So what am I supposed to be doing, traditionally-speaking? Ice-skating, of course.
In the real world, though, it's been at least twenty years since I've been on the ice. I don't even have my old skates anymore. Not that they were any good... or maybe I wasn't.
However, my friend konstanzerb  invited me to go skating with her tomorrow, and that sounds like fun. So I headed for the charity shop across the street to check out the stack of ice skates I remembered seeing there, about two weeks ago.
Oops! Not much left of that stack by now... after all, it's been freezing for a while. But I did find these:


Très vintage, aren't they? And I'm told that these should work better for me than my old skates. Those where the kind with a white leather boot attached, that never fit well and would give me blisters; also, the blades were short and the shoes high above the ice, which made them unstable. Suitable for ice dancing, if you knew how, but not for gliding along for longer distances.
Besides, I can wear these with my own hiking boots, which are nicely warm, waterproof and very comfortable.

I have no idea if I'll be able to ride these. I'm hoping my Dutchness will take over and tell me how.
If I live to tell the tale, I will be letting you know how it went soon!

...will not be a review of the year past, or a list of resolutions or plans for the year coming.
Instead, it's about a website that's both funny and immensely useful. It's the very best answer when someone asks you something that he or she could have found out by his- or herself in half the time it took to formulate the question.
It's slightly snarky. But really only slightly so. And it does actually lead people to the real answers.

'The capital of Burkina Faso? The lifespan of gold fish? Who wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls? Hmmm... Let Me Google That For You.'

Be sure to bookmark. You're going to want to use it sooner or later. Probably sooner.
Have a splendid New Year, my friends and lurkers!

It's hard to tell but it does look that way.( Under a cut, because I'm that kind of person. ) Of course, we can't actually see their little mouths open and close, so when we see one of them hop forward a centimeter, we just assume he or she is hunting.
And if we're right, we should see them getting bigger soon!

12 larvae are in the Chinese take out containers so far. And it looks like there are another five or so eggs left.

Well, I'm not sure they're eating yet... but apart from that, they're doing well.
Five of them are now over three days old; another five have hatched, but one of those doesn't look very good. He's sort of bent and his gills seem underdeveloped. We'll have to see if he starts looking better soon.

Here's a picture of three from the first batch with a one cent coin placed underneath the container, so that at least those of you who live in the Eurozone will get some idea of their current size:

The coin looks oddly shaped because of distortion by the water.

The red blobs are cyclops: water fleas. Too large for the larvae to eat right now, but it was worth a try. We'll try to breed them so the larvae can eat them later, when they've grown a little.

The tiny specs are sea monkeys or brine shrimp. Those seem more suitable.
In fact, stoneshop  just told me he saw one of the larvae eating them. W00t! Now let's hope this little pioneer will tell the others how to do that.

Look what came out of one of the newt eggs. It's an itsy bitsy teeny weeny little baby fire bellied newt!
It's about 1 cm long.
There will probably be more in the morning. I've prepared a setup for hatching sea monkeys (brine shrimp), which takes about a day, so I can feed those to the newt larvae tomorrow.
It's a tough world... eat or be eaten!

Everything just tastes so much better if you don't simply eat it but instead carry it into the bedroom, while loudly proclaiming your victory, then manage to let it escape so you have to catch it again, preferrably noisily and within two metres of someone's ear, at an ungodly hour.
Then, if you find that you cannot retrieve it, act all nonchalant and as if nothing ever happened, and start making polite inquiries about breakfast.

Okay, maybe I didn't need to know that after all. Good morning, all y'all.

My friends, I invite you to follow this link. No nasty surprises, promise. And SFW.

*sings*
Falalalala lala la laaaa. And I've actually decked the halls, sort of.

...and then it may. Below is a fuzzy picture of a tiny little baby newt inside a newt egg. It's in the middle of the picture.


Most of the eggs are rolled into leaves, so you can't take a picture of them at all; this one is between two leaves of a Java fern.
I have put the plants that have eggs in them in two small tanks, so no one gets to eat the eggs or the larvae; there are about 10 eggs in there, maybe more. They are about two or three mm in size; that is slightly smaller than a grain of black pepper, a bit like the size of a coriander seed, maybe even smaller than that.
It's not uncommon for the eggs to die and get moldy in this stage, so I'm not counting on any results, but so far, all the eggs that I can see appear to be doing fine. I've been watching the dots inside them grow for a couple of days weeks now.
I've decided to try to raise the larvae. It's fairly complicated but I'll just give it my best shot and see how far we get.

Isn't it exciting?

They can't be serious about this... or can they?
Lenovo (that's pronounced IBM) has announced a new dual screen laptop. It's going to be a total brick at about 5 kilos. But the cool factor is at least equally large, I must say. And look, they've kept the good old trackpoint!


Click the pic to read about it on the Computerworld.com site.

