Marijke's blog

The last two days have been overshadowed by the chick fight in our front yard. It confirms once more that I hate physical fighting, between people but also between animals (have you ever seen ducks trying to drown one and other?)…

What happened? We have three cute little bantam hens in our garden: conveniently named the black, the white and the yellow chicken (which movie does this naming convention remind you of? “I don’t want to be mister Pink”) in general occupied with eating a large variety of seeds, veg, fruit and what not, recycling the input into cute little tasty eggs. About two months ago, however, one of them wanted to transform her eggs into chicks – she was broody, wouldn’t leave the old casserole they had used for laying eggs so far (funny sight that is, three chicken squeezing themselves into the one object they should try to evade; a cooking pan). Due to lack of a rooster that would cause a problem; unfertilized eggs simply cannot turn into chick, right? So we ‘borrowed’ five regular large farm chicken eggs from our neighbour, so eventhough it wouldn’t be her own chicks, at least she would feel the satisfaction of ‘having babies’. (Sounds kind of sorry when I write this down, I know). Guess what; within two weeks the two other chicken joint her in the casserole, brooding day and night on these five large eggs. A busy affair in one little pan.

After 22 days we had three more or less empty eggs, and two really cute little yellow living furballs. And a problem. Because the chicks were supposed to have one mom who would take care of them by protecting them against strangers, and keep them warm at night underneath her wings (do I hear a sound track here?). Yet there were three candidates who all appeared to feel entitled to the mom-role. So, based upon the good advice of another chicken-knowledgable neighbour – we put one of the three chicken in a separate quickly constructed separate pen (dubbed “the nursery”) with the two chicks, to prevent any mom-fights. Right…

I believe there is a saying about getting repaid in threefold. Three days ago we returned the, by now adolescent, chicken to the egg-providing neighbour. So it also was time to re-unite yellow mom-chicken with her sisters. Somehow I expected a warm welcome. Well, nothing less than that happened. Black “I am now the boss” chicken clearly was not charmed by the return of her yellow sibling and has been physically (and verbally) pestering her ever since. Boehoehoe, I have to let it happen; apparently even chicken have to establish a pecking order and who ever arrives last (even if they have been present before) start at the bottom, and has to tolerate the matching treatment including the bullying of the “superior” specimen.

The online expert offer me one trick to keep up my sleeve; I choose to isolate the agressor for one day and then return her to the pen. Chicken live by the rule of “out of sight, out of mind”, so when the bossy unit returns after one day, she is the last one in, and therefore finding herself at the bottom of that darn pecking order. Question is; do I take the risk that this becomes a perpetuiting self repeating cycle?

Ok, as you can see I am these days mostly involved with getting the website up and running, so more or less “technical” activities (I guess I am offending the true techies, however to me this work does feel rather technology-involved). So today and yesterday I was working on updating the test database with the content for the website. Sounds good, right? Except that I completely forgot that we had switched from the site from one test server to another. So when I received a mail from Erwin – the website developer, an exemplary true techie – confirming whether I was indeed working on the new test server – which I obviously was not – you can guess how I felt, once more…

Never ever listen to the advice of the computer sales person when you have trouble with getting things working on your laptop and he/she says: just start your computer again and when doing so, press F9, then your system will be fresh and all. Cause your system wíll be newly installed, yet all your files are gone as well in case you did not make a back-up…

Another mental dance of joy when working on the museum addresses. This happiness-spurt wasn’t caused by the culinary specialties but by the locations. I love finding addresses outside the more or less standard destinations like Europe, the US and Australia.

Every kind of exotic destination makes me connect to it for one tiny moment, transforming me in a true virtual traveller. That’s also a reason why I am looking forward to working on the Slow Food related activities; since they represent a enormous variety of literally worldwide locations.

I am fascinated by the fact that the countries I mostly encounter during the news; Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, all have museums potentially interesting for curious food lovers. Of course. All these countries have an unbelievable rich history, yet that is something I personally tend to forget while being smothered in terrible war-news.

And at the same time that is one of the things I love about taking food as an entry to exploring other cultures; as far as I am concerned, there is no right or wrong in different food habits. It are exactly those differences that makes exploring other cultures so enjoyable! Not necessarily to taste – I am indeed a bit of a culinary coward – , yet at least to explore visually and through stories.

My collectors blood starts to flow rapidly when working with the culinary museum addresses, I mentally jump up and down when working on each museum that directly has to do with food & drink; the Cork Butter Museum, the Spargelmuseum ánd the Europäisches Spargelmuseum on asparagus, the SchokoMuseum in SchokoLand on chocolate, the Schnapsmuseum on this gin variety, the Zoutmuseum on salt, museums dedicated to cheese making, beer brewing, wine, candy, mustard, there is hardly any specific topic that does not have a museum that is completely devoted to it, somewhere in the world. Of course there are the musea with broader culinary topics, like agriculture of fishery that should be included as well. A special category are musea that have a broad historic collection on daily life in general; lets not forget that food – collecting, storing, cooking, eating – is an important part of daily life, with many objects that illustrate the local stories on this subject. Or the open-air museums that re-enact life in the past. Or the shipping museums, that tell stories about daily life while out on sea.

On catergory I have not worked yet; museums with paintings depicting food. drink and its consumption. It’s an culinary angle I am fascinated by, and will definately dive into later on.

It will probably be the category I will post in many times: feeling stupid. The last few days I have received 8 (tadah!) comments on my previous postings. Had my postings been relevant in any kind of way, besides testing the functionality of this blog, me being new to world of blogging, they did could have fool me with texts like: “great stuff!”; “your posting really hit home!” and other completely irrelevant compliments.

Today I am working on the culinary museum addresses for the travel guide. I have collected around 2500 addresses that to some extend have to do with food and drink. Now I have a large excel sheet with addresses that needs to be formatted in such a way that it can be imported into the database connected to the website. A while ago when I worked on the addresses I noticed that a lot of addresses were abbreviated; av instead of avenue, pl instead of place, etc. Personally I like see addresses in full, so I thought it was a good idea to use the find/replace function in excel to have the abbreviatons replace with the full word. Do you feel the catch coming?

Here you go; sometimes av is an abbrevation, sometimes it is just a part of a word, that now gets Avenue squeezed in. Obviously I only found out after I changed most of the abbreviations, lucky I could undo them. I thought…

Today I encountered some rather strange addresses: OrchaRoad Mill, 5825 Old OxfoRoad Highway, Old WaterfoRoad Road. Huh?? Stress; I thought that there was some strange corruption in the address file and that I had to check each and everyone manually with the original sources again. Then slowly it dawned; I forgot to undo the change from rd to Road. Talk about feeling stupid… (and extra work, having to find those odd ones out and change them one by one)