Last night, while reading my favorite Yes, She is Anastasia book in bed, I found a box of Sweet Tarts there in the top drawer of my night table.

We must have picked them up during our last trip to the States. When I gobbled Sweet Tarts as a child, they didn’t come in a box. But shoot me dead, I can’t for the life of me recall how they were packaged back then.

As I crunched a few, though, and as The Father complained about the noise of my crunching, I was dragged back into my past, those days when Dad and I and Tut went to movies so very often. It was an Army thing, entrance for flicks was cheap- we watched all sorts of films, from Barbarella to Beach Red, me munching Sweet Tarts.

Sounds a lot better when it is french, doesn’t it ? About some cookie…

So, yesterday the heater guy came. To fix the heating system in the house.

Now, not only is the living room cold, but so is the rest of the house.

Not frigid, just cold. Two sweatshirts and socks- no gloves- cold.

The Father stamps his Van Lier encased businessmen feet and declares ‘I want a warm house !

It has been my experience that stamping one’s Van Lier’s encased shoes can be very effective.

We have floor heating throughout our house, excepting our bedroom and our bathroom ( long story, cold room). A few weeks ago, the heater guys stopped by to finally connect the last of the hoses- for that is what floor heating is, underneath all of those floors- for the rooms on the upper levels of the back of the house ( Achterhuis, got it ?).

Since then, we don’t seem to have much heat in our living room, which fact we have combated by having the fireplace blazing away every evening. Today the heater guys came by once again. Rumor has it that the heat in the kitchen will go down and the living room will go up.

But it still leaves us at 3 degrees, our bedroom windows open, no heat in sight there and I am about to go to sleep. I dredged up a pair of socks, have on a sweat shirt and jogging pants and in idle moments think that those finger- less gloves of The Boy might be rather comfy when reading in bed.

Gelaturi te salutant !

( Uh, I took greek- so think gelati. I am faking it in an even more rude way than I do with english.)

The Father-

BTHub torrent tracker routing is a nifty idea which works pretty well. Watching your client should let you know which port to forward.

I was watching the last episode of this BBC series on Auschwitz this evening. Now, during this series, they were following the…uh…career of Rudolph Hoess rather closely. He was head honcho at Auschwitz.

So he is caught, he is in prison and he is jotting down his thoughts about his life. He says this, he says that, yet the only regret that he jots down in lead and white is that he was obsessed by his work, and so , neglected his family. He regrets this most of all, the – perhaps – 200,000 children who died at Auwschitz don’t shave a sliver off of his soul .

I wonder how many men, looking back on their lives, regret having missed out on their families, those few years that were there to share.

I have heard this numerous times- perhaps it’s a boy thing, some sort of blind spot. Why, both my father and The Father’s father have admitted that that was the greatest mistake in their lives: That they missed it all.

But I do believe that is was Thoreau ( or perhaps Emerson ?) who said that no one ever learns from another’s mistakes.

And I find that to be true.

Today I donned my Mummy Dearest of Brabant, fashion photographer avatar. No ? A bit much ? All right, today I was supposed to snap some pics of work wear for the company. I’m guessing that that is supposed to catches your attention.

No, I did not actually photograph anything today. Instead, I found myself ironing. Yes, ironing. One lab coat alone took me forty minutes to iron. All three articles had perma- press wrinkles and creases in them- my hair is a halo of frizz, caused by damp towels shooting steam up into my face.

I hate ironing. I never iron when I’m wearing my Mummy Dearest avatar. But today at work, that is what I did. And the fact that- for the first time in my life- I was actually being paid to iron did not make any difference at all.

I hate ironing, period.

The Father : The Baby, where did the Yankee shoot you ? (Note, Grandma is from Alabama )

The Baby : ( pointing to her navel) That’s where the hankie shot me !

The Father did not whisk me away to some tropical island : we don’t do Valentine’s Day. Never have, never will.

Nope, today- armed with my curved needle ( you remember, the one worth a left nut)- I spent my free time working on recovering the couch in The Playroom. Yep, I finally decided that I better get moving on doing that room over, get it done some time before the children move out.

As I pinned and sewed fabric, I briefly considered writing a post about scissors and what happens to them when they are forced to share a roof with children. No, I thought- as I snipped some threads with a Gerber baby nail clipper- that’s too easy. Everyone knows what happens to scissors in that worst- case scenario.

Moving along, I found myself thinking about DNA, which is not surprising, as I was over at peterkurth.com today reading about the DNA results from Anna Anderson. Yes, I confess, I am reading my Anastasia books again, even though I know, know, know that they were all buried in that cold dark forest that evening when Anna Anderson jumped off of a bridge in Berlin and became my favorite mystery.

Very pleased indeed with my curved needle, after a short while I found myself thinking that perhaps the Double Helix has replaced some of the doctrines of Calvin.

My next thought was that when I find double helix and Calvin in the same thought, it is time to get some music up here, some noise to distract me.

Even Faith Hill would do .

A few weeks shy of her 12th birthday, The Girl is now taller than I am.

I am 5’2.

As per an agreement made with both The Girl and The Boy- when they were respectively 5 and 3 years old- we shall celebrate this on her birthday, the day when she no longer sits on my lap, but I on hers.

Balloons and steamers expected.