Mosquitoes. Peter is being eaten alive inside our own flat! This occurs at night [when he's not looking!]. We live one street away from a canal (unhelpfully bearing the same name as our street, the variation being Lennep straat vs Lennep kade...have sent many a friend to 250 A on the kade, not the straat...feel I ought to bring a pie or similar in apology to the tenants at the address). The slow-moving water of this canal in particular seems to attract the mosquitoes in droves worse than the thickest brush in Muskoka country.

It gets hot enough at night, you see, that we need to keep the windows open, which being sans screens, give the insects free reign. The choice therefore comes down to staying cool or offering Peter up as a nocturnal human sacrifice. Every night...all very Prometheus being torn at anew night after night. Curiously, I am rarely bitten and am feeling rather rejected by the mosquitoes, actually. They say that people who eat a lot of red meat at more attractive to mosquitoes; given that McDonald's are liberally littered around this town as much as in Canada, Pete is assured a good diet of red meat...

Peter had to go to the doctor in the end as the bites were growing huge, with multicoloured bruising ringing the red nuclei (think international astronomy association's photo-a-day). It strikes us as deeply wrong, however, to have to pay for a visit to the doctor (kinda like praying use the toilet or to buy bottled water as tap water just isn't done). A basic visit costs 25 Euros -- less than we feared it might. It's another 15 Euros to get a prescription. All these basic costs are covered by an insurance company (all people are responsible for seeking their own coverage, not usually provided under a group policy at work). Since PEte and I have encountered endless red tape seeking an insurance company thus far, we had to consent to pay or die of mosquistoe bites. It turns out Peter is allergic to the mosquitoes...The doctor prescribed some meds and some cream and then told him that the allergy is "little understood" and wished him luck. eep!

I visited my cafe as usual today. I sat right up at the counter that runs the length of the tall windows cast wide open to the canal below. It turns out that the cafe is the erstwhile headquarters for the city's 17th century (Oh glorious Golden Age that it was!)riflemen. These were a wealthy old boys' club, as far as I can tell; military men had to purchase their own weaponry and rifles were most expensive and thus only the rich bore them. The old boys even got together and had Rembrandt paint a group composite of them all. It turned out to be one of the artist's masterpieces -- original in its depiction of each man in action, not stock still staring forward as was the norm. Personally, I think the bits of action in which Rembrandt chose to depict each man tend toward the ridiculous, but I am no art critic. The painting hung in the same room in which I do my writing and can now be seen in the Rijksmuseum, a twenty minutes' walk away.

The ghosts of a martial frat club...I suppose they make as good a set of muses as any?