Traffic theatre

To get from my house to the company I'm doing my internship, I can take two routes. One goes through the middle of the city centre, has very few traffic lights, and is generally quicker, unless it is a market day or there are lots of drunk post-party students hanging about. The second is through a more open patch, going round the city centre, with lots of traffic lights and streams of busy commuters trying to push past me on their bikes.
Sounds like the first route is preferable, and in many ways, it is. But for the past two weeks, I've been taking the other, slower route. The main reason: broken traffic lights.
There is one main junction in Groningen that has been under construction for about 5 years now. A new underground parking lot has been built, put on hold when the digging made the homes in the neighbourhood slide and crack, continued, and finished, with a huge new office put on the top and new roads put around it. It's been chaos and mess and diversions for 5 years now, but finally, the thing is almost finished. On Monday last week, the new traffic lights were installed. These immediately malfunctioned, unable to cope with the busy morning rush, causing long delays and traffic jams. While the problem is being sorted out, traffic marshals have been put in place of the lights.
This provides me with free comedy every morning. There are two of them, standing in the middle of the junction with their whistles and there red lights and their high-visibility jackets. I admire their bravery in stepping in front of an oncoming stream of cars, forcing them to brake and wait. Sometimes cars try to slip past them, but they are always kept in check by an angry whistle and waving of arms. This leads to many smiles and knowing nods amongst the cyclist ready to move. I also love how they apparently arbitrarily decide who gets to go and who doesn't. But their system is so much better than the traffic lights, because they can actually see which line is longest or that there is a traffic jam up ahead so they should keep traffic in that lane back, etc.
But the best moment is when they pull the whistles out of their mouths and shout together: "Cyclists! Pedestrians!" (these generally don't get to cross together, but in the early morning rush hour time is of the essence, and the traffic wardens just mix them together). On a good day, they also make a cycle movement with their hands above their heads, as if we can't remember what we're supposed to do. But most people start cycling as soon as the wardens reach for the whistle in their mouths.
There are always a few car drivers brave (or stupid) enough to try and slip in between the cyclists and pedestrians, but they never make it. The waves of bikes and 'freight' bikes (used to transport small children to and from school) are just too thick. In a couple of seconds, every biker is on the other side of the road, cleverly avoiding the traffic wardens and other cyclists in the process. And then the whole thing starts over again, with cars in short lines having to wait quite a while for the busier parts to clear. But as a cyclist, you're always one of a huge pack, one that floods the junction for a couple of seconds and then separates and disappears. It's one of the perks of being an early morning bike commuter, and I will be sad when the traffic lights are fixed and I won't have my free mime break anymore.

The house phase

I know, it's been quite a while since I've written anything, and also quite a while since I've done anything worth writing about, creatively speaking. That doesn't mean I haven't been busy. My internship has gone up from 2 to 4 days a week, and there are lots of meetings and events in the evenings and weekends, so that's keeping me pretty busy. Also, I've had to finish most of my dissertation before the 19th, which I managed, but only just. But the thing that's been occupying my mind the most lately is the fact that we've bought a house.
Yes, you've read that correctly; we've bought a house. Remember when I was ranting on about life's phases and not being sure where you stand and what you want to do and where you want to live? Apparently, all that doubt goes away when you find the right house, in the right location, with the right feel. Not entirely true, as I still have some creeping doubts when I hear that friends of ours are going to live in New York City for a year, but I was there on holiday just 2 months ago, and I want a garden and a place for our cats to live, and something we can afford, and that's in Groningen, not NYC.
So we've been busy talking to banks and notaries and contractors and bathroom people and what-not, managing stuff from money to insurances to bathroom tiles to paint colours. The house is huuuge, they've combined 2 ex-social rent homes to make one new home, and it needs a lot of work done. There's no bathroom, for example, and only a very basic kitchen. On the other hand, there are two massive living rooms (one of which will be split into a bedroom and an office). So that will keep us busy for a while. We hope to do most of the work ourselves, and we hope to do most of it in the Christmas holidays, although I had also planned to do a lot of dissertation work during that time, so we will see how that goes.
I'll try and put up some before and after pics, something I forgot to do with the house we live in now, which was in about the same state as this one is in. The garden (which is quite big) is also going to need a lot of work, as it is all kind of clay-y and soggy at the moment, but that will be a nice project for April or May. For the moment, it feels as if we've got pretty much the most basic stuff arranged and done, so now we just wait until December 17th, when we'll get the key. And then I will be the most adult version of myself I've ever been, complete with a  house and a mortgage. Let's wait and see whether we slide on into the double-income-workaholic stage that seems to follow this stage all around us... I hope not, as I want to enjoy this house as much as I possibly can!

