one of her six baby ducklings today.
We never meant for it to happen, but as the mama and her six babies were crossing a three-lane highway in the pouring rain, and there were cars on both sides and a motorcyclist behind us, there was nowhere to go but ahead. And over them. With our big car.
:-(
I feel awful. I can't get the image of that mama and her six babies out of my head.
So, mama duck, I'm beyond sorry we ran over you, and that you and likely your whole brood were killed. I've been mourning you all day. I wish there was some way to undo it, but all I can think of is to write this post.

Just finished...

2010-04-27T09:16:00.007+02:00

Uhm, okay, I went a bit mad this past month with the reading. Just ask My Better Half and Daughter. I'm the strange lady that sometimes cooks, right now. :-) But hey, I don't get these reading binges all that much anymore, so at the moment I'm just letting it take me where it will...

Tai-Pan by James Clavell
Proof that you can have a book on your unread pile for a few years, start in it a few times, and then all of a sudden read it in one go. Loved Shogun, read that a few times already, but this one never really did it for me. Maybe because it wasn't set in Japan, but in Hong Kong? Anyhoo, I started this one, and fell hard for the story-telling and the cultural details that Clavell also put into Shogun. A great cast of characters set at the time that Hong Kong was settled by the British. Marvelous stuff. If you like storytelling in the vein of Gabaldon, you'll like Clavell, too. Including strong women that shape their own destiny.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians, book 1: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
Read this one because it's one of the stores new Evergreens. Definitely a kid's book, but that only means I finished it in a day, not that it wasn't enjoyable. Includes lots of Greek myths updated to the present day, which I thought was a good little twist. I've read (most of) The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Aeneid, and I think I would have been rather more eager to read them had I had something like The Lightning Thief to prep me a bit. It's part one in a series of five, and I may read the others, yet. I'd like to see what other quests Percy (or rather, Perseus, son of Poseidon and a human woman) is given. Passing this on to Nephew #2, hopefully he'll like it!

The Owl Killers by Karen Maitland
Had to read this for my bookclub, and so glad I did! Very dark, fearful story, told in 5 different voices. Set in 1321, at a time of great natural upheaval (droughts, floods, storms, etc.), in a rural English village still struggling to combine Christianity with old Pagan beliefs. A group of Beguines has set up camp next to them. I always thought Beguines were nuns, but I was quite wrong! They were instead communities of women - what a fabulous thing to discover! How come I never learned this in school? Why don't they teach this along with the various kings of England, the great plague, and the build-up to WWII? It's like when I discovered there was a woman called Aphra Behn, one of the first known women writers, all the way back in the 1600s. How come nobody ever mentioned here before?
Anyhoo, very interesting stuff, with lots of historical details, although at some point I was wondering when the darkness and the fear was going to be relieved a little. But I'll definitely read Maitland's first, about the plague; who knows what I'll discover in that book. :-)

The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell
Ah, yes, Maggie!
The only reason stock was unpacked that Friday was because I was determined to find a copy of this book, to take home with me (and as I didn't have to come in for another 4 days, it was imperative I find it then). This is the only writer whose books I can't wait for, and will buy in hardcover for myself. And she didn't let me down (not that she's ever let me down, but still).
There are two intertwining stories here. You follow Lexie Sinclair, who leaves rural England for London and falls in with the Soho crowd back in the 1950s, and all their shocking ways. A woman before her time, she is, the love of her life a very unhappily married man who plays father to a child that isn't his. And then you follow Elina and Ted, a young couple in the present who have just had a baby. She lost a lot of blood at the birth, and as a consequence she has large patches of memory missing. But Ted, too, has trouble with his memories.
I'm not going to tell you about the plot further, as they weave in and out of each other beautifully and I'd hate to spoil it for you. But as ever, her style is what gets me. So clear, and unpretentious, and with room to keep thinking about the characters, and no one else can paint a picture with so few words. All her books are special, and this one killed me with its descriptions of early motherhood, when you're left alone with that baby and it's yours and you simply can't comprehend it. She captures Elina's mood shifts beautifully, where first she's overflowing with love for this little child in her arms, and the next it's like she's looking at a stranger, unable to fathom that it came out of her, and that she's the one that needs to take care of it. I remember those moments so well! Every time we left a family gathering that first year, I was astounded that Daughter was coming back with me, that she wasn't one of my sisters' children.
I can't recommend this writer enough. And I can't believe I'll have to wait another few years for her next book. :-(

The Inimitable Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
The adventures of Bertie Wooster and his unflappable gentleman's gentleman Jeeves, part 1. Wodehouse has that lightness of touch, and manages to make the entirely useless existence that Bertie lives touching and funny and sweet. Where would he be without Jeeves, indeed... Great stuff if you're looking for a light, entertaining read, with lots of British humor.

