Summertime,. and the living is . . . frustrating

It’s shaping up to be a fun-packed Sunday here at Dumpling Towers, what with the post-holiday washing and ironing, a bit of light vacuuming, my attempts to not bake anything (fat- and sugar-free, remember), and some paperwork filing. I might take a trip to the library as it stops opening on Sundays shortly; apparently, we’re in the “summer” season now, despite it being a numbing 4 degrees outside.

I know I should be grateful that the library ever opens on a Sunday, but I don’t get why it closes on that day over the summer. It’s not as if we experience Mediterranean temperatures that require people to take siestas. Trips to the beach are a hellish experience, complete with thousands of Amsterdammers, packed beach cafes, and Siberian winds blowing off the North Sea. And yet the Dutch relish every opportunity to get a little bit of sunshine. When I lived in Spain, my Dutch and Belgian flatmates would head down to the riverbank from mid-February, slather themselves in olive oil, and catch what rays they could. Most of the young women at the gym have deep tans, acquired at the vast number of tanning salons around the city. (And these aren’t beauty salons coating customers with St Tropez and sending them out, streaky and biscuit-scented, into the world. No, these have ye olde tanning machines, but cranked up to cancer-inducing levels.) And come the “summer”, people start taking time off “sick” or get “stressed”, and shopkeepers and restaurant owners close on sunny days or for weeks in August. I guess I should applaud this placing of pleasure over money, but it’s bloody irritating when you need a pint of milk at 8 pm and the local deli owner has decided to shut up shop for 3 weeks, rather than hiring someone to run it in his absence.

The worst example of this was the utterly appalling, landlord-mandated cleaner we had foisted upon us in our previous apartment. If a Tuesday morning dawned sunny, we’d wait for the phone call informing us that her mother was sick and she couldn’t make it in. In many ways, her absences were a blessed relief: we were spared her wiping down the radiators with bleach – ruining the clothes that were drying on them – or smoking in the flat and then stubbing out her cigarettes into my Chinese crackle-glazed dishes. Apparently, it’s impossible to get nicotine stains off them. Four years later, this still rankles, as does the fact that we couldn’t get the deposit back until we’d paid her an additional 200 guilders she claimed we owed. Who needs a cleaner for a 70m-square flat? Although, it would be nice to have someone to clean the bath – my all-time No. 1 most hated cleaning activity.

< rant over/ >

I really need to bake – I get far too cross and fidgety when I can’t. Maybe I could just make some cookie dough to put in the freezer and use at a later date. Or is that cheating?