Learn Nothing Day #5

A fortnight, two weeks, fourteen days, half a month from now (not six weeks... pick one of those two-week designations) is The Day. It is Learn Nothing Day, the day when unschoolers STOP learning just to prove they don't learn all the time.

This is the day to cite when your nosy neighbors and rude relatives ask about your "school days" or how your kids will learn. They will learn every day except this one. By golly gosh, by gum, get going. Plan your lack of learning carefully, because it's not as easy as you might think. You might want to invite them over to learn nothing with you.

Click the image above for more information on this International Holiday for Unschoolers, now in its fifth year.

Bad Guys took my Macbook!!

E-mail will not be happening the right way with me until tomorrow; sorry. My Macbook was stolen by a window-smashing burglar (or two) from Julie Daniel's house. Evil bad guys. The iPad was right next to it, and they left that. Adam had his iPad in the van. We had gone to see Ice Age 4. Keith looked up the serial number for me so we could report it to the very nice policeman who was already here when we got back. The house has an alarm, and the robbers went out the front door (having first thrown a big brick through the glass door into the dining room).

I don't have my cordless keyboard for the iPad, and I can hardly type without a real keyboard, so I've borrowed Julie's computer for this (and a note on Facebook).

The purpose of this post is mostly so I'll have a record of the date.

The one I had was bought after I dropped my first MacBook (the one Holly uses now) and broken the glass. So I got a 13" Macbook Pro at a computer shop in Cardiff in July 2009 (possibly early August).

So I'll get another one (not sure yet whether the insurance will cover it) and get the dealer (I hope) to back it up from my external hard drive; I had backed it up two nights ago. I'll try not to leave it visible through a window.

My photos are on photobucket, my blogs and my website are accessible from any computer, and so it's not as bad as it could have been.

Older

I was in Philadelphia last year touring an odd little place by myself, and a young Japanese tourist wanted me to take her photo, with her camera. I did, and she offered to do the same for me. I told her I was too old to need photos of myself. She said I would never be this young again. So I let her take my picture.

Today is Keith's 56th birthday, and he was born in 1956. I remember how excited I was when I turned 53 and was born in 1953, so I told Holly she was going to be 91 because she was born in 1991. Not only was she not amused, but she figured out the whole pattern of such birthdays, and I was left in the dust of her mathematical-patterns brain, which she got from her father, who is 56 today.

For Graham, who liked this song, and Keith who is as young as he's going to get, in this direction, and for me to be able to find it easily...

Amsterdam

I made a post on my Europe 2012 blog here: Photos, Notes and Amsterdam that was going to be about links to photos, but ended up BEING photos, so there it is.

Here are a couple of interesting boat names. Many boats are permanently moored for people to live in, but these two were fully capable of going (though not equally fast or far):

Truck Parade

This is not my video, and I wasn't there, but I sure like it. Modern trucks (mostly) parading through an old town. This is Baud, where the McNeills live now (Helena the Fortunate, for some of you).

Apparently something about American vehicles. :-)

A couple of weeks ago, Julie and I saw these (unrelated to the event above) on a Thursday afternoon, on a motorway near her house:

I don't get the chassis, so that's a mystery. If anyone knows, please leave a comment!

Connections in all directions

I loved my time in the Netherlands. Rippy and Graham were exceptional hosts and their family is sweet.

Rippy and I went up into the belltower (not as high as the carillion bells, but pretty far up) with one of their every-half-hour tours of six people. That by itself was pretty cool. A tour guide and six people go up and come down and then another group of six goes.

There's a walkway all the way around, 40 meters up. This photo was brought to mind by one that Lori Odhner had on her Marriage Moats blog today, so I've brought them onto the same page. They are, in a way, just the same. :-)

The photo Lori used is by Brita Conroy, and it accompanied Lori's writing about different cultures, and families, and houses.
Click it to get to that post, if you want to.

More photos from the day in Amsterdam may be viewed here, but don't expect them all to be as pretty as the one above. Some are coots' nests on odd things in canals. Some are sad. Some are fuzzy. There are two pipe organs, in the same church. These two photos go together:

Stamppot dinner

I had two kinds of stamppot, made by Graham Dusseldorp, the dad of my host family. He said it's more a winter dish, and the green one (with kale) is the more regular kind his mom makes. The purple one had red cabbage and apples. Both were good but I liked the purple one better. There were two kinds of sausage—one for each—but the gravy was the same for both, and was what the cooked sausages had been in.

Rippy and I had been in Amsterdam all day where we went to canal tour boats and climbed up the bell tower at the Westerkerk. There will be photos.

But back to that dinner thing:

So I had two dinners. A Stamppot Sampler! :-)