Ah, how Teutonic!

Seen in the big Co-op non-food shop in the local shopping centre. I was in there today to pick up some cute measuring spoons (shaped like fish and intended for children) and a small plastic spatula to run around the edges of the non-stick ramekins I'm using for the steamed breads. I made a second lot of green tea ones this morning... and they're all gone. ^_^; I also made the hijiki brown rice recipe from the same book last night and it was amazing.

In other news, I finally repaired Mom's bracelet and the latest Skulduggery Pleasant book and posted both off this morning. I got a letter from Stadt Adliswil, which I opened with bated breath, only to find it was not my residence permit but them wanting to know who my health insurer is. Well, that comes after the permit.

The birds are still eating everything we put out, and brown rice (cooked) is the new favourite. There were some very confused and upset great tits after himself took down the half coconut shell that was once filled with fat and seeds and now looks like it's been cleaned and polished. I swear they use it and the feeder as swings. We've been seeing some other kinds of birds that we're not able to identify, but at a minimum we have sparrows, great tits, blue tits, goldfinches and greenfinches. No need for TV!

Where there's green tea powder, there's cocoa powder!

After my surprisingly successful attempt at making steamed green tea bread (from the The Okinawa Diet Plan, which I recommend as a cookbook if nothing else) I decided to have a go with cocoa powder.



It worked beautifully! The flavour is subtle but delicious and the texture is amazingly dense. It's a definite tie with the green tea ones.

The one thing that didn't work so well was using both trays in the steamer. The ramekins I have are too large to put four in one tray, so I put two on each and the ones on the bottom steamer got dripped on, one worse than the other.



Himself insists he's going to eat the slightly soggy one regardless.

Been really enjoying the recipes and will probably try making the Hijiki Brown Rice tonight. After my cross-questioning from the lady at Nishi's Japanese shop while buying the hijiki yesterday - although to be fair, I didn't know you couldn't use it in soup, so I learned something this time.

Man to man

Reading up on the Japanese offensive in India in WWII for some work.

At this period a special jeep supply column was formed from a London Territorial Regiment. In its ranks were numbered many London taxi-drivers. General Messervy tells a story of one of these jeep crews. "All races produce tough, brave soldiers, but only the British soldier really has that sense of decency and kindly humanity which nothing can upset.

"A Jap was seen skulking in a bush near Jessami, by the side of the track. Out leapt the Gunners and seized him.

" 'Shall we kill the little bastard ? It's what he and his like deserve.'

" ' Oh, no, we can't. We'll take him back with us.'

"After a ' few hundred yards---"Ere, Tojo, you look pretty miserable. 'Ave a fag.'

"A mile farther on they had a puncture, and it was 'Come on, Tojo, give us a hand:'

"By the time Kohima was reached, 'Tojo' was a mascot, if not a friend."

From Anthony Brett-James' Ball of Fire: The Fifth Indian Division in the Second World War.

Seems there is always hope left somewhere in the world that people can just treat each other as people.

New and old

It's nice to get something off the long-term to-do list. I now have a functioning backup system, and it's bootable to boot. What finally got me to do it? I've decided that I really want to upgrade from OSX Tiger to Snow Leopard. The performance should be better, things may stop supporting Tiger soon as it was two releases ago, I get Boot Camp which means SDL will support me when I run on my Windows partition and I get to use Chrome instead of Firefox. I don't know what has happened to it, but it's become slower and slower and chews up up to 20% of my CPU. So, everything is copied over safely. Twice.

I finally managed to give in my application for my residence permit and registration in the community this week. It will take up to a month to hear back, but can take less time. I successfully registered with the Handelsregisteramt, despite technically not being able to get a notarisation without a permit, and they informed the SVA (national insurance) of my existence. I've filled in the form for them and sent it back with piles of contracts, invoices, etc. to convince them I'm self-employed - it's also missing lots of information like my permit number and bank details. But they wanted a response within the month so this is what I can give them.

Work has been reasonably busy. Well, it's been furiously busy or nothing, as usual. I still need to get used to it. And use some of the downtime to do my accounts and figure out how well I'm actually doing in the grand scheme of things.

I got my official results from the exam board - I passed! So I can now add another MA after my name (MA squared?). And ACIL - Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. And I took the final set of training for SDL Trados Studio 2009 on Friday, just have to do the exam now and that's the lot. Other than the Termbase one. It's all professional development.

Right. Now for the rather scary endeavour of upgrading my OS.

And boom!

The doorbell went at about 9:00am - David was in the bathroom and I wasn't very dressed, so I peeked out the door of the flat and saw that someone had abandoned a box outside the front door.

I'm assuming this was Swiss Post. Contrary to expectations they seem to be even dodgier than Deutsche Post - so far they've delivered an enormous box to the mother & baby shop in front of our building despite being told it was the wrong address and rammed a box that was too big into our postbox (thankfully the contents were in hard boxes). Oh, and not delivered letters for no apparent reason, causing our ISP to cut us off for non-payment when we hadn't received the bills.

This abandoned package (which a kind neighbour had brought inside the door by the time we went to get it) contained something David had put in an order for months ago but assumed he hadn't got as it was only available in limited quantities - the pocket-böögg!

For those of you who enjoy Sechseläuten, you can get your very own mini-Böögg, the exploding farmer-snowman. It came in a lovely box with three stepped wooden bases, a set of stickers to make the face and bowtie, a removable hat, pipe... and mini firecrackers to put under the hat. And the wooden bases appear to be prepared with something flammable, as the bottom one has three wicks in it. There's a video of one being assembled and burnt on the site, along with the traditional Sechseläuten march music.

So, not only are these made by adults with cerebral palsy, but sent by post? The Swiss really do have a different idea of health and safety!

More updates later - it's been busy, and I've been tired.