Thanks for All the Fish

Although we love to sleep in on Sunday mornings, we decided last night to be sensible and mature and get up early enough to go to a nearby flea market and then to the gym.

We actually managed! After a quick sensible breakfast of muesli with cranberries in some yoghurt, we packed our gym bags and left. Schatz, like most every other man I know, is not very keen on shopping. Unless it's for food. Anyway, he too wanted to have a look at the flea market.

And it was crowded! It seemed as if twice the sellers were there this morning than usual. The sun was shining, the punters slowly walked - nay, were pushed by those behind - along the stalls. There wasn't that much interesting ware, though.

Except maybe for the yardsticks, but we do have a good collection ourselves, really.


Until we reached the rope seller. No, not Monsieur Leclerc disguised as a typical rope seller, but a supplier of all types of ropes, from hemp via sisal to artificial fibre. Sisal also is called sisal hemp, by the way, but it is not hemp but stems from the Agave sisalana. They just called everything hemp ropes in the past as hemp was for centuries a major source for fiber for ropes. The same, by the way, also applies to Manila hemp. Neither are therefore acceptable for Early Medieval re-enactment.

Anyway, we needed more than just a few meters, not just for us but also for some friends of ours. His roll held about 200 meters which was about double of what we were looking for. Schatz and I discussed buying it all, but balked at the amount of money it would cost. The seller overheard us, of course, and came with an offer that we couldn't resist, and so now we own a large roll of rope. Enough for us and To&Bi and possibly our next tent.

200m of hemp rope plus some tarred hemp cord

One thing I've learned: some things you never can have enough of...

From the flea market, we went straight on to the gym. Warm-up on the stepper (I hate that thing), then a round of machines to do all sorts of strange things to muscles I have never heard of. I can handle a lot of things but the following machine really has me going.

lateral deltoid machine

The first time I tried this, without any additional weight to pull, my right arm sort of pushed up the roll, my left arm just stared at me and said wordlessly "WHAT?". It simply did not know what to do. I had to literally tell the muscle in my shoulder and upper left arm to lift that roller bar in a weird outward move. That first day I would manage a lift or two and then had to stop. By now, I can lift 5 kilograms (which is the machine without any additional weight, so it's really zero) 13 times without interruptions. Yippeekayay!

Bah! Schatz does 20 lifts at 7.5 kg. I'll have to do something about that.
Like make him watch this YouTube video:



Anyway, I stopped after one round on the machines and went to the studio part of the gym where, mornings and evenings, all sorts of courses are given. But now it was quiet and I had the mirror wall all to myself. I have started to do Pilates, and in a group there isn't always time to really work out all the details of an exercise, and that's what I focused on today. I'll see Tuesday morning at the next Pilates session, whether it helped.

While Schatz was working through a second round of the machines, I decided to cycle a few miles. Which is pretty boring, unless you catch a good documentary on the tv above. Fortunately they do have the Phoenix channel - German public tv documentary channel. Anything from science to natural wildlife to interviews to history. The other day it was a documentary on Gagarin, today is was German history of the early 1930's.

Back home, Schatz started contemplating what cake(s) to bake. It's his birthday tomorrow and it's customary to offer cake to the co-workers on your birthday. He rather wanted to play his newly bought pc-game and so kept juggling plans but in the end he baked two cranberry cakes - one with chocolate and one without.

Cranberry Cake Schatz Style

Before the cake, though, Schatz prepared dinner (okay, I helped with the veggies). First he harvested new potatoes from the balcony. No no, I'm not kidding.

Balcony Potatoes

Some months ago, he planted a couple of potatoes that were about to rot to hell and back in a plant box on the balcony. Today he figured they were ready, and they sure were!

Foiled Wolffish

With them, we had some wolffish (Seewolf in German, falsely also called Steinbeißer) fillet, baked in the oven inside a foil bag with spring onions, chili, basil, garlic, thyme, rosemary and a touch of sage. And some zucchini and aubergine ratatouille.

Fillet of Wolffish with New Potatoes and Ratatouille á la Sorte

A glass of Chardonnay or two accompanied the meal quite well, and so did the after-dinner whisky, a 12-year old Caol Ila Single Malt.

Caol Ila - from Islay

Sláinte! Here's to Schatz!

Foxtrot India Tango in the Golf Yankee Mike

11:35h

Searching the internet for something has similar effects as searching a dictionary for a word or an encyclopedia for information: you regularly come across information you weren't actually looking for but which is so interesting that you spend more time with it than you should.

In my case, I was looking for ideas of how to translate a very German (labour law) term into Dutch, when I stumbled across a list of telephone alphabets on a Dutch website. You know, the Alpha Bravo Charlie Stuff, but in 7 different languages including NATO.

I was missing a few languages and went a-googling, and the second entry lead me to an FAQ which not only lists the various alphabets but also all sorts of variations from old handbooks or phonebooks.

