March 28, 2003 : fridays as they should be

I got up with Eva and while she was in the shower I headed to the local bakery (which was consequently recently bought by a Jewish family) and bought croissants. Regretfully so, I paid the man into his hand instead of into the change plate, and next time I will remember that doing so is uncouth. (I learn something new each and every day!)

When I got back Eva and I had a nice breakfast together which included tea and coffee and general gettings-ready. By the time we were finished she hurriedly collected her things and left. 2 minutes later I heard her stomping up the stairs. She had gotten a couple of steps out the door when she realized that in the variety of the morning, she had forgotten to put on a bra. No joke. She got out and realized she was a bit more bouncy, so she came up the stairs, unlocked the door and told me to ready the car.

I went downstairs with her on my heels, got in the car and sped off to the station where she just barely made it to the train. With her bra on. Now if that's not a funny story, what is?

I'm not going to go into the weekly rant of how Eva is supposed to get off at 4 but she gets home at 5:30. She too doesn't think it's the fairest thing, and she admits that she's one of the first to leave (even though it's already an hour and a half past the beginning of her weekend) but still.

Today was much the same sort of situation, though now that we have "little Debbie" it seems we're not as time-bound by here extra hour and a half. Her extra hour and a half still puts her home 2 hours earlier than she does most weeknights, so we gladly hopped in the car and headed to Carrefour's for some weekend food shopping.

As I was in and out of wanting to fix dinner, Eva stumbled upon some "must sell quickly" nearly-finished dinner item which consisted of ground pork wrapped in witloaf (belgian endive) and seasoned with ground pepper. I'm still not a huge sausage fan (though I'm a fan of rookworst and woorstenbroodjes) and that's what it looked like; a sausage-filled cabbage-like vegetable. But she was insistent.

We also bought some festive drinks that always seem to get stored away instead of adding to a festive spirit. Two are currently chilling and one is hiding away in the pantry.

When we got home, I started making dinner. It's not that I didn't want to cook, it just seems like when it comes down to it, I rather enjoy peeling and fixing and watching over the assortment of steaming veggies, sauces, and tonight's cabbage sausage. It wasn't something we could throw into a pan, so we baked it for about an hour. In the meantime we munched on some mystery-veggie pan-fried appetizers. (yum!)

Joris came over for a haircut (buzz) and as Eva manned the clippers, I manned the food. I also kept manning the computer as I was still trying to find additional options for my latest project. (one of which I'm actually pretty proud.)

Two men in an Iraqi coffeeshop. I had originally only wanted to do the GI Joe themed bit, but in my mind, it's grown into something even more exciting. I nabbed the picture from one of Yahoo's photo slide-shows. Something about it made me want to keep it. It wasn't until later on today I began thinking about the possibilities. Now the concept is bigger than I had originally planned--it's always nice to have a project grow a bit out of hand.

It doesn't seem to work on a Mac unless you happen to have Netscape; I have an older version ,4.7, and it seems to like the plugins, but not the size really. (does anyone download Netscape anymore?) At least it doesn't seem to work like it's supposed to. I'm running Win2K on an old beater-PC, and everything works just peachy. If you have problems, let me know.

Joris headed out for a night on the town and Eva and I were left to our meal. The meat had cooked for over an hour and was quite pink inside. We both eyed it with a little apprehension, but then decided, "what the hell" it smelled ok, it tasted ok...and we didn't feel to bad afterwords, so pink pork is alright under some situations; this being one of them.

After dinner Eva did her normal friday-night activity and passed out on the couch. I gathered our plates, tidied the kitchen a bit and then set down to figure out the browser issues and to find more live news casts. I even landed on a site that had live-stream from CNN (something you actually are supposed to have to pay for, so that was exciting) However, after a couple of hours of "live from Baghdad" reporting, I felt myself becoming both sucked-in and numb. Thank god the project is on such a small screen, or we'd both get sucked in. At 3 in the morning, I called it a day. I think the project is complete, it's time to go to bed, and Eva's only now waking from her slumber.

IN THE NEWS:
It's not that this is really news. The news seems to be all war-related. But I was talking to someone recently and as I, myself, didn't know this until a year or so ago, the Red Cross (the universal sign for help/relief) is known as the Red Crescent in countries where the 'cross' would be a symbol of Christianity, so it's replaced with a more region-friendly logo. When I first found this out, I was surprised to see the correlation between red-cross and Christianity (this is what I originally thought). To me, it was more of a plus-sign, and it's relativity to secular help/need overshadows any relativity to a concept of religion.

Here's a link for more real information about the history and current issues with the red cross/red crescent/red star of david: http://www.ifrc.org/who/emblem.asp