Quaintr

Like some of you already know, i got a tendency to get addicted to things quite easily. The newest addiction:

Millinery

Home alone. Normally not a problem. But now I feel alone too. Which is a problem.

It's not that I don't have loving people around, it's that I miss the ones that are not around. And offcourse I can email or use google chat. But it's different. To talk late at night. To walk together and go windowshopping. To drink tea and make some more tea. Just a quick call to ask how the day has been. To get a real *hug*. Strange, 'coz I don't remember it bothered me like this before. Something has changed, and besides time and distance, I guess it's me. 

Luckily, Einstein proved distances and time relative...

Today, I asked a 90 year old lady, with an early stage of Alzheimers' disease, if she had ever had a hallucination. "No, I don't think I have," she said. However, her husband disagreed. "It's not that she truly hallucinated, but... ehm... she used to be able to... ehm... know that things would happen, before they happened. Do you understand? She would tell me things beforehand and she was always right. Never seen her to be wrong. But now I think of it, it stopped when the Alzheimer started."

A nurse saw an adult man and an adult woman french-kiss, normally not a problem (but not always a pleasant sight). But the woman was a patient... she might look like a 30 year old but due to a traffic accident she has the mental age of a 10 year old. And the man was her father.

Later, another nurse discovers that the woman/child sleeps in the bed with her father when her mother isn't home.  

The MD in charge talked to the man, he denied everything (as was expected I guess). Somehow someone decided to let it be... no-one pressed charges. Incredible. Stupid. Unbelievable. Wrong. And I know about it, and can't do a thing about it. It's not my confidentiality that's bothering me ('coz in cases like this you're expected to breach the confidentiality), it's that I don't know where this happened, when it happened and who it happened to. I just know it did.

Somedays work sucks.

Like some of you already know, i got a tendency to get addicted to things quite easily. The newest addiction:

Millinery

It's snowing. Again. Every season has it's pro's and con's. But one of the big plusses of winter is snow. (Besides offcourse the time to bake goodies in the kitchen, drink hot chocolat and the joy of eating parsnip). Snow makes me relax. Makes me smile. Don't you just want to go outside? 

Snowball fight, anyone?

"I do it quick, but in slowmotion, so you can follow"

Like the Dutchies amongst us (and the Brits that have known me for a while) probably know, St Nick arrived in the Netherlands last week. Trying to explain my favourite Dutch holiday to Americans turns out to be quite difficult, they all find it pretty racist. Luckily i came across this. Now i only have to convince them that this is not something Mr. David Sedaris made up as part of his show, but that it actually -is- true...

The first one closed his doors right in front of me, and left. The second one had only malfunctioning cardmachines, so the driver advised me to buy a ticket in a nearby store. And when I came back, he closed the doors right in front of me, and left. The third one had working cardmachines, so I had bought a useless ticket... nice guys!

I know they're just doing their jobs, but if I were doing my job the way they're doing theirs, I would have a lot of angry patients...

'Coz he can explain it way better than I can: what's wrong with what we eat.

"Girl, you looked like you've walked out straight of a Dickens' play"

"Or out of that show they're running over at the Brown's Theatre. What's it called?"

"Pirates of Penzance?"

"Yeah exactly like one of those characters!"

*silence*

"Actually... are them pyjama-bottoms you're wearing?"

"Quark?"
"What's that?!!?"
"How do you pronounce it?"
"What do you use it for?"

Just a few of the questions i was asked when i asked if i could buy that in this country. Well, apparently you can't. So what does one do? Right: you make it yourself. Not the traditional way (i wanted it NOW), but the quick one (next time i'll try the longer one). Cos sometimes you just want to make a 'quick' quark pie. Well, it took me about a day. And then of course i didn't get the stiffness right, and it turned out to be a lot less sweeter... but still nice... and it gave me a very good reason to go to the fabric store and buy some cheesecloth amongst other things (will be continued...)

While we were drinking Limoncello in Italy, she posted about making some. It made me remember the time I made Fladderac with my mom. Fladderac is a alcoholic drink from the nothern region of the Netherlands made with lemons and sugar. The taste is quite similar to Limoncello but in my memory the Fladderac just tasted better. But it could be just my memory... so to try the difference, I decided to make some Fladderac today. Now I have to wait two weeks to taste the result and I just have to remember the taste of Limoncello to compare properly...