Dark Lover, Lover Eternal, Lover Awakened, Lover Revealed, Lover Unbound, and Lover Enshrined by J. R. Ward
And then to what I've been reading the past week and a half. Yep, that would be 6 books, positively inhaled in about 9 days. It's that Evergreen action's fault, I tell you!
You see, one of my Romance books was nominated (by me, since I figured I had to represent, you know?), and, incredibly, the Powers That Be thought it would be a good idea. And so Dark Lover, as the first in a series that has been selling well for quite a while, became an Evergreen. And of course I felt duty-bound to read it, since I had nominated it on the strength of its sales (including hardcovers, which is practically unheard of in Romance circles).
And then it was 9 days and 6 books later.
I shouldn't like this series, as you can't get much more Alpha Male than this, and alpha males generally give me the giggles rather than the vapors when I meet them in real life. Their all well over 2 m. tall, and their shoulders are so wide they can't walk through doorways properly, and they're all ripped, and they're a badass brotherhood of vampire protectors, and they have mega-hot sex for hours and hours, and they have the most ridiculous names every conjured up (Wrath? Rhage? Vishous? Zsadist?! Tehrror?!?! WTF!) - and yet I couldn't stop reading. And you know why? Because, unlike so many other series that are out these days, each book advances the storylines of a whole lot of characters, not just the one that the book is ostensibly about. Yeah, sure, each book highlights one of the men of the Black Dagger Brotherhood as they find their true love and get good and whipped, but that's only half of the book, if even that much. The rest is about the war the vampires are fighting with their arch-enemies, and the other brothers or peripheral characters that have their own problems, and those others are what make reading this so much fun. She keeps stringing you along, and you keep wanting to know "what next" - and if that isn't the sign of a good story, then I'm not a bibliophile. :-)

So this is what heaven looks like

2010-04-17T20:31:00.005+02:00

That's right. Dusty boots and colorful socks.

Heaven.

They mean that somewhere out of shot Daughter is running around, barefoot, probably visiting the two dogs in the garden at the beginning of the path.

And they also mean that, after I take this picture, I get a watering can and walk around on the grass and the mud and the sand, feeling the tickles and the cold squelch and the sunshine through the soles of my feet as I water the clematis, and the raspberry, and the honeysuckle, and the strawberries, and all the plants on Daughter's plot.

It may not look like the garden at Ryoanji Temple, but my bit of land is every bit as Zen.

Teach Yourself Trainership

2010-04-15T19:45:00.002+02:00

Last month the unthinkable happened: Auntie left work for bigger and better places.

We're all still recovering. And I get to see her in May, when we'll go fabric shopping and allotment gazing, so it's not like I'll never see her again, but still. It's been odd.

She trained all the newbies, and now I get to do that instead, as soon as some get hired again. So I went off to the Amsterdam store today and sat down at various desks and went through the many many notes she left behind. Still haven't gotten through them all, but I'm beginning to shape the notion of training in my head, and what to cover in those days.

I'd forgotten how numbing it is to soak up so much information. :-) After a few hours I was filled up, even though I'm going through stuff that I know how to do blindly - but seeing it from a trainer's perspective gives them a new meaning.

It also reminds me why I stopped teaching. Besides starting as a teacher too soon after graduating (less than three weeks between the two), the work's never done! Still, it's also good to go back again, even in this small capacity. Once I get a newbie to mold, who knows what'll be unleashed... *cue ominous music*

14 months later

2010-04-10T22:52:00.004+02:00

About 14 months ago, we signed our names on the dotted line, and with that, we became the proud renters of an allotment. It looked like this:

A little over a year of digging, sieving, painting, building, planting, sowing, harvesting and oodles and oodles of enjoyment later it looks like this:

Since it's early spring I can't show you pictures of ripening tomatoes, but we do have garlic, onions, and scallions in the ground...

