Ok, I confess: guilty as charged.

Well, SOMEONE must have been good this year, because Sinterklaas visited our house on Saturday night. So this Sunday morning...

An airplane!

Chocolate! And biscuits! And candy! And more biscuits! (And mandarines)

Someone's going to school in a couple of weeks.

Chocolate-eating time!

When uploading the previous post, my ISP’s server chocked on the many pictures. Again. You see, in this beautiful but retarded country of mine, the two main ISPs (*) still maintain strict limits on downloading, server space, scripts you can use (in my case: none) and so on. Some well meaning idiot tried to fight this policy by hacking the Belgacom servers and publishing a bunch of users’ logins and passwords. But he got caught, because even the police use computers these days. His trial starts next week.

I’m looking into less drastic alternatives to get around this ban. Of course I could move my weblog to Wordpress.com or – cough hack – Blogger – hack cough – but I like to keep things under control. And I don’t want to be entirely dependent on free services, that can change their policies any time. Such a thing happened to me recently with Gliffy.com, a free service to draw flow charts online. They changed their ‘free’ policy from an unlimited number to five charts per user. So now I have to throw 25 diagrams away or cough up $5 a month. I don’t want something like that to happen to my beloved Bartlog.

So I’ve been tinkering about with Drupal, a free content management system that allows you to create any kind of site: a webstore, a weblog, a forum, a photo collection, a simple one page website,… you name it! And that is precise its problem, because to create something like a blog you need to gnaw through tons of documentation. Drupal is developed and maintained by a dedicated community, and that is another one of its problems. Forget easy-to-follow step-by-step beginners manuals. You’ll be bombarded by so much information that it’s very difficult to keep focused. Oh, and then there is the panoply of extra modules that you need to install to get anything working. Want something exotic like images in your posts (imagine that, eh!), why you only need to install five extra modules for that. And then the real fun begins, because all those modules have settings that need to be changed and they are absolutely all over the damn place!

I guess you can say this thing has a steep learning curve. There is a simple explanation for its complexity: its made in Belgium (well, it started here, now it’s a worldwide community really). But on the plus side, you really can tinker about and tweak this thing to your geek heart’s desire. So if all goes well, expect a new, flashy and dynamic version of Bartlog any time soon. Like in 2020.

(*) Two, yes two as in 2. There are other ISPs, but there are only two separate networks, which means you can write off any free market principles. Internet is expensive here, service is lousy and their idea of internet security is blocking all customers from doing anything else but surfing and making old-school websites.

A couple of weeks ago on a rainy day, we crossed the border to visit Amsterdam. It must have been almost twenty years since I've been there the last time, but not that much had changed: the canals were still there.

Tulip, anyone?

Amsterdam is a very Bart-friendly city.

The Kalverstraat - Amsterdam's main shopping street (for non-hallucinogenic items).

Wolf with his cool Siberian winter hat.

Guess who had hot cocoa?

Taxi!

Somewhere underneath this pile of bikes lies the famous Damplein.

I'm seeing pink elephants!

I first saw these elephant statues on Invader Stu's blog and I was so pleased to see them for real. Wolf loved them too. They are scattered trough the city and painted in all sorts of colours and themes. This is clearly an Indian elephant.

Mrs.B was feeling peckish and wanted a little something. Yes, it's the 'Walletjes', Amsterdam's famous red light district. Wolf liked it too, because there were a lot of shops with 'balloons'. That's when we decided to set another course.

The local cuisine is simple but delicious, if you like raw herring with bits of onions that is.

Canals, more canals, with boats, and more boats. And many, many more boats.

You have 'champignon de Paris' and you have 'champignon d'Amsterdam'. Do not serve the latter in a cream sauce with your steak.

Time for a snack, after such a long walk. Do they have hot cocoa here?

Ok, the VERY last picture of a canal.

Clogged up nose – check

Blocked ears – check

Sinuses under high pressure – check

Stinging headaches waking me up at night – check

Aching joints making me climb up stairs like an arthritic old goose - check

Coughing like a fifty year old Russian diesel engine somewhere in the Siberian tundra

Check and double check

Yep, it's definitely autumn...

Mrs.B is a great fan of crime/detective/lawyer/police/judge/prison series. Not a day goes by that she doesn’t switch from one channel to the other watching her favourite shows. Much to the dismay of yours truly, who is more interested in human interest shows based on profound psychological insights in the human psyche, such as films with Arnold Schwarzenegger, animation series like the Simpsons or South Park or any Sci-Fi show. Oh, and high-tech geek stuff on Discovery channel!