Remember the failed dish? (Which he lovingly called 'inedible'?) Well, I agree the form was a total failure, but I like the taste. Or at least, the way the recipe should taste, the way I thought it would have tasted. So, I tried again. Changed the recipe a bit. When he wasn't home, 'coz I wouldn't dare to serve him something that resembled the failed thing. Especially if it would fail again, he would laugh at me (real mean and loud). And he would be right to do so... but he's not home. So I'm the only one laughing.

This dish has a life of it's own. And it went everywhere, like a shape-shifting-tart. I guess my rim wasn't high enough to keep the rising-egg in. But after a quick trim, it looked and tasted a whole lot better than the first try. It was actually edible. And quite tasty, or at least, I think so. Although, I don't know if I dare to try again. It left me with a whole lot of oven to clean...

He wanted to cook & bake. I love to cook & bake. So we cooked & baked between the windowshopping and site-seeing. Here's an incomplete list of the things we made (in just five days):

Grandmother's applepie. Pizza. Pumpkinpie with feta and walnuts. Ravioli with spinach served with a mushroom-cheese sauce. Lasagne. Tomatos stuffed with mozzarella cheese and basil. Butternut squash soup with ginger. Popcorn. Banana-ginger cake. Loads of tea. Two cocktails.

... some more pics (after some time/hard drive/data stick probs)

Some of the ones i wanted to post last week:

Some i wanted to post after the power cut (the one in September):

(plus on this one you can see the panel that came down)

(The orange extension cable actually came from the neighbour's)

... it's almost right again...

When I wrote this, I was sitting in the train in Milan not knowing the week would become more strange within a few hours...

The train left Milan with a delay of an hour. By the time I woke up for the eleventh time (didn't sleep that well: the lights went off at a quarter to five and on again at ten past five) the delay was over two hours. Somewhere between Bonn and Kohl (Germany) somebody jumped in front of the train, which did no good to our delay. After standing still for two hours, we started moving again. But the train didn't go very far. It was cancelled at Kohl so I needed to find some other way home. After another two hour waiting in Kohl I took the ICE to Amsterdam. Home with a delay of more than five hours, and a hell of a story to tell.

No gruesome details, luckily there was a notartz from the Deutsche Bahnhof so they didn't need me (although I did offer three times, after all I have taken an oath). No bloodspatters or bodyparts stuck to the windows (although I was in the foremost carriage) and we weren't allowed outside the train. Most of the trainpersonnel did see the result, 'coz some of them were quite panicky. It was definetely ruled suicide by the polizei and it was succesful.

When they were clearing the tracks, I talked with an American named Brant. Which was just as bizarre as someone jumping in front of my train. He was just a few years younger than me, going to university major in 20th century history. We talked about the elections, he was a republican which made it quite interesting. As he said "I'm not a racist, but where I come from the blacks just don't like the white and the white don't like the blacks". (Something I only know from history lessons and movies.) Talked about other things too, like socialism, carrying weapons and global warming. He did like the principle of socialism, and he liked to visit Europe 'coz somehow we made it work. But it wouldn't work in the States, he said. Middleclass people just didn't like to see their money go to the lower class, and there are a lot of middleclass people in the States. In his opinion the right to carry arms is a good thing, 'coz when they first came to the States they were forced to defend their land from the people who already lived there (?!). Ow, and he "just didn't believe in global warming."

It was a real interesting talk, but left me with a bit of a culture shock. Which is, offcourse, to be preferred above the shock some others in the train had...

To visit a friend. We talked and walked, went out for window shopping four times. We cooked, talked some more and laughed. Ate 'till we were completely stuffed. We baked pies, made popcorn and watched some movies. We drunk a whole lot of cappuccino and even more tea. Some limoncello as well. Said a lot of 'caio' 'grazie' and 'arriverdeci'. But we didn't say goodbye, we just hugged. He skipped back to his car and I took my seat in the train.

What a week.

What does one do with lemons left-over from making limoncello? Right, you pickle them. In a month i'll let y'all know how this project tastes...