Whoops, I think I pressed the wrong button and deleted everyone else. Forever alone.

!

Back in the office after a week off. The nice thing is I nowhave the desk next to the window, so I have a view of the Erasmusbrug, the Willemsbrug, the old railway bridge AND the Unilever glass box among the skyscrapers of Rotterdam. Quaite naice.

Penelope, that reminds of my office of a few years (too many) ago. The fact that I was a significant contributor to the design layout of the place has nothing to do with this, of course. The department of the organisation in which I worked was situated on the 20th floor of a building which itself was positioned on a relatively high point of the City of Sydney. The windows rose from thigh height to the ceiling. The view took in the top of the Harbour Bridge, the buildings of the main CBD and then a panoramic sweep of Sydney Harbour (Port Jackson) all the way out to the harbour's heads. It really hurt, but I had to turn my back on it else I'd have done sweet nothing in the way of work.

What do you lot do while doing laundry? I'm experimenting with brainstorming the week to come in a notebook while my smalls go around and around and around, and it works well.

Well, nights, I find that doing laundry is an exercise in concentration. Firstly it's getting the right temperature of the water in the copper. Then there's the right balance of water to cloth to consider. After that it's what, if any, domestic aids - such as soap - might be required. After those it becomes necessary to move the wooden dowel I use for agitation in such a manner as to effect the most efficient cleaning whirls and swirls. Whilst doing the latter my mind drifts to the mangling and then the efficacy of hanging the final product right-way-up or up-side-down. Laundry, nights, is an art and is not something that should be taken lightly. Anyway, your notebook will get wet.

[nights] I mostly sleep, having put the machine on to run overnight.

(Dujon) Do you have a coal fire under the copper or are you still using eucalyptus logs? Soda is very good, isn't it? I prefer wooden pegs, or pigs as they call them in NZ (and SA, it seems).

[Rosie] Gerroff! The wood of the eucalypti beneath the copper? That's reserved for the hot water heater and bushfires. Blimey, you Britons aren't half backward. Soda? Indeed; a tablespoon of bi-carb goes a long way when washing. Pegs/pigs/pugs around this wee bit of territory are not my responsibility but I do find that the plastic (non gypsy supplied) tend to snap all too often after being subjected to sunlight.
Being serious for a moment: Should I be required to buy a scuttleworth of coal for the fireplace that I don't have I have no idea as to where I might buy it.

[Dujon] That's what Google is for. Or, as it used to be called, the Yellow Pages. Or the small ads in the back of your local newspaper. Or ask at any house with a smoking chimney.
I am now virtually convinced that e-technology is ringing the death knell of common sense and 'nouse'

(Dujon) Bicarb's no good - you want proper soda, Na₂CO₃. Alkaline enough to dissolve aluminium. Try it in a saucepan with a bit of heat. It'll fizz nicely. Don't do it for too long or the pan will have a hole in its bottom which is all very well for us humans but not cooking vessels. As for coal, this can be obtained from any of Britain's many preserved steam railways and is of a quality high enough to be burned at the ferocious rate required in a locomotive firebox. Or you could get it direct from Poland as we don't have any mines left. About £80 a ton. With you on pegs. Use wooden dolly pegs; they last for ever.
(pen) esp. satnav. Recently someone was given several column-inches in the Grauniad Technology Section to describe how inadequate the device was because it had got her lost driving from Wolverhampton to Stoke and she nearly landed up in Shrewsbury. If that had happened to me I'd have kept very quiet about it, not wishing to appear a complete tosser, but you know what people are like these days. I won't say any more because I can get really sarky.

Quite. I always like to have a lookie at a map before I set off, so at least I am informed about the route/heading/places en route. People who blindly trust a SatNav are eejuts.

When I taught engineering at night school I always told students that they had to know the answer before using a calculator. They used to laugh at this but I used to point out that you first had to estimate the decimal place otherwise the calculator answer could be orders of magnitude out. This principle applies to all technology, it is useful for accuracy but you need to know what you are doing before starting.