Today I decided to be nice and clean the kitchen floor.
It had been a while. Then again, there's four of us living here and I'm pretty sure you don't need ovaries to do a bit of cleaning...

While I was at it, I noticed mousiness. Which translates to mice pee and mice poo. Hard to avoid completely, since this place is big and unwieldy, and it's not easy to mouseproof the whole place; there were, however, two holes in the back of two of the kitchen cabinets that needed closing off. I used PUR foam, also known as building foam. Lots of it.
When the can was empty, I pushed it into the biggest of the holes that needed to be filled up. Let's see you gnaw through that, you furry little rodent scum.


The kitchen floor looks nice and clean. And the place smells nicer, too. Even though it reeks a bit of building foam.
But clearly someone has been slacking lately. Click to see who it is!

Copied from gummihuhn , because a surprisingly large number of his answers are the same as mine. Lazyness is its own reward.
( Under a cut because it's long. )

Look what stoneshop bought me!
It's not a gift; it's purely practical having the same phone, so we can share changers and other peripherals. Sez he.
Well, I reserve the right to regard this as a gift, and a really neat one at that. Also, to jump up and down.
(I can jump up, but how does one jump down? I don't need to; so far, that part has always happened by itself. Never mind.)
This phone can do a lot of interesting stuff; it's also a 3.2 megapixel camera, and a radio, and a GPS receiver. But most of all, it's a sturdy and almost waterproof phone.

Happy icon. Because I am.

I'm a gecko!"
I've never seen newts climb up against the glass like this before. It sure looks funny and it makes me glad the tank is well sealed.

...who's not feeling down at the moment? It seems that way.

Vibes, hugs and best wishes to all of you who need them. May you feel better soon!

I bought a painting today.
It was just one of several more or less silly things we bought today, but by far the most unexpected. I mean, buying a christmas tree can hardly be called unexpected this time of year. I buy a christmas tree every year but I think this is the first painting I ever bought.
One of the reasons why I bought it was that I wanted to support the charity shop that had it on sale, because they're Good People who allow us (a small group of local BookCrossing members) to haul away six or more boxes of books every two weeks, rather than to have them recycled. The shop has recently been renovated, because the roof beams were rotting away, which has obviously cost a lot of money. So I was looking for something to buy.
Another reason was that it cheered me up when I looked at it. It's sort of a Mirò or Kandinsky imitation, done by an amateur (or so I think), quite gaudy and full (in fact, a bit crowded) of decorative elements, and I really like the colours.

So here it is. Click the pic for a bigger version.


It has a title, too; the title is Herstellende Dood, which means Healing (or Recovering) Death. It's signed with the name Benno and the year '86.

The frame is hideous and badly damaged, but I think I really like the painting. I'm going to paint the frame black with a narrow silver stripe and then hang it above the couch.
Buying art can be fun, especially if it costs only 10 euros, all of which go to a good cause!

Oh, and stoneshop  spent 2 euros on an electrical footwarmer. It's lovely.

...which is how I feel when I read aka_phoenix ' latest entry and then compare it to what I'm going to write about.
But still, here it is: stoneshop just got me some stuff we bought off Marktplaats, and I'm insanely happy about it. Because it's all really neat.

First, there is this delightfully tacky fake open fire, made in England and called Magicoal:


The picture doesn't do it justice. It has moving fake flames above the fake burning logs. They look very nice and actually fairly realistic.

And then, from the same seller I bought another item:


Pretty, aren't they? And not a chip or a crack to be found.
All of this cost just 25 euros (and it cost Stoneshop a couple of extra hours on the train to go and pick it up, but he said he didn't mind. I'm very glad he did it, though). What a lovely bargain.
It's strange that stuff can make me so happy. But it can. And it doesn't have to be expensive; in fact, knowing that it's not only makes me happier.
So I guess I am materialistic, but in a weird way!

Actually, this is a recycled posting from last year. Here you go.

Here's a bit about Saint Nicholas traditons, the way I know them:
( Read more about Dutch Saint Nicholas traditions )

So how did all y'all do when I asked you to tell me what you know about these traditions?

( Click to find out. )

A list of 100 things meme works as follows:

Original Directions:
bold = I've done it
italicized = not done it but want to
underline = not done it and DO NOT WANT TO EVER
( Under the cut. )

Those of you who think 'Yes, yes, we get it. Newts are cute. Now enough already'
... please feel free to skip.
( Three fairly big pics inside. )

...but in an old office building.
It means you have space enough for things that would have been difficult elsewhere. Like a sauna.
Not only we have a sauna, and it's actually in what passes for a bathroom around here (and which is bigger than most people's living rooms, and some people's houses), we now also have a place where you can sit and relax with a drink in between the various stages of a sauna bath.
Here it is: our Tropical Beach Style Relaxation Lounge.( Click to see. )