The third source, of course, is the Wikipedia. The NATO Phonetic Alphabet is as good a starting point as any, it is useful not only when you are inside a NATO tank but also when you try to rearrange a plane ticket on the other side of the globe. And via the Wikipedia languages frame you get to quite some other national alphabets.

Bah! I'm procrastinating... back to my translation!


17:30h

I finished the translation in time to go to the gym. I'm turning into a fitness junkie!!!

Scary, really scary!


23:15h

Time to log off. I'll explain about the gym some other day.

Convenience Loo and Viking Tux

Last weekend, Schatz and I went to the Kreismuseum in Syke near Bremen for a weekend Viking craftsmarket. A group of about 25 re-enactors had been put together by Lutz from the Hacheschmiede. Crafts shown included smithing, bow- and arrow-making, working with bone and antler, turning wooden bowls on a lathe, filting, card weaving silk braids with silver wire brocading, turnshoe-making, silver smithing, pottery, and last but not least, sewing, needlebinding and spinning.

When Schatz and I arrived on Friday evening during a major downpour, most other people were already there and had put up their tents. Unfortunately, the space allocated to us was not only wet but rather under water and quite muddy - and on top of that we weren't quite sure whether it was big enough. And you don't want to drag your tent about in the mud this way or that in the dark to be absolutely certain you cannot fit it in.

Fortunately, Lutz still has a flat in the same town and so we bedded down in his guestroom for the night, hoping the weather would be better the next morning. Lutz is moving to another city and so his flat is rather empty but fortunately he has not yet dismantled his loo corner.

Convenience Loo with built-in beaker holder and reading table

With a maximum load capacity of 500 kg, the reading table is perfect to hold heavy exhibition catalogues, smith hammers or possibly even anvils. A must for any smith!

Just prior to leaving the museum grounds on Friday night, we had spotted the perfect place for our tent, though: right among a few 18th and 19th century gravestones, underneath some majestic trees with extremely good foliage... had we discovered this place when we arrived, the tent would have been up in no time. On the other hand, we would have missed the Lutz' loo then.

(c) Syke Kreismuseum

Anyway, the next morning we set up our tent in the 'graveyard' (top left, between the children's museum and the vegetable patch) at 8 am, while the space originally reserved for us was taken up by two ladies whose matrasses had already submerged the night before in a little brook that had formed underneath their Viking tent. The joys of roughing it!

Torsten was roughing it, too. We discovered that his second 'good' shoe had somehow not made it to Syke and so he had to wear his worn-out Iron Age shoes with major holes in their soles. Since I had packed the shoes and not discovered the shoe's absence, I did penance by doing all the outdoor walking (and fetching) while he kept his feet dry and warm on a few pieces of wood underneath his workbench.

Even though it was still raining some, we managed rather well under the trees, and the audience quite appreciated the reprieve from the rain and mud there as well. A good 250 people actually did show up despite the cold and the drizzle. Real die-hards, hats off to you!

In the meantime, Birgitt and Michi from the Trutzhavener Feldküche worked hard to prepare the banquet which we were to enjoy on Saturday night.

The banquet was exquisite as always. The food was medieval - with a bit of Roman thrown in for good measure.

Michi is happy when we are

Some excerpts from the menu:

- chicken fillet rolls with apple
- pork carpaccio with dill and chives
- moretum
- hare and rabbit stew with coarsely ground pepper and coriander
- grilled salmon on a bed of red cabbage with ginger and mustard
- leg of moufflon with apples, sauted with tarragon and parsley
- smoked pork roast with Swiss Chard (or Mangold) and gooseberries
- plum compote with a trace of black pepper
- wheat pudding

Leg of Moufflon! Bones! Moufflon leg bone! Schatz' eyes lit up but Susanne was closer. And faster!

Susanne and the Moufflon Bone Whistle

And once she had gotten hold of the bone - under the pretense of helping Timm with carving the meat - there was no way she would let go of it again. The twinkle in her eyes did not leave any space for doubt about who our bone and antler worker was at the market.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The next day brought better weather and more than eleven hundred visitors. Schatz' dad and his aunt and uncle also came to visit and he showed them around while I demonstrated needlebinding, silver wire braiding the Vikingestrik, polished brass and bronze wire beads and explained and answered questions until my lips started to fray a little at the edges.

A little later, I was able to briefly visit the museum's permanent exhibition. If you are in the area, and like to be taken back not only to your own childhood but a bit further, do pay the museum a visit, it is most delightful. Their collection focuses on 19th and 20th century crafts, agriculture and household activities but there is also a typical 1930's classroom and a historical exhibition about the history of the area, including finds from as early as the Stone Age and right through to the Middle Ages.

Until the end of August 2008, the Kreismuseum is host to a special exhibition of quilts, under the motto "Man and Sea". Dutch and German quilters have put together an extraordinary collection that left me speechless. And without pictures of my own! Fortunately, some of the quilts can be found on the net...