[penelope] Around my neck of the woods it would be hard to find a house with a chimney, never mind one with a proper coal burning hearth an 'ob and a couple of hunting dogs to keep one's feet warm. A few decades ago oil burners were all the rage but the cost of fuel seems to have put those foul things to rest - even the use of the common wood burning heaters seem to be well and truly on the decline. After your comment (mine was meant to be light hearted) I did look at Google and my local paper's classified advertisements. Unfortunately my common sense and nous came to naught. Should I ever need a scuttleworth of coal I shall be trawling the local railway lines for inadvertent sullage. :)

[Dujon] Apologies, I didn't mean my comment to sound so brusque, but where on earth do you live, you poor coal-less thing?!?! Next point: I don't think you mean 'sullage', unless you're burning cowpats and horse dung...

No, penelope, I didn't. It was a slip of the brain or fingers. Please read the word as 'ullage'. On the coal question: Australia exports huge amounts of coal and uses various grades of coal in its power stations but I can quite honestly say that in my fifty-odd year sojourn in this country I have never seen coal being burned domestically. It sounds odd, but it's true, although it's impossible for me to say that it doesn't happen.

I am sad about Hershey's practices. I just found out that they source their cocoa from cacao farms that use slave labor. Children are sold to farmers, never paid, are beaten . . . Mars and Nestle are not great, either. However, they promised to stop these practices by 2020. Cadbury for you brits is fine, but Hershey's distributes it in the United States.

[Kaggers] I suppose this is why it's important to check that Incidentally, we're Britons, not 'brits', pfffft. (And Norwegians, Australians, and residents of just about every country in between those two.)

Too much maybe?
Yeah.
O-Kaaaaaay

*slopes off*

[Chalks] It's not as if you do it every day, or even every week. Welcome back, missus!

[ChalkyPhilCdMIrach] Does anyone who contributed a line to the riddle glow-worm know what the answer was? I can only find one word that seems to satisfy all clues, are there others?

Hidden text

I can only find 'nerd'.

[Knobbly] That was all I found. I'd been staring at line 1 wanting to make the answer "Néa" but couldn't conjure a line 2 which would squeeze two accented words in.

[Knobbly] So it would seem.

Hidden text

"neon" would have been possible, prior to line 4

. A little apt, I suppose?

I didn't think of Néa when I posted Line 3 (I should have), so i was aiming for NERD at that point -- because, as Phil said, it seemed fitting.

I read the glow worms, but I missed the riddle. All this "line 1" talk is making me think poetry. I think you Britons *rolls eyes at self* might like this poem of mine: Bigfoot's Love Slave.

Gosh. I clicked. Powerful ending.

Making my name show on everything in the first box.

Back in NL. I have been hen-partied. :o/

I do hope you maintained your cool and didn't wear any fairy wings, pen.

[Softers] No way. We had a very sophisticated evening in a Greek restaurant, not even any plate-smashing. And today, my department at work threw a bash for me too - with a water-taxi down the Oude Maas to the Hotel New York in Rotterdam for afternoon tea, and back again. The weather cleared up spectacularly and it was wonderful. The poor old windy miller didn't get supper cooked for him tonight - I was still stuffed! (But I did cycle to the Chinese takeaway for him)

Saw the Staffordshire Hoard (or at least some of the finer pieces) on Saturday at Lichfield Cathedral - remarkable for its quality (gold filigree and cloisonné work, etc.). There's a moment in the video presentation where one of the experts says: "We get asked if this is the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure hoard ever found - it's the ONLY Anglo-Saxon treasure hoard ever found". Also went to Wightwick (pronounced 'wittik') Manor, possibly the best William Morris house in the country. Morris never saw it, but it was entirely furnished from Morris's shop in Oxford Street by the Mander family of Mander's Paints.
Also had a quick look at CdM's childhood home.

[INJ] I'd love to see that. The hoard, not CdM's childhood home - I doubt it even has a blue plaque, does it?

