• studies: I have to change a LOT in mijn products for my studies, so next six weeks are going to be work-work-work untill I just about drop.
• But first: I’ve allowed myself to rest during Easter, as I’m sóóó tired from sleeping really badly during the last week or so (stress from studies + that darn light saving time-shift = out of sleeping rhythm)
• I just casually ordered a new washing machine over the phone (after an hour or two of desk and field research)

No housewife could do without it. Seriously, women's lib owes a lot to washers.

(het schijnt alleen dat hoe blijer ze zijn als ze naar buiten gaan, hoe minder comfortabel is het in de stal…)

Carla has a nice post about het fascination with knitting and refers to computers (she used to be ‘in’ computers before going all knitty).  Writing my comment on her post, I felt like writing more about this topic: textiles and computers. I’ve returned to it many times, at least in my head. Often is was a way of getting women and computers into the same realm. Computers was seen (especially in the eighties, when I took my Computers & Humanities-minor) a the prototypical new and exciting ‘thing’. Nerds with coffee mugs were the new heroes. And they were almost always male. I wanted to drag women & the ’small’ daily things like knitting and weaving into this new & shiny hall by referring to when they used to be in the same realm in the infancy of computers. As ‘we all’ know, Babbage was heavily influenced by the Jacquard-weaving machines punch cards with holes and non-holes. Of course, this connection was via the not-so-domestic industrialisation, but nevertheless, something as ‘mundane’ as textiles sparked off this development.

Also, of course, I liked to tell my co-students about Ada Lovelace, the brilliant mathematician who’s often seen as the first programmer. One choses one’s own role models. The same reason that I mailed my co-data analistes about Florence Nightingale, who was not only a nurse but also a pioneer in the field of graphic representation of statistical data.

The Dutch nation seems to have caught the skating psychosis: everybody is getting on their skates that have been stacked away for the past 12 years, getting in their cars & causing queues on the roads to the lakes, increasing the influx of patients at the first aid posts with up to 70%. But the weather is brilliant.

Skaters near Blokzijl (c) Martin van den Bogaerdt

OK, Elsje wil weten Wanneer, waar en hoe heb jij je (huidige/ex-) partner gestrikt?

Nu is er in mijn geval alleen sprake van één partner (vasthoudenheid is inderdaad een van mijn karaktertrekken), dus er is weinig keuze qua verhaal. Het is eigenlijk een heel gewoon verhaaltje van zus gaat er met beste vriend broer vandoor, of vice versa, afhankelijk van hoe je het ziet.

Het zat zo: ik woonde nog in Denemarken bij mijn vader, mijn broertje was met mijn moeder meegegaan naar Nederland. Daar zat hij op school met de toekomstige partner. Ik kwam op vakantie naar Nederland, en verveelde mij wat terwijl mijn broertje pacman zat te spelen op zijn nieuwe commodore Toekomstige Partner sprong in het gat, en begon met mij rond te fietsen in het gehele Zuid-Hollandse land. Zogenaamd omdat ik mij zat te vervelen. Van het een kwam het ander, en voordat je het weet zit je te zoenen in een Haagse Chinees. Ja, en toen waren er een paar jaar dat je apart woonde in ieder z’n land. Na 2,5 jaar ben ik maar geëmigreerd, en naar nog wat jaar gingen we samenwonen en dan ook maar trouwen. En dat is intussen bijna 20 jaar geleden.

Allemaal weinig spectaculair, maar wel leuk als je erbij bent

O ja, en ik gooi het stokje door naar MJ, die heeft wel een goed verhaal! Nu maar zien of ze het wilt vertellen

Elisavet, who commented on my Esbjörn Svensson-post yesterday, has a very nice motto for her blog:

“”Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. Cyrill Connolly”.

So true

Only now, of course, she does have readers

Sipke sort of nudged me to post some more entries on this blog (take a look at his blog – het Bontmutsavontuur – if you read Dutch, and see what he means about not being quiet). I have thought about it for some time, and have realised that since I moved my blog to WordPress, it feels much more official. Linking to it from Ravelry doesn’t help either. This somehow put the fear of blog into me. Over at Hyves, I wrote about everything, cats, school, films I’d watched etc. It feels a bit trivial now. Compare to Elsje’s emoties, where E writes sort of mini-essays each time. She also writes about cats and movies, but much better (to be checked out if you read Dutch).

But I should stop this and think of Virgina Woolf, who very early on pronounced the trivial non-trivial. And walked towards that river with a stone in her pocket…

Anyway, expect a lot of trivialities in this blog from now on. We can’t all have exciting lives, and what’s not exciting for one may be all too exciting for someone else…

Actually, this blog block was so severe, that I forgot to publish the above post…

It’s the first of January 2008. Beginning of a new year, beginning a new blog.

I’ve decided to leave my blog at Hyves, and continue here, due to the feature free nature of Hyves

At first, I decided that this blog should be about knitting and all those things. But I’ve realised, that I end up blogging mostly about the cats and school + work. So beware, this is going to be a rather diary-like blog… about what keeps me occupied, what I decide to to drag and drop from the ‘real’ world into this private domain of my blog. Could be all sorts of things: endangerd mice, knitting and frogging, cats throwing up, grades obtained, etc. etc.

(The current image in the header is a detail from Han Singels’ photograph Uiterwaarden Gameren 2, 2006)