...as well as potatoes and strawberries...

...and Daughter's garden patch is looking remarkably tidy (and the swing is still heavily used, too):

And finally a picture of today's break-time, wherein we rediscovered the joy of lying on the grass in the sun, underneath the (unseen) apple tree.

Mermaid

2010-03-30T22:54:00.003+02:00

The Saturday before last, Daughter had to pass her swimming test, for her A certificate. It took almost two years of weekly half-hour lessons, but look at her go!

A Fearless Jump into the water, for a lap fully dressed (this is the part where I feel a large lump of fear disappear; all those fantasies of her falling into one of the many canals/waterways/seas/rivers everywhere in this country now have happy ending. Or at least an ending where she surfaces and treads water while I jump in and help her swim to the shore).

A Slightly More Hesitant Jump into the water for the hardest part of the entire test: swimming through a hole underwater.

Victory! She made it through the hole! Look at that palpable relief. :-)

Celebrations at the end, when they all hear they passed the test. Daughter's the one with the over-large blue bag (but what a pretty bag it is ;-)).

Now onwards, swimming soldiers, for certificate B.

Just finished...

2010-03-15T19:51:00.000+01:00

I've been on a bit of a reading binge the last two months, at least for me. Some good, some not so much...

Slave to Sensation - Nalini Singh
One of the up-and-coming authors in my Romance section (never mind that she has about 10 books out already, we're only just discovering her over here). So I thought I'd read part one of the series and see if she's worth the excited squeals when a new part comes out. And it was good, I have to say. I don't have a penchant for shape-changers, but I enjoyed the story well enough - certainly enough to try part 2 one day. :-) I'm quite curious about the rest of the shape-changing clan and I liked her idea of the Psys (humans who have great mind powers but totally push away emotions), and her description of the internet-like Psynet, even though I kept saying Spy in my head. I believe it's categorized as HOT, which means there's pretty HOT sex, so if that's not your thing, stay away.

Curse of the Spellmans - Lisa Lutz
Part 2 of the Spellman files. Kind of a noir detective story, with a nearly-thirty-year-old as the narrator. The story is set up as a series of case files and interviews, all from the narrator's point of view. Very wry humor, but the immaturity of the narrator made me impatient with her at the end.

Play to Kill - P. J. Tracy
The Penguin rep of the store very kindly sent his advance reader's copy to me, so I could devour it and then have Junior Big Sister devour it before it's out in May. And Petunia will want a look in too, I think. :-) Another tale of the Monkeewrench crew and the Minnesota/St. Paul's police department, furthering their stories and even introducing two new, interesting, flawed, and likable characters that I'm hoping will come back next time. As usual, the murders described have a grey quality to them - you can imagine why someone would want them dead, which is P. J. Tracy's forte, in my mind. But it's not as tight as some of the previous books were (even if there are a few scorching parts that have you reading impatiently to see if the good guys get there in time). Still, I'm glad it's here, and I hope they'll keep writing.

The Help - Kathryn Stockett
I had to read this for my bookclub, otherwise I wouldn't have picked it up. But I'm glad I did! Told in three voices (two African-American maids, one white socialite), all three are very human and instantly likeable. Stockett does a good job getting the danger across - it's set in 1963 Mississippi, at the height of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Jim Crow laws, and all that. The story becomes a bit sugary towards the end, but there are enough interesting characters and situations before to forgive that. When I finished it I had to sit and breathe for a bit, to let it settle in my mind. I always like it when a book does that to me. :-)

Mr. & Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy - Sharon Lathan
Loving Mr. Darcy - Sharon Lathan
Urgh. I didn't so much read these as skim through them. Another one of those Pride and Prejudice continuations, which I generally read in the spring because I want to know what happened after the happily-ever-after. There's the occasional interesting line and funny bit, but otherwise it's full of "I love you, Mr. Darcy" and "Elizabeth, my Elizabeth, you are my lover, my life!". Altogether too saccharine for words. And full of sex, too, which I generally don't mind, but Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett are like parents in that way. You know they must have (had) sex at some stage but you don't want to know about it. Also, there's this one violent episode in each book completely out of keeping with the tone of the rest of it. There's a third part, and I'm trying to gather my courage to skim through that.