One of mistress Bee’s favourites is NCIS, or Naval Criminal Investigative Service. I must admit I too find it appealing, as long as we don’t have to watch it every damn evening. But unfortunately, the series has a bad influence on my wife, making her even more violent than she was before.

As you may know, the leader of the Navy team has the habit of slapping people on the back of the head when they make a stupid remark. Since the series got airtime in this drizzly kingdom by the North Sea, slapping on the back of the head has made a dramatic entry into this household. It takes no crime investigation team to figure out how this has happened. And I think you can figure out the name of the victim here. But we’re not only talking about domestic violence here, oh no…

Last week, Mrs.B had to take job interviews, together with her boss. She designed the questions for the oral examination of the candidates. At one point, she poses a question to a candidate, upon which her boss inadvertently and absentmindedly gives the answer. And in a reflex…

She slapped her boss on the head! I should also add that Mrs.B is still in her probation period (which is a ridiculously long twelve months). So slapping your boss on the head may have abrupt and drastic consequences.

Good thing her boss has a well developed sense of humor then.

This weekend I discovered a large puddle of water on the first floor. On my brand new floor that is, which I laid only three weeks ago. Water was dripping from the ceiling; at least it dripped until I touched the rock wool insulation with a finger. It went right through and the very next moment I had a whole waterfall streaming down.

I couldn’t believe it, ANOTHER bloody hole in the roof! Last summer, I got so fed up with plastering the roof with repair kit, that I re-roofed one side of the roof with a new roll of bitumen. Needless to say, the leak is in that part of the roof that I thought was still pretty fine.

Luckily, the new bathroom ceiling isn’t up yet, that’s for next month. But I can tell you I’m getting pretty fed up with this colander we’re having for a roof.

With autumn well under way and winter fast approaching – Christmas decorations anyone? - it is time to prepare the garden. I must admit that Mrs. B is the one with the green fingers, my services are only called for to do the heavy work such as pruning things and digging out old shrubs and things like that.

So this weekend I pruned our grapevine. Almost all its leaves had gone, and the bugs had left nothing from the last grapes but a few dried-out and rotten corpses. Previous years, I just cut off the long branches and tried to stuff them in the green container. But this year, I had a secret weapon in my arsenal: granddad's Ultimate Destroyer. A handy machine that allows you to feed whole branches one way and turns them into small slivers of wood.

So instead of having three containers of branches, I ended up with half a bag of atomised grapevines. Super!

Then I attacked the mountain of pine branches that lies next to our neighbours garden shed. If you remember, last spring we took out the 25 meter long/4 meter high/1.5 meter wide hedge that separated our garden from our neighbours. They kindly offered to stack the branches in their garden, and when we were done they had a mountain of pine branches so high in their garden that planes need to make a detour. Ever since, the next door neighbour and I have been taking tours at pushing those branches in the GUD (Granddad's Ultimate Destroyer).

It's an annoying task, because the flexible small pine twigs sooner or later make the cutting disk inside grind to a halt. Which means you have to open the GUD, remove the twigs and shavings that didn't come out and close it again. On top of that, there is this security mechanism with an interrupter that keeps getting clogged by the pine needles. All this makes for a fun afternoon in the garden.

So I was happily feeding the GUD with pine branches, until I had a couple of them that were too large to feed in one piece. No problem, because I have some mean pairs of cutting scissors. And while the machine was turning in the back I was cutting happily away at a big branch on the ground.

However...

The GUD's electrical wire was also on the ground. Under the branch I was cutting. And then the inevitable happened. SNIP – Flash! - and then the cutter ground to a halt. It was a good thing those cutters had plastic handles (and I was wearing gloves of course). I had taken off a good 50 cm of wire.

Half an hour later I'd put the plug on the remaining end of wire and I was back in business. But I decided to cut those branches a bit further away from the machine.

I've barely arrived from Congo and I'm leaving again... to Congo. This time to the southwestern part instead of the northeast. I'll be back in ten days, so you'll have to make do with the other blogs that you may find in the dark pathways of the internet. Not that I can imagine that any of them are as interesting as my weblog, of course.

Farmers' meeting near Mbandaka