Still getting used to the new currency, and I don’t think I’m the only one. You still see people letting the cashier pick out the money they have to pay; and you hear stories about customers tipping way too much or not enough. All this will pass with time. Problems with the bills being too big for my wallet (they are slightly larger than the old Austrian money) will also pass once I buy a new billfold. Currently, my largest problem is that I am amassing huge quantities of coins, making my pockets bulge and my wallet hard to fit into my pocket. I thought at first that this was due to poor planning and design of the coins and their denominations, but now I think this too will pass; when the Euro was introduced, stores were prohibited by law from rounding up their prices, in order to prevent a wave of inflation resulting from the Euro. This naturally causes odd prices like 17.234 euros etc, because it is a rare Austrian shopkeeper who will voluntarily round down. As soon as it is legal to increase prices again, we’ll get nice round numbers and the change problem will be solved.

Alpha was in Japan this past week. She comes home tonight, and not a minute too soon. The week started out well, the in-laws took care of the kids and cooked and minded the cats while I worked. Everything went well. Even the weekend wasn’t so bad, really. I mean, we were all tired and cranky by then. And the cats didn’t do anything especially bad or gross. And the oldest daughter Beta even cleaned out the litter boxes when I told her to. And when I did finally flip out because I was, mostly, simply tired, and tired of the kids bickering, and tired of being *ignored* by the kids when I told them stuff, or getting snotty answers, and when, after lecturing Beta on some damn thing I of course can’t remember anymore and she said “Now I can understand why mom breaks a coffee cup sometimes” and I said, “So can I, it makes you feel!” [smashing first coffee cup onto kitchen floor] “So damn much better!” [smashing second cup onto kitchen floor] I had enough self-control to smash the cheap cups. At this point, Gamma, 4, said, “You’re not supposed to break the coffee cups.” Beta said nothing for a while, but we were getting along again within an hour.

Neither I nor my wife grew up in a house where crockery was regularly broken on purpose, but we have learned to enjoy the practice. Self-control is a good thing, but anything can be overdone, and if you’re going to go bug-eyed crazy now and then, breaking a cheap cup is a harmless way to do it.

In which Michele is interviewed by a TV news crew.

Let’s do the Sunday mailbag thing. We’ll just unzip this heavy old mailbag and see what our readers have sent in.

["zzzip"]

[a few starved-looking moths flutter out. Miguel turns the apparently empty bag upside-down, shakes, nothing falls out]

That reminds me of an anecdote – did you know that Alexander Graham Bell invented the zipper? At least, I believe it was him. Someone do a google search and verify that, you there, the anal-retentive one, get on that right now. Whoever it was worked on a mail train as a young man, and was often slapped about the head by his supervisor because he was so slow at buttoning- and unbuttoning the mail bags. Slapped so thoroughly that his hearing was damaged. So he invented the zipper to speed up the process.

Hrm. Hang on, here’s a bit of mail after all. Someone wants to know where the “about” page is. I guess I don’t reveal enough personal information in this space. See, the thing is, I have seen so many really good about pages? That anything I could write, eh, you know. So occasionally I reveal something personal directly in my blog. Like this (which happened this afternoon): My daughters were at their grandparents watching TV, which they occasionally do on Sundays when their mother is in Japan. After my workout, and lunch, I joined them to watch a …

Anal-retentive person: I have it. It wasn’t Alexander Graham Bell by any stretch of the imagination. It was, according to uselessknowledge.com, Whitcomb L. Judson.

Thank you. As I was saying, after lunch I joined my daughteres to watch a 1999 British animated film (I missed the beginning, and do not know the English title) about two children…

Anal-retentive person: Hang on! Stop the presses! A scandal of historic proportions has been unearthed at Zipper Facts for Kids . According to them, it was actually Elias Howe who invented the zipper, but he was so busy inventing his sewing machine that he never got around to marketing his zipper invention. Whoa! I see enchantedlearning.com fell for the Judson myth, but interestingly points out that B.F. Goodrich coined the word “zipper”.

Ah. Anyway, the movie was about two children, brother and sister, who make friends with fairies, enter their kingdom through the fairy oak, and after several adventures save the fairly kingdom from the king’s evil brother. At the end, lounging there on the sofa between my daughters as the credits rolled, I noticed – despite the fact that the animation, which consisted of a disturbing mixture of apparently live-action photography (landscapes), computer-animated graphics and old-fashioned cel animation (for example, a cel animated man would be smoking a pipe, and the smoke would be computer-animated) was very unsettling and somehow evil-seeming – that I was very nearly, or perhaps even actually, crying, but only just a tiny bit.

Alright, another letter. Ah. What’s up with the Shoe Project, they want to know. Working on it. Currently still parked at the old Feral Living site, but I have big plans for it. I would like to improve the design somewhat, and include very short texts with the shoe pictures. I’ll let you know, probably sometime in February or March. So start thinking about images of shoes that are somehow significant to you, and very short stories about why they are so special.

My sister sent me a couple more dismal books about the Baudelaire orphans by Lemony Snicket for Christmas. If I read too many of them at a sitting, they start getting a little too campy for me, but I’ve been enjoying these this time. I’ve tried to get my oldest daughter to read them, but she refuses because they are dismal and awful.

Reports of Punk sightings continue to spread. Supernatural phenomenon, mass hysteria or evil meme? Elise of Opinebovine.com writes:

dead, my ass.

he’s under disguise working as fountain-tending greek god (he’s always
trying to pass himself off as one god or another) here in KC.

[More Punk sightings here, acerbic wit available here.]

Patriot registration at whitehouse.org