The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Interesting one, this. Scruffy Boss described it as "Harry Potter for grown-ups," and he's not far wrong. Only the Harry Potters books are much more detailed. This story is so full of outlandish events that I think the author sat down and let the story do what it wanted as he typed it. It's a fun process, but it made for a wildly meandering book. I loved the Fillory-books-within-the-book that were made a big deal of, I thought that was done very well. But, like before, I got impatient with the main character. I didn't really like him all that much, I think. But worth a read - you can really charge through it.

Changing Grooms - Sasha Wagstaff
Ladies and gentlemen, a new Jilly Cooper has arrived. A bit uneven, this tale of British aristocratic erratic behaviour and Hollywood movie stars doing their worst, but a fun romp that you finish in two days (and not at all bad for a debut!). You know who's going to end up with who by page 10, but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable. I'll definitely read her next one!

Up

2010-03-15T16:41:00.004+01:00

Voila. A new bed for Daughter. Or rather, her old bed hoisted up high by my Dad. She loves it - and we're happy she's happy, even though putting the sheets on isn't as easy as it was, and she has a habit of switching on her bedside lamp at night, half asleep, which we then have to climb up and down the ladder to turn back off.

In other news, we've managed to do a bit of work in our garden again the past few weeks. Hooray! Not much happening other than digging holes and filling them back up with sieved earth, but the bulbs are all making an appearance, the garlic I planted in October survived the ice and snow and is doing beautifully, the hydrangea is budding, a lost forsythia is almost blooming in the wilderness at the back of the house (we'll replant it when it's done), I replanted the clematis so it now gets the proper amount of sun, and the rose in Daughter's bit of the garden is shooting out too. And more we don't have yet. :-)

The plants on the balcony that are still alive are responding to the end of winter too:

Hopefully I'll have some pictures relatively soon of the lilac bush in full bloom, and after that, the jasmine. Dad even has two jasmine baby plants, from his own stock, so to speak, that I have big plans for in the garden. One day I'll make cuttings for him from some of my own plants, I hope. :-)

Yes, it's a very mundane chat today. :-) No new weddings to report, although the eldest Nephew and Nieces #1 and #2 all seem to have found girlfriends/boyfriends at the exact same time (long live Carnaval?)(hopefully Niece #3 will have good news soon, too - we're all crossing our fingers for her!)(and everybody else will have to wait). We met them all this past weekend at Niece #1's birthday, and they passed the first test. Little do they know what we have in store for them next time...

Daughter and My Better Half went to a concert together last month, and they came back all shiny-eyed and excited. They saw the local orchestra together with De Wereldband, and there was much mayhem and dueling with violins. I'll leave you with this video of their Coffee Cups routine:

Cheeky

2010-02-27T00:13:00.003+01:00

My Better Half and Daughter were home yesterday, while I was at work. My Better Half decided to take a shower whilst Daughter lounged on the couch, undoubtedly watching the same baffling Bakugan episode she's been watching on repeat for a week now (long live dvd recorders?).

As he stepped out of the shower, the door opened, there was a *click* and then the pitter-patter of retreating feet accompanied by gleeful cackling. The admonishing "Oi!" had the effect of the door opening again, followed by another *click*. And more running and giggling.

Clearly it's time to put the iPhone in a very high place. Or else somehow waterproof it and put it on the shampoo shelf in the shower.

Sadly for you I won't share Daughter's photographic talents of that little episode here, although I do have a Self Portrait of her Mood:

We're not entirely sure where she gets this from. I'm guessing it's the Protestant elementary school she attends.

Once more, with feeling

2010-02-05T23:40:00.005+01:00

This morning, The Other Half was reinstated to his rightful place as My Better Half.

We were married at 10.30ish. :-)

The only person there was Daughter, who signed her name in the marriage booklet, and who handed us our rings. And who checked carefully whether we said our I Do's properly (we did).

Afterwards we had a lovely lunch at Bagels & Beans, and then visited Mom and Dad, as well as Mother-In-Law, (and called Senior Big Sister and Junior Big Sister, as well as Big Sis and Big Bro on his side) to tell them the news. Thankfully they were all happy for us, and not a bit miffed at being kept in the dark!

And despite keeping everything so very low-key, we're all exhausted now. Still a very emotional day, even if no tears were shed.

