ever seen a fireball swishing through a christmas tree three meters high, incinerating the wax candles as it goes? we just did.
as our curate had fallen ill, dorothee and i stood in for her and basically repeated the worship service that we did last sunday in adliswil in wollishofen — with a twist though: the wollishofen united methodist church has the tradition of having a real christmas tree — i know, a lot of churches have that tradition, stay tuned — and of lighting the wax candles on that tree with a fuse. that’s right: with a fuse.
the tree is about 3-4m high, and an appropriately long fuse — which we were told one can only get through special connections — is tied around each candle wick, from the bottom up to the top. at 18:00 on the dot, a girl from one of the local families gets to ignite the fuse — causing an orange fireball the size of a football to swish through the christmas tree, jumping and forking in places, all the way up to the top of the tree.
impressive. scary.
— and, no, we didn’t have our camera with us.
today is tea bread recipe time: the idea is to have a nice tea bread for after-church on sunday. so, off we go: i follow the recipe and dump everything into my bio-reactor, err, bread maker. in my excitement i choose the wrong program: rapid bake instead of the normal long bake…hmph…stopping the beast is easy: just punch the “start/stop” button, but how to get it going again? pressing “start/stop” once more just results in the default program roaring to go (bread size XL, normal bread, normal crust — no good)…i try pulling the plug on it: no go, still the default program…hmph, i’ve got a bloody phd in computer science and can’t get a bread maker reset, great…finally i work out that once one has done the “start/stop” bit, one can immediately press the “program” button and reprogram the beast..pheeew
this time we end up with the correct program and everything is “go”…