This is what my hand looks like after 10 days. Not bad, huh? I'm thinking of offering to do a celebrity endorse- ment for Flammazine. Now if only I were a celebrity...

Don't try this at home, kids.

You should try it at school, where more of your friends can see and be impressed.

This is my mummy hand. You can have one, too. All you have to do is heat a sauce pan in the oven for about an hour (425 Fahrenheit works nicely), pull it out and set it on the counter, take 2 seconds to forget that it's hot, pick it up with your bare hand, then go to a Belgian emergency room. The Belgian emergency room is the key to getting the mummy hand because the SHAPE clinic doesn't do nearly as nice a job of wrapping you up. The SHAPE folks did agree, however, that the Belgians had treated me properly. The Belgian hospital uses a product called (no kidding) Flammazine! They also gave me some megapowerful acetaminophen, so I can laugh at my stupidity instead of writhing in the pain I obviously deserve.

The lights go out

This morning we looked out our back windows and discovered that the Christmas tree lights on the crane have been extinguished. The Christmas tree crane was our beacon morning and evening that signaled the magic of the season. And now it's over. I guess the compensation is that the days are slowly getting longer, with sunset not arriving until after 5:00 PM. With the slightly longer days comes the promise of spring - and the completion of our first year in Belgium. Wow - we're only a month away from a full year here. Hard to believe...

Tragedy Strikes Mons...and Mom

I'm surprised Rita still has the spirit to post entries. She's been listless and depressed since the day a couple of weeks ago when we walked down the pedestrian shopping street in Mons and discovered, to our horror, that the Zigzag had been destroyed by fire! (Sorry, no English version of the story; it's real local news.) The Zigzag was our favorite store--and hard to describe. It was kind of a tiny, two-aisle, hip dollar store. Everything was priced at only a euro or four. It was a great place to get things like candles and holders, cute coffee cups, cheap wall clocks, cutting boards made to look like Swiss cheese, bread baskets, rubber ducks and duck-shaped soap (Rachel), and cow-shaped salt and pepper shakers (Linda). And now it's gone, destroyed by a fire set in the trash that wasn't collected as usual because the garbage men had Saint Barbara's feast day off. Ironically, Saint Barbara is the patron of fire-related professions. *Sigh*

Back to the grind

It's cold and rainy today, a fitting end to a very enjoyable Christmas break. With all three girls here, we had a typical family Christmas - except that we went to a Christmas eve service that wasn't at midnight, we made monkey bread but not for breakfast, and we decided to forego the traditional Yule log in favor of all the cookies, chocolates, and fruit cake we'd already accumulated. 

We did some day trips too: the Christmas market in Lille; Epernay and Reims, where not much was open but we still managed to get in a tasting; and Antwerp. It was our first trip to both Lille and Antwerp, and both deserve a return visit. We barely scratched the surface in Antwerp and realized, as we were leaving, that we should have planned to spend the night. 

This is a picture of the Grote Markt (Grand' Place in French) with the Christmas market in Antwerp. 

But does it count as a White Christmas?

We've had cold weather for the last couple of weeks: lows around -5 or -6 degrees Celsius (low 20s Fahrenheit) and highs barely above freezing. Because it's so damp here, we have really heavy frosts. And since the sun is so low in the sky, much of that frost never melts; it just sits there and accumulates. we have about half an inch on the shady side of the canal bridge, for example. And then there's the field up the street. No that's not snow. It's frost.

The Pyramid

Being technologically challenged, I couldn't figure out how to post all these pictures in a series in one posting. So scroll down five pictures until you get to our bobo Christmas tree and read up.


The Pyramid is one of my acquisitions from the Cologne Christmas market. It's not exactly what I wanted (I wanted red!!!). I'll keep looking. I have two more Christmas seasons and many markets to go.