Belgian Humour

2010-02-02T20:20:00.001+01:00

Just finished...

2010-01-27T23:47:00.006+01:00

...or rather "Just finished over the past four months because I've not been reading much what with NaNo and Sinterklaas and Christmas". But here you go, presenting them from just finished to long finished:

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto.

The book I picked for my bookclub. Chose it because it's nonfiction and I liked the Dutch angle. I found it a very readable book; the author is very good at humanizing history. I really got a sense of being there, and in the end there I found myself all riled up against those dastardly Brits, with their inflammatory pamphlets and anti-Dutch sentiments. I do think I missed a few things, since I never had Dutch history, really, nor American history, either, so I perhaps missed the right perspective. The author (an American, BTW) really makes a case for the American idea of being a melting pot of cultures stemming from the Dutch trait of tolerance (as he puts it, "grudging acceptance," which I found quite to the point :-)). An enjoyable and educating read!

To Ride Hell's Chasm by Janny Wurtz.

Classic fantasy that I'm generally not too fond of, actually. But The Other Half really enjoyed it so I gave it a try, and I have to say the author is excellent at world-building, and also at making the dark magic at work in this story very menacing. I do think a few bits dragged on for too long, though. One excellent point about this book (and one that pretty much sets it apart from all other fantasy books nowadays): it's standalone!

The Conqueror by Georgette Heyer.

Historical novel, as opposed to historical romance. A good book to read during the madness that is NaNoWriMo, though, since I could afford to not pay too much attention. I didn't enjoy it as much as her regency romances, which are full of hilarious dialogue, but, like I said, the right book in that particular month. :-)

Still Life by Louise Penny.

She got one of those bewildering Dagger awards that the Crime Writer's Association hands out on a weekly basis, it seems. I never understand those awards when I come across them, but the little blurb about this book caught my eye. Set in Quebec, around an elderly inspector who is a very likeable character, and populated with people you immediately take to. Kind of in the vein of Rita Mae Brown, but without the pets. And Canadian, so you don't get the latent "I hate taxes!" that Brown always puts into her stories.

An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon.

Ah yes, Gabaldon! I bought the UK edition, which I found prettier. :-) Once again I loved it entirely, although for the first time I felt short-changed at the end. She's always managed to finish her books, even though you knew there was another part in the making. But this book feels unfinished, on several fronts, no less. The Claire and Jamie story is cut off, as is Roger's and Bree's. I know there's another one coming up (probably in a few years), and I can only hope she starts about 75 pages before this one ended, to fill in those huge gaps that started appearing about then. Regardless, this is great story-telling, so go read it!

The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich.

Click here to see what I thought of it. :-)

Crinkly hair

2010-01-21T11:45:00.000+01:00

Every straight-haired seven-year-old's dream. :-)

Christmas

2009-12-25T19:34:00.005+01:00

What a lovely Christmas day today was. I got to sleep in until 9, and then we all lounged in our pyjamas, watching the Phineas & Ferb Christmas special, as well as the one from The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, and enjoying a wonderful breakfast filled with warm rolls from the oven liberally smothered with Nutella, of course.

Had to do a lot to get Daughter dressed after that beginning. We somehow managed it and then slithered and crunched our way to the garden, to hang up seed balls for the birds there. First time we ever had to use the key to enter the complex! Garden looked pristine and snowy, until we stomped all over it. :-)

And then I made dinner, a right proper official Christmas affair, too. See?

Zee menyuu waz:

Fresh Tomato and Orange Soup with Dill (extremely yummy, even if the combination of tomatoes and orange juice in soup strikes you as an odd one)

---

Chicken en Papillote and Mustard Bearnaise Sauce (just quoting from the cookbook here)(The Gretta Anna Recipes, FYI)(no longer in print, sadly, and I thank Mom for her foresight in having these cooking bibles of hers reproduced for all her daughters, since I always find something yummy in them)(but the fancy name stands for a delicious oven dish involving chicken, mushrooms, apples, bacon, toasted almonds, and my very first ever bearnaise sauce - see evidence below!)

Pommes Duchesse (fancy name for potato mash done up in pretty little florets using a decorating bag)(made 'em myself, since the supermarket was out of them)(the florets, not the decorating bag)

Simple Green Salad with Proper Vinaigrette

---

Strawberry Cheesecake (Daughter's choice)

Delicious and not too heavy, either! Ended the day with Wii tennis/bowling/boxing. And writing the menus for tomorrow's dinner at Mom and Dad's, which I fear might involve serious overeating unless we compensate by not having any breakfast. Until 2010.