One of my favourites is called Aquamarine Window by Miriam Pet-Jacobs. "Silence under water. You can open your mouth but no sound emerges. You are cocooned, as it were. Through a window you catch a glimpse of the chaotic world", she describes it. Another quilt that really caught my eye is by the same artist and is called Rhythm I. This two-sided quilt is made as a tripticon and somewhat wasted on a wall...

By 5 pm, when the museum officially closed its gates for the audience, we were worn out. The audience in Syke was just as curious as the last two times, not just asking questions but listening to replies and then asking some more... a big applause to all those who visited!

It was time to pack up and go home. When we took the tent down and lifted the ground sheet, we discovered that the voles in this part of the museum had not lazed about during the weekend: they had tunneled a penthouse addition to their extensive tunnel system right underneath our tent. Unfortunately, the cameras were already packed in our chests. And it was only when we arrived at home that we noticed that neither Schatz nor I had taken a picture of our little tent in the 'graveyard'. Wadda mistaka to maka!

At home, we also found the missing shoe in Torsten's car where it had been hiding between the backseat and the side wall since our return from Ribe a few weeks ago...

While carrying several heavy chests upstairs, we lamented the photographs we hadn't taken, the ones that didn't come out (Birgitt and Michi in their director's chairs supervising the food in the barn cooking itself), and the captions we never got to write about graveyards or voles or cooks. Until we unpacked some of the items we had acquired in Syke, that's when we started grinning broadly:

Tux goes Viking

The egg cozies are made by Anja Stolzmann from Dat Beekfolk. She made Tux from a picture we had given her, and the result is most amazing. The helmet is an egg cozy itself, of course. I'm not supposed to eat a lot of eggs but at least I'll do it in style from now on! The tux, by the way, is for a friend's birthday: kill that lobster, Jan!

Medlab Blues

Ack! 2 months since the last entry... *sigh*

There's quite some catching up to do, I admit, and I'll try to do that bit by bit in the coming weeks. But instead of working my way up to the present, I will keep this blog a bit more up-to-date and insert some past events or trips as I go along.

Today is "Off my Chest" time.

This morning, I left home a little after 9 am to walk to my GP in order pick up a form for some routine tests to be run at a medical lab. Of course, it wasn't ready and I had to wait until the doctor finished the session with the present patient.

I then walked to the lab nearest to the doctor's office, only to realise that I had forgotten my insurance card, and since the doctor's assistant had not bothered to fill in any details on the form, I would have had to pay for the tests myself and then claimed them later from the insurance. So I decided to pick up the insurance card and then return.

Not having eaten since 8 pm yesterday evening in order to be completely sober this morning, and the lab being about 3 km from my home, I decided to take the tram home. It was quicker than walking but still took me close to half an hour.

To save time, I decided to take the car and go to another subsidiary of the same medlab company, only a little over 1.5 km away. I should have taken my GPS system along: of course, there were road constructions between me and the lab and, of course, I misjudged at which end of the street the higher housenumbers were. By the time, I reached the medlab, I had driven more than 3 km, and probably could have walked there in the meantime through Rembrandt Park.

When I got there at 11.35h, number 57 was up on the screen. I got #76...

At 12h h noon, they had reached #67 with blood (and other things) being taken by 4 staff members. Not fast enough, and I went out to pay for 45 more minutes of parking. Only € 1.30/hr, fortunately, nothing like the parking fees in the city center.

And then the board froze. Apart from one staff member, all others simultaneously went on their lunchbreak or home or just vanished into thin air.

At 12.25h, #70 was called. That's when I went to reception and voiced my unhappiness about the slow progress. It seems they are immensely understaffed. I wonder why...

At 12.32h they reached #71 - who had gone home. 3 minutes later, more than enough time to walk the 7 m to the announced cubicle, they called #72...

Not wanting to collect a parking ticket on top of it all, I went back outside to put another Euro into the machine. In the meantime, they seem to have found someone else to help out and when I returned, I saw #75 on the screen.

I just had enough time to get hold of a complaint form and then gave some of my blood. The whole procedure took less than 5 minutes...

I filled in the form and left for home, via yet another detour. Of course.

Lesson 1: walking is faster than driving.
Lesson 2: if there is a next time, I'll go back to the first lab.
Lesson 3: having only water for 17 hours sucks! My brain is still befuddled some hours later...
Lesson 4: Venting really helps!

*****

Lesson 5: Never forget your camera when going on expeditions like this.

To make up for that, I'll leave you with some impressions from recent walks through Amsterdam.

On Herengracht, just north of Leidsegracht, I discovered a button shop with about the largest selection of buttons and jewelry and other objects made of buttons I have ever seen.

Knopenwinkel on Herengracht

The owner wasn't really happy about me taking pictures inside, so here is a view of her shop window in late June:

buttoned-up lampshade

From a completely different part of town, near Mercatorplein, is the following picture:

Hudsonhof gate

The gate was put there about 10 years ago when the whole neighbourhood was renovated and it turns this former part of Hudsonstraat into a quiet area, almost a courtyard.

Right - that's it for today, now it's time to get back to something even more painful than a visit to the medical lab... bookkeeping.