Many of you will be able to relate to the trauma of having some of your precious books stored elsewhere due to lack of room. In my case, Wingnut's best mate agreed to store some of my books while we went to Paris for "a year or two". He's an SF fan too, so it was nice to think that the books would have some love while I was gone.

As it happened, he had rather more time than anticipated to read them. Ahem. Cough. But here I am at last and on New Year's Eve, he kindly ferried four big boxes over to our place.

I'll have you know I was polite and waited until our guests had left before diving in to find out what the hell I'd packed into those boxes.

So, hello and welcome to the LibraryThing catalogue, David Eddings! It seems I decided I could do without my (pre) teen reads for a while because Anne McCaffrey is even better represented (and not just the Pern books). But by far the biggest series is Star Trek: my brother and me had bought a job lot secondhand during one summer holiday. Some of the authors who I had no idea who they were at the time: John M. Ford, Laurell K. Hamilton, Joe Haldeman, and Diane Duane. To be fair, a couple of them might not have known who they were at the time, either. :)

Definitely due for a nostalgic reread are the completely random SF anthologies edited by the likes of Terry Carr, Judith Merril and Damon Knight. The paperbacks were old and crumbling when I bought them from the short-lived second-hand bookshop in Newlands and should probably be handled with tongs now!

And what I'd really like to know is, how did I wind up with some of my brother's Dragonlance books?

Probably the same way he wound up with my Dark Elf books...

Not only should sleepless babies beware of cradles tumbling out of trees, but Napoleon himself might come to get them too!

Baby, baby, naughty baby,
Hush, you squalling thing, I say.
Peace this moment, peace, or maybe
Bonaparte will pass this way.

Baby, baby, he's a giant,
Tall and black as Rouen steeple
And he breakfasts, dines, rely on't,
Every day on naughty people.

Baby, baby, if he hears you,
As he gallops past the house,
Limb from limb at once he'll tear you,
Just as pussy tears a mouse.

And he'll beat you, beat you, beat you,
And he'll beat you all to pap,
And he'll eat you, eat you, eat you,
Every morsel, snap, snap, snap.

(Collected by Iona and Peter Opie in The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, originally published 1955)

The summer recess meant a short election campaign though the results are not short of shocks.

With 99% of the votes counted, the right-wing liberal VVD can claim a historic win of 41 seats (+10), closely followed by the Labour Party with 39 seats (+9). It's being hailed as a win for the pro-Europeans, but time will tell. Incumbent Prime Minister Rutte said he didn't want to give another cent to Greece, but Labour, who he'll have to work with, is more flexible.

It's certainly not a win for the anti-Europe side though, most notably Wilders' Freedom Party, down to 15 seats from 24. Wilders changed tactics from hating on Islam to hating on Europe, but that doesn't seem to have been as popular as he thought. Breaking up the coalition over austerity measures needed to submit to EU budgetary rules, doesn't seem so clever now.

Some are already dancing on his grave but I wouldn't put away the garlic just yet. 15 seats isn't nothing and puts the PVV at third equal to the Socialist Party.

And what about the distinctly non-Europhile Socialist Party?! They were polling 30 seats a mere month ago! But Labour's Diederik Samson turned his party around at their expense.

The Christian Democrats continue their decline, from 21 seats to 13 seats. For so long a force to be reckoned with, but just seem to be floundering now.

The progressive centrist party D66, on the other hand, goes from 10 to 12 seats. A reward for sticking consistently to their story, including being very pro-Europe, even when it looked like the unpopular thing to do.

The conservative Christian Union stay on 5. The other Christian party, SGP, which dislikes women even more, goes up 1 to 3 seats. The animal rights party get 2, so does new senior party 50+.

Lastly, my party, GroenLinks, had a dreadful result. They fell from 10 seats to 3. They were always going to have a hard time after the popular Femke Halsema left, but Jolande Sap has had almost 2 years to bring the message across. Instead she oversaw some political missteps and internal ructions that undid the good of the emergency agreement after the coalition collapsed and a budget needed to be agreed on a tight deadline. I don't see how she can stay on.

Now, it's coalition time! The liberals and Labour make up a majority of 80 out of 150, but don't have a majority in the Senate. Adding D66 is proffered as the most obvious solution, but it'll be hard enough for the big two to hammer out an agreement. How long will it take?

After being involved with live blogging the Discworld Convention a few times, this year it's my turn to follow the action from afar.^[1] The comms team have started up a tumblr at dwcon.tumblr.com to which anyone with an e-mail address can submit content for consideration. It's a nice idea to try tumblr and I look forward to seeing what turns up.

The group Twitter account @dwcon continued to operate after the last Con and is now revving up again. The hashtag #dwcon is also being used by people talking about the Con.

Also, look at what's popped up on the old Chronicle Live: hypatia has just updated the links to photos from the last DWCon.

[1] Instead of Birmingham, I'll be heading to Dublin this Thursday. It's not a Bank Holiday in the Netherlands though, in fact, at least one Dutch region has gone back to school already.

That's not a reference to clubbing or anything, I'm just excited about the fact that, after six weeks in the Netherlands, I've seen my first squirrel! Not one of the big greys which are overrunning London, but a little red one that shot out in front of my bike and then up a tree.

Also, bats! When it was nice and cool in the garden on Saturday, we lay on our backs and watched the bats zipping back and forth across the field at the bottom of the garden. There were a lot of squeaks from the bats' prey. Short ones.

The field is full of calves and they come when Wingnut's mum calls them. Then they stare at us in a disconcerting fashion. Quite creepy, actually.

Further, it seems I'm having regular auditory hallucinations at 6:15am because the rooster I complained about has never been heard by the people who live here. Guess I should hallucinate it a snooze button then.

However, she did confirm that the thundering noise of feet over the roof belonged to the magpies. I'd no idea they could be so noisy, they look skinnier than the NZ ones. Mice are nothing to it.