Perspectives

I have just finished reading The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, one of the books I got for my birthday (I asked for "books you think I will like to read" and that worked out very well, so I will probably stick to that for the rest of my life). The book was great fun: a literary adventure, time travel, hopping from one dimension to another, and filled with quotes and references to literary works, many of which I got, but many of which also must have gone straight over my head. I normally don't like crime or detective novels, but this one was exactly right.
The only thing that wasn't exactly right was the perspective.
The novel is written in the first person narrator, with detective Thursday Next (yes, weird name, but not the weirdest by a long shot) telling us what is happening 'real time'. Now I generally don't like first-person narrators, and even less so when the author is pretending that what I am reading is actually happening right now, and the narrator is telling me the story as it is happening. Thankfully, Fforde used the past tense, "I shot him in the back", rather than the present, "I shoot him in the back", which is even more frustrating (and stretching my suspension of disbelief to breaking point). But then, some chapters are still written 'through' Thursday, but she is telling me stuff that happened somewhere else, information that she got later, from her aunt and uncle, and is now putting back into the story at the time it happened chronologically. This would not have been a problem if it was somewhere stated that she got this information later, but it isn't. And then such a chapter is followed by a chapter in which Thursday does not know what is happening in another location while she told me what was happening in that location in the previous chapter, and I get annoyed.
It feels as if the author couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted to write in the first or omniscient narrator and tried to go easy and do both. You can't do both, unless you consistently do both, and he doesn't. (Also, I think you should be able to write a detective novel from the point of view of the detective (or his sidekick, as in Sherlock Holmes) entirely, and not need extra information about what really happened so the reader knows before the detective knows).
The first person narrator happens to be a very very limiting perspective to write in. I can think of only two recent novels in which it works properly: the Tomorrow-series by John Marsden and Bridget Jones's Diary. Both of these are written accounts of something that happened earlier, which is the only way it works, I think. And even then, in Bridget Jones there are some instances in which it would not have worked for her to have her diary balanced on her lap, writing away, while Mark Darcy is annoyed with her for looking at him while he is sleeping. But still, the first person narrator works, and Helen Fielding actually makes use of the limiting perspective that it creates by having Bridget make all kinds of daft assumptions about others, which then turn out to be complete nonsense. (I'm currently reading The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan, and I have the feeling that the first person narrator is working there too, but it is the story of a man recalling events that happened when he was 15 years old, again, describing the past.)
But if you're telling a story that is to all intends and purposes happening right now, don't have one of the characters spell it out for you. And if you do, and it works, don't cheat by adding scenes that this one character knows nothing about and cannot know anything about at that moment. It's distracting and confusing for the reader, and really, you should be able to pick a point and stick to it.

Japanese stamps

I've written about the stamps I get with my Postcrossing cards before, but never got around to showing you some more. Since that post, I've added a little line to my profile saying that I love beautiful and unique stamps, and the amount of special stamps I've received has gone up quite sharply. Germany, Finland, and the US seem to make it quite difficult to get any other than the 'standard' stamp, but many other countries do have beautiful stamps which I've been enjoying greatly.
Now one country I didn't mention in the original post is Japan (I did refer to a Hello Kitty stamp I had somewhere). Looking back I find this a bit surprising, as cards from Japan generally include the most beautiful stamps. So here I give you some examples, drawn from the 12 Japanese cards I have received so far (I've combined several cards' stamps):

I love this beautiful astrological series (on 2 different cards). They have some sort of glitter effect that you can't see on the scan, but is very nice. I hope to receive more of them!

A cute shaped teddy-bear stamp, I haven't seen many shaped stamps before.

Combined stamps of 2 cards, they look typically Japanese to me (except maybe the fox).

This one also looks like the beautiful Japanese art work that was on the front of the card.

The first of the Hello Kitties, with some more Japanese art work (2 separate cards).

Another Hello Kitty stamp. I like it, but I loooove the one with the cranes on the left...

And finally this huge selection of stamps. Together they get to 70 yen, which appears to be the correct rate, only the astrological signs and the first Hello Kitty are 80 yen.

I hope you enjoyed them as much as I did, and I hope to show you some more stamps in the future!

Feeding your birds

I've been very busy the past few weeks, the dissertation stuff needs to be done before November 19th, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen, so I've geared it up a bit, and then there were some other things I may tell you about in the future.
But one thing I did do is put the bird feeder outside. I've always had bird feeders for as long as I've lived in the city, and they've always been busily visited by blue tits, great tits, and the occasional robin or green finch, with blackbirds happily munching up all the seeds that are spilled by the others (I always read about house sparrows invading feeders, but I've never seen them here. There is a big group living in the hedgerows about 50 m from our house, but they don't appear to be interested in my food). For my birthday I got the most beautiful caterpillar-shaped peanut bird feeder, which will be put to good use as soon as I have the time to buy peanuts.
I know some people may be going "feeding the birds? But they're wild animals, they should fend for themselves!", but honestly, these are not wild birds anymore. The gardens in my part of the city are very small and often badly maintained, which leaves little food for the birds. In winter, most insects actually crawl into the houses rather than winter outside, which depletes the store of food even more. Moreover, we're adding plenty of cat-predators who live very close to each other (a wild cat's territory can be many square kilometres) and make it even harder for them to survive. We're the ones taking away their food, we're also the ones making them less 'wild' by removing the 'wild' itself, so I cannot help but want to do something back.
I know there are other concerns, as there is still a rumour going around that birds who feed seeds to their chicks kill them (chicks generally only eat insects), so that you should remove your feeders in early spring to prevent this. Believe me, birds who would feed their chicks seeds would have died out a long time ago (as they aren't reproducing, so their habit isn't established in other birds, etc...). They use the seeds themselves to get some quick energy and get back to finding grub for their young. There are many people who leave feeders out the whole year, so this is really not a problem. I leave mine out until at least the last frost, but usually a bit longer, say the end of April.
Also, it's been really cold (freezing) for about two weeks now, so here the birds really need the extra food. But even if it had been okay weather I usually put out the food at the end of October, so the birds can get to know the place. If the temperature suddenly drops and they have to spend precious energy trying to find a place that can sustain them, they may still have problems even if they do find your food. So put it out early.
All the little bits help, of course, especially if you're living in a city or busy area. Feeders are cheap, food is even cheaper, and you'll be helping that little bit of nature that is still left close to you survive!