February 2009 Archives

I a nut shell:
Eliane upset with her web hosting company that says: backups referred to a few days before the problem, unfortunately we have lost all the updates.via Twitter -

Pictures above are the old entries I lost. Fortunately I still have the comments:

A new comment has been posted on your blog Eliane Duvekot Illustration, on entry #1531 (free!).
Is that a family pack of sellotape in the top drawer?

A new comment has been posted on your blog Eliane Duvekot Illustration, on entry #1531 (free!).
You know very well it is not the real thing but Staples house brand :-(

A new comment has been posted on your blog Eliane Duvekot Illustration, on entry #1531 (free!).
Maple! So Canadian!

A new comment has been posted on your blog Eliane Duvekot Illustration, on entry #1531 (free!).
hey then maybe you would like the 7 foot high wall unit, that doesn't
come apart, let me know

A new comment has been posted on your blog Eliane Duvekot Illustration, on entry #1531 (free!).
Take that up with my husband Dinah, I am going to stay out of that one.
You on your way to the park?

A new comment has been posted on your blog Eliane Duvekot Illustration, on entry #1533 (staying seated).
How come he was the youngest in his class when he was born in December?
Or  did all children born in a given calendar year start school at the
same time (but when? January? or August/September still?). I was born
in July and was always one of the youngest children in my class. So now
I'm confused.

A new comment has been posted on your blog Eliane Duvekot Illustration, on entry #1533 (staying seated).
In Belgium and in Canada they work with calendar years. All children go
to grade one (groep drie) in the year they turn six. Even when they are
five in September. Capicce?

The last one was only up for a short while and didn't get any comments. And it was the most interesting one, it proves how insanely famous I am in Holland; Tommy Wieringa KNEW ME!!

I didn't put the pencil in the pochet, it was there, swear to god. You think he should be able to do that himself, my lovely highschool student? Sew a button on his coat? What household skills do your (as in my deminished readership) teenage boys have? Mine does the dishes and walks the dog. And in theory he can bake pancakes. He makes his own lunch to take to school. And he changes his bed. He goes to the bakery. He sometimes hangs the laundry. Is that enough? Piffin does more, she can go to the beerstore, haha. And the supermarket. And she can do laundry. And lots more, Piffin is more or less done, I'm sure she would be just fine on her own.

My lovely little art school student. The one with the crayons. I think she melted them. Today was a good day, I received a compliment that gave me a real warm feeling for the rest of the day, despite even my brutal dentist. I was on my way to the dentist, and I saw the streetcar coming when I was still almost a block away from the stop. I thought, shit, I'll be freezing on the sidewalk for half an hour. And I ran. There wasn't much traffic, so I ran on the street, towards the streetcar full fucking top blasting speed. I wasn't even out of breath when I got in, so much for being out of shape. The gorgeous looking athletic black driver in a relaxed Caribbean accent: "you are a good runner". Ha! Ha! I was so proud of myself.

Today was family day, which is a brand new Ontarian holiday. I think we should have way more, I think the average family could use at least a dozen of those a year. Very good idea, family day. Especially since when all the shops are closed, there is always Chinatown. Piffin and I went on a shopping spree in Chinatown. She needed crayons, my lovely little art school student. Now you can count yourself lucky if they even understand the word crayons in these shops. The corner store was very helpful, but they know us. And they're only half Chinese, because they're from Hong Kong. And all their kids studied at the UofT, so no problem with the word crayons there. The woman in the next shop also knows me, because I always buy my TTC tokens there, but she wanted to sell us a comb. In the next couple of stores we managed to explain the word crayons in sign language, but they were out of crayons. We finally found them in the fifth or sixth shop, and a whole lot of other useless shit too, see picture. I don't know why only one of the shirts was marked down. And we also bought some nice pieces of salmon at Bill's Lobster, so the interior humans in this family are happy too. And not only the family, Toni, Otger's crazy math tutor, ate almost all the cookies Piffin baked.

I am working at getting back in the habit of blogging. So an old photo it is for today. Yes, this is the painful reality, people. The seventies. Now stop romantisizing that decade, it was gruesome. Just look at those slippers. Look at the matching furniture. Not that my 2009 furniture is matching, in fact that is total chaos. But laid back chaos. Back then everything was awful uptight. Like my socks in the picture. We had a go at some good old fashioned family uptightness this afternoon. We were invited to a tradional English Sunday dinner. Only it wasn't uptight at all, and nothing wrong with a little nostalgia. Roastbeef and Yorkshire pudding. (Our recently immigrated host thought the Yorkshire pudding turned ot horrible, and blamed the flour, which according to her is heavier in Canada?!) Not that we ever had roastbeef and Yorkshire pudding in the seventies, we're not English. I don't think we had any real food traditions. We often grilled a chicken on Sunday mornings, and then it was done when we came home from church. My tiny surviving readership any interesting food traditions?

Look what the postman delivered today! A big fat second use of the Voltaire drawing I did back in 2005. It is a book of praise for a professor retiring from the university of Brussels. I am getting so much work from retirements lately, but I guess that's a good thing.

The look of my blog isn't quite there yet, but I am familiarizing myself with the new Movable type. I like it, I can do all sorts of things I couldn't before. I can do pop-ups again too, I'll try that later. My old Movable type was so broken that that didn't work anymore. And I don't have to write any html myself anymore, happy lazy me. And my whole archive, from 2003 on, is still there. We had some scary moments there. I don't think the comments work yet, when I click comments it wants me to sign in, but that doesn't work. So for now just e-mail or facebook me.