[Pen] Not any more, it hasn't.

A week since the last post - anyone got anything interesting to report? This morning, I'm going to take my camera down to the windy miller's (non-functioning) mill at Maasdam, and take photos. One of his apprentices spent four days creating decorations for it for our wedding; buntings, 6ft carved initials painted red, and carved intertwined wedding rings, all strung between the tips of the sails and floodlit. He took us out to see it the night before we got married. *beams*

As usual at this time of year, spent in a friend's cottage in the North York Moors. Almost didn't make it along the track on Friday after torrential rain. After that fine walking in forest and over the largest expanse of heather moorland in the world - all bright purple and with a glorious sweet scent. Cold and windy, mind you.

[INJ] Excellent. A week on Sat, I'm off to Wensleydale, to play in the Hardraw Scaur Brass Band Contest. Also spending a week in Swaledale for half-term. Can't wait to get back up to North Yorkshire :-)

*yearns for a proper bit of Wensleydale* God I miss English cheese.

Ah, yes. The clog stuff is a bit waxy. Great for using one of those cheese slicers that they love, though.

Dutch cheese - always highly spoken of, but as far as I can make out (and I may have said this before elsewhere), there are only three varieties. However you can have them at any age you like. But until they get a couple of years old, there's no real taste, and no texture. And you can't grate it - ever. I think it's a bit arse-about-elbow to design the cheese to suit the cheese slicer, isn't it? And the cheese slicer/cheese scraper/cheese plane only works for about 40% of the truckle - it doesn't work once to get towards the edges of the cheese. Surprisingly inefficient for the Dutch. Rant over. Now bring me some proper cheese, please.

[pen] At least it's lower in fat than cheddar et al.

[pen] agreed about the slicer. Mine seem to go mad towards the edge; I'd thought it was just me.

My taste in cheese is not so sophisticated. *prepares for ostracism*. I don't like camembert or brie or veiny or runny or very hard very smelly cheese. I do like what is sold here as "Dutch smoked", whether it has anything to do with the Netherlands I'm not sure. Thinking about it, liking it might, in part, be due to growing up with Kraft processed cheddar (in the blue cardboard box, doesn't need refrigeration), which it does bear a passing resemblance to in texture. Not sure if that product ever got to the UK, i think it was a US thing that turned up here in the 40s or 50s. I haven't eaten the stuff for decades, I found a tin of it in Oman but wasn't game to actually eat more than a small wedge to confirm its identity.

Anyway, crumbly feta (not smooth, yuk) is good. A nice cottage cheese sometimes finds its way into my diet. Cheddar, well, what is sold here as cheddar, no idea if it is or not, is my main cheese, in a lower fat variety, not because I'm a low fat fanatic, but because this particular one just seems to be less greasy, especially when melted or grilled where it turns out beautifully, compared to some others.

And i will fight even my best friends and relations for haloumi. You have been warned :o)

[flerdle] Just buy double the amount. I like mine grilled with a sprinkling of fresh chopped mint and freshly-ground black pepper.

Nooooo, it's mine, all mine, i tell you.

Damn you. Now I'm checking out sausages punt en el and slavering over my desk. The sausagepalace is only about 7km from the windy miller's office. I can see I'll have to make a visit. (And then probably hate them and end up making my own with the new KitchenAid mixer-with-meat-grinder-attachment-and-sausage-stuffer-thingamebob that is about to be purchased with the wedding present money.)

I love cheese. Almost all varieties (only one I can think of that I don't like is cottage cheese). I like hard, soft, creamy, waxy, crumbly, mild, mature, sharp, sweet, blue, goat's, ewe's, cow's, flavoured and so on. Love 'em all.
However, I am on a self-imposed low saturated fat diet, so the only cheese I eat now (other than for a very rare treat) is low-fat cream cheese. Then again, I loved smoking, but I don't do that any more either.

Went to my first pub games last night (Sept. 7 - USA/Central time) so, like um, what 2am Friday for Brits? I forget . . .