Happy holidays everyone, wherever you are!

Oink

2009-12-09T17:45:00.004+01:00

Whew!

Survived the madness that is November (my fingers have uncramped a bit by now), as well as the annual Sinterklaas surprises (we make them at professional crafts level). Apologies for not posting/commenting more; I'm slowly catching my breath back though!

And now I'm floating on the wave of nostalgia that is, oh yes, Het Oink Beest.

Sinterklaas was kind enough to give it to Daughter as a gift, and she's fallen as head over heels for it as I did when I was little.

:-)

Art

2009-11-17T20:44:00.002+01:00

For those of you who don't know our latest favorite cartoon, above you see Daughter's rendering of two of the main characters, Candace and Phineas.

Since she drew these all by herself I feel justified in showing them off here. :-) I think she did a fabulous job! Tomorrow they will be sent to the local cartoon channel's ongoing drawing competition. I think they deserve a gold star, with merit, but sadly, I'm not in the jury...

Seven!

2009-11-05T13:41:00.004+01:00

Daughter is turning 7 today. As a good friend of mine from college would say: "Unbelievable!"

Since I wikid my birthday before, I thought I'd find out what amazing things have happened in the past on this most important of days:

1605: the infamous Gunpowder Plot - Guy Fawkes Day, in other words.
1688: start of the Glorious Revolution, with William of Orange taking over England.
1872: Susan B. Anthony votes in an election, despite the law telling her not to. On behalf of all women that may now vote: thank you.
1913: Vivien Leigh is born.
1931: Ike Turner is born.
1940: Franklin D. Roosevelt elected to a third term as president of the US.
1941: Art Garfunkel is born.
1946: Herman Brood is born.
1960: Tilda Swinton is born.
1965: Famke Janssen is born.
1968: Sam Rockwell is born.
1977: René Goscinny dies.
1982: Jacques Tati dies.
1996: Bill Clinton elected to his first term as president of the US.
2002: Daughter is born, at 19.02 (one of the first things The Other Half said to me afterwards: "She's all prime numbers!")(05.11.02, 19.02 hrs)(geek!).

Spine-tinglingly Cool

2009-10-13T22:26:00.000+02:00

Cerulean

2009-09-28T21:10:00.002+02:00

Yep.

That would be Cerulean, a rogue, and my second max-level WoW character (that link refers to the days before The Burning Crusade came out)(and she's level 80 now, too).

Not sure if this is a step up in the ÜberLeet-Gaming-Geek Standings, or a step down in the Whatever-Happened-to-Doing-Household-Chores Hall of Shame. :-)

Moment

2009-09-26T21:31:00.002+02:00

Mother-Daughter moment at our favourite joint, Bagels and Beans.

For the record, we didn't eat all the chocolate coffee beans. This time.

Public Service Announcement

2009-09-22T21:42:00.001+02:00

Just noticed on The Other Half's computer that the nifty little Tweet Feed in the right corner of this blog is filled with all kinds of stuff that isn't mine.

Odd.

You see, on my computer, I just see the last three I posted. So apologies if that part is filled with garbage; if it's still like that tomorrow I'll take the widget-thingie off.

Castle

2009-09-22T21:10:00.005+02:00

The Other Half and I happened to see an ad for a new fall show: Castle, starting Oct. 8th on SBS6, of all places.

That's right, everyone's favourite Captain Tightpants, or Captain Hammer, if you prefer, in a new show that's already on Dutch tv! Hooray!

Tune in with me, will you?

PS. Another Firefly alum, that lovely and very lethal Mrs. Yo-Saff-Bridge Reynolds, is the sex bomb on Mad Men (it was on Nederland 2 on Wednesdays this past summer, at the very accessible *cough* time of 22.50 hrs)(no mention of reruns or the second season, but what with that winning more Emmys I'd hazard a guess at yes).

PS. Some more love for Pushing Daisies, which got cancelled: Kristin Chenoweth, who plays Olive Snook, got an Emmy for the role! If only the touch of that Emmy could bring the show back to life...

Caught!

2009-09-22T09:16:00.001+02:00

I wonder who tried to sneak out to the neighbour's balcony...

State

2009-09-15T20:33:00.006+02:00

Daughter and I travelled in state this afternoon to wave at our Queen in her golden carriage. This is a yearly returning phenomenon - the Queen in her carriage on her way to the State of the Union address, that is, not us waving at her. We figured she needed our support today, though, since her speech was all doom and gloom (leaked to every single news outlet throughout the past week)(I guess the recession has hit members of the Cabinet so much they need some side income)(as long as they declare it ;-)).

We were on that square so handily called Square. Not the greatest of spots, but thanks to the crooked way in which the barriers were set up Daughter had a clear view up to the flags in the distance (which look much further away in the picture than they were in real life). We saw six billion three hundred gazillion twelve thousand and seven horses go by (she kept an exact count), and four carriages, including the Big Kahuna, drawn by no less than six horses (I kept an exact count):

We saw Princess Maxima's pink outfit, the Queen's hat, and Crown Prince Willem-Alexander's military uniform. They waved, all the way down the street, to Daughter. Very gracious of them, it must be said.

And then we bought presents for The Other Half, and ice cream for ourselves, and Daughter had a heart-to-heart with the street organ man she gave some money to, and eventually we found our way back home, all tired and contented.

Sunday Evening

2009-09-14T23:09:00.002+02:00

11.30 p.m.ish. Apparently I have a comfortable lap (that's my foot, btw).

BBD

2009-09-09T22:54:00.002+02:00

Daughter and I had a visitor yesterday:

That gorgeous little thing is BBD. The Lady Sings dropped her off before work, and Daughter and I got to play Mom and Mom for a little while.

Daughter did a stellar job feeding BBD, giving her water to drink, showing her which blocks went into what hole, fending off The Kitten (he was being waspish and had A Look In His Eyes), and even fitting on the fresh diaper. The icing on the cake was walking BBD to school in her stroller, of course.

Seeing pictures like that also brings home the fact that Daughter is A VERY BIG GIRL already. In the best senses of the word.

As for me, I got to feed and then clean up after both of them, change a poopy diaper, wipe noses and chins, take a long walk in the woods with the stroller, play peek-a-boo... and rock a baby to sleep:

It's been a while, folks, but I still have the touch. Comforting to know. :-)

Shoot the Ingenue

2009-09-09T07:50:00.005+02:00

The Other Half took a few pictures of my finished Ingenue sweater yesterday. Here are the usable ones (the non-usable ones focus rather heavily (pun almost intended, sniff) on the part of the sweater just below the collar and right above the waist)(cheeky bugger)(then again, it's in my ring, so he's not breaking any promises!):

Apologies for the grainy quality of the pictures, but they were taken with my phone. Maybe, one day, I can get The Other Half to focus on what he's doing and take a few proper ones with his high-falutin' camera.

Ingenue sweater pattern in this fabulous book (and don't buy on Amazon, they are the devil)(quite seriously!): Custom Knits.

sjoplog

Just finished....

A Different Species

Soup

Image

Favorite Books of 2011

Cocktails

Gotye

Sky Scarf

Just finished...

Not to be outdone

Look at her sew!

Puuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrr.....

Finally!

Just finished...

Singer

Hummingbird III

Speed

Just finished...

Hummingbird II

Progress

Hummingbird

Stunned

Sketches

Escher

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Dwarven Battle Bonnet

Janelle

In Anticipation of Spring

Votes are in

Poll: Classics

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Shawlitis

Details

Growing Up International

Feed the Birds

I'm a bookworm, hear me munch!

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NaNo2010

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A Bright Career Ahead of Her

Switch

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Scaring Horses

Baby no more

Stormclouds up ahead

Mother Nature can be a bitch

Put in my place

Finally I get to show off!

I'll get the ice-creams...

35

Multifunctionality

Stash

A mind full of nothing

I Kid You Not

A Copiosity of Collective Nouns

Man In His Natural Habitat

*THIS* close

Just finished...

Pfffft

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Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have a Dress

There She Goes Again...

Double Oh Daughter

Ducks

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Teach Yourself Trainership

14 months later

Mermaid

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Up

Cheeky

Once more, with feeling

Belgian Humour

Just finished...

Crinkly